Yes, I work at an R1, and I do know that we have a lot more support in areas like this than many universities. But UoC absolutely does -- they have a research data management center with training, consultations, etc.:

"The user can do no wrong" is just as stupid as "everything is the user's fault" â" I'm not taking either of those positions. If you actually read what I wrote, you'll notice I am not blaming him for his IT skills or making a mistake with the software he was using. I'm blaming him for not meeting his responsibilities as a researcher, or taking advantage of the teams of people he had access to help him meet those responsibilities. He had a responsibility to preserve his data and working materials, he had the resources and support to do that, and he just failed to do it. Nobody else could have made him.

I'm not denying that there is a ton of terrible software out there â" I've been in the business long enough to see many horrors, and have written plenty of terrible interfaces myself. But this is like saying that a doctor who failed to wash their hands because of a shitty sink design wouldn't responsible for giving someone an infection with their dirty hands. Professionals with training and support have certain obligations, and they are responsible for the bad outcomes when they fail to meet them.

No, this is not some random user who was farting around with a chatbot. This was a researcher at a major research university. He has access to probably a dozen options for local and cloud storage that he could have used to backup his important data, and he chose not to. He has a grants office, and access to data management instruction and support. He chose not to use it or follow their advice.

I work at a US research university, and I know that we have several units on campus providing this kind of support, encouraging best practices at data organization and preservation. But there are always people who don't listen. It is 100% this guys fault. He had a responsibility to manage his data more responsibly, and resources at his disposal to help him do that. If he didn't bother and something bad happened, it's on him.

the parent wasn't talking about "Cloudflare" and neither was i — we were talking about turnstile.

Blame AI.

Everybody that I know who has implemented Turnstile (or similar things like Anubis) has done so because they are getting absolutely pounded by bots scraping content to feed their LLMs. Reasonably-well-behaved bots used to be 20-30% of my traffic, but that's surged to over 70% recently. Several of my sites were DOSed on multiple occasions until we got Turnstile setup.

Like almost everything in the US, it's up to the state. New Jersey has annual inspections, but other states I've lived in don't.

Of course people just starting their careers shouldn't ask their parents for career advice — it's very unlikely they have relevant, current knowledge and much more likely they'll draw from 20+ year old info that worked for them.

That said, parents are great for doing a "smell test" on an email, a resume, on an outfit, or on anything really. Hiring managers are likely to be closer to parents' age, so it's good to get feedback. Parents are also going to have much stronger professional networks that can help even if you're in an entirely different field — colleagues' spouses might work in the right industry, or someone else might have a good connection. Just a small example that happened to me recently — my daughter was on a group trip that was getting screwed by their hotel, and one of the parent chaperones happened to be an ex-VP of a credit card company, and could make a call to the right person to get the problem resolved.

In short, think carefully about how people can help you and have an open mind about things they might know or connections they might have — you might be surprised.

FWIW, we tried fail2ban and the bots circumvented it in days - instead of dozens of requests coming from one IP, they went down to one request from each IP, and swarms of IPs coming from all over the place (not within an easy-to-define CIDR range).

The first thing that's been effective for us is Turnstile. A colleague of mine wrote up a general approach in Rails https://bibwild.wordpress.com/... and we wrote up our version of that using Trafik https://github.com/pulibrary/p...

Safari doesn't decide which ads to show me based on Apple's access to my personal data. Websites decide which ads to show me, and Safari shows me the web pages.

This is already an existing practice, called "pre-registration" (e.g., https://osf.io/prereg). The idea is that you register in advance what your hypothesis and methods are, so you can't go fishing around in collected data looking for something that's significant.

This is definitely a good way to give people credit for designing and planning an astronomy data collection plan.

All that said, this post seems like a pretty biased anti-open-science screed to me. It's really amazing how every time we try to peel away needless secrecy and hoarding of data in academia, some vested interest comes out to say it's going to be the end of the world. And then, lo and behold, when you finally convince the government or funders or journals or whoever to make their data more open, it's actually not that big of a deal.

This is already here in a lot of ways, with voice assistants, configurable things like IFTTT, etc. Sure, those do simple isolated things and not big complex applications. But they can easily do a task with no coding that in the recent past would have required writing a couple dozen lines of code. And it seems pretty clear to me that these things are building rapidly towards replacing things that would have been full-blown applications until recently.

As a programmer-who-got-promoted-into-management, I really doubt this is going to change the number of programmers working, though. Maybe a subset of them will spend most of their time writing webservices for new things or things specific to their employer. And another big chunk will be employed by the tech giants to run the infrastructure.

IMHO, if it means fewer people need to spend hours fighting javascript dependencies and CSS tweaks, so much the better.

If you'd actually read the stories and site you linked, you'd see that all of these schools had the same policy and Princeton upped its no-parent-contribution limit to $100k this year where the others upped it to $75k. Princeton was also the first in the country to stop including loans in financial aid packages (in 2001).

Just wait until you hear about their retirement strategy!

I agree, EVs plugged in and charging does seem like a good optional drain that could be dialed back in an emergency. Particularly charging at work during the day, which seems like a likely scenario for the late-afternoon peak-demand scenario.

There are certainly times when I absolutely need my EV to charge, but they are few and far between (mostly road-trips where I make a pit stop to charge and am sitting there waiting for it). But it's usually completely optional and I'd be just fine charging at home or waiting a day or two. I can imagine charging in the late afternoon planning to do a road trip and really feeling like I needed the charge. But most of the time I'm charging up from 60%+ and have plenty of charge for the rest of the day's driving.