23% of that debt is owned by the Bank of England ("Gilt and Treasury Bill Holding"), which in turn is owned by... the British government.

Some more background information: https://www.taxresearch.org.uk...

In short, it is a choice to be beholden to the bond markets in this way. It is a political choice to outsource the fiscal margins of government spending to the financial sector, and paying them lavishly for that privilege. And no, I'm not saying this means you can spend endlessly on anything without very bad consequences. It's just that it's a very expensive way to provide the money supply and private savings, while giving enormous budgetary power to a sector that has proven time and again that it's unable to properly manage the economy's funding (if it's even interested in that at all, rather than just in enriching itself).

Even though it whitelists the IA crawlers by default?

Anubis has worked well for us to get rid of most of the scrapers from our wiki, including the ones faking regular user agents.

It's not just data centres, many of the requests from regular broadband IP addresses. I think they're using "services" of bottom feeders like Scraper API, or buying from the authors of malicious web browser extensions.

AI scrapers use these residential proxies. It's not (just) VPNs and Tor routing. Several bottom-feeding companies openly advertise such scraping services, for pretty much any country you may want. I administer a wiki that's been on the receiving end of such scraping, and the majority of these scraping requests are in fact coming from residential IP-addresses rather than data centers.

I don't know whether these are hacked accounts, people getting tricked or paid to run these scraping apps on their devices, but it's impossible to block them all. Even if you let fail2ban block entire /24s for every detected hit (even disregarding the collateral damage and the fact that these blocks don't solve the issue, the fail2ban and iptables overhead starts to outweigh the apache load at some point).

Anubis seems to be taking care of it for now, but it's obviously only a matter of time before they can deal with that one too. Although its delay does enable fail2ban rules to block the IP-addresses before they get to stress the mediawiki php scripts, attempting to diff 2 revisions of a random page from 10 years ago.

Maybe from NOAA? (at least until they get defunded)

ELIZA's evil twin.

It's indeed not AI, but it's not particularly related to quantitative easing either. It's a regular cycle that's been repeated since forever by publicly traded companies, and game companies are just getting better at playing that game as well (pun intended): https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

"Made in China" and then transported to and consumed everywhere else in the world isn't powered by fairy dust and unicorn smiles. It's easy to have low emissions when you externalise production. Let's see how it goes once (if) the process of bringing manufacturing back gets under steam.

Mine just turned 2 - premature, but dodged NICU by a matter of hours. Also missed my birthday (and my mother-in-law's) by one day!

Also still here, looking forward to hearing your take on it!

If you're interested in the technical details of how they manage to do that, there was a very interesting presentation on it at WineConf last year. It turns out Apple has been fairly accommodating to their requirements in this respect.

Valve does not like reviews that complain about DRM and has been removing their ratings from the global score. They consider them "off topic": https://www.dualshockers.com/s...

From TFS:

So it's 0% birds splattered. The 2.3% you're referencing merely did not evade the "rotor swept zone", but they were not splattered as a result.

Nice try, but they already do. Electricity companies have to buy electricity on the open market if their own power sources don't produce enough to satisfy the demands of their customers. They don't just pull free spare electricity out of the thin air in which the CO2 gets dumped.