Yes, so 18x the risk of a motor failure. You know they went away from jetliners with 4 engines for a reason right?

...just without the built in safety of being able to autorotate down in an emergency. Seriously though, why does anyone think this is going to fill any use case that a helicopter doesn't already. I don't get it.

I'm probably remembering wrong, but I could have sworn that at least one of the themes available on KDE2 had all rounded corners. KDE was great in the 1.x days and we were all thinking about how great it was compared to Win95/98. KDE 2 was even better with lots of bug fixes and looked much fancier KDE 3 was worse as the devs decided to remake a ton of things that already existed KDE 4 ? IDK lost track. I moved to different desktops that don't use the Windows 95/98 paradigm of the start menu in the bottom left and the dock in the bottom right.

I wondered the same thing! Very strange.

We did this same shit on early websites to try to game the Google algo to give you higher page rank. Super tiny fonts, white text on white backgrounds, stuff full of keywords etc. It worked for some time until Google realized that this was killing the relevancy of their search.

Yes this is good advice. The problem is that using this we are good until one of these companies slightly changes their UA (say from "BaiduSpyder" ->"BaiduBot" for example) to where it no longer matches and/or when a new/existing company comes online with a new bot you never heard of with a brand new UA. That's what happend to me with Claude and it took down my site.

Good comments. I do now block by UA, and I've blocked tons of IP block as well. Since my .org is essentially only applicable regionally in the US, its easy to block large blocks of IPs without concern of blocking many legit users.

Essentially all of the random bots that hit the site constantly (whether they are Chinese or otherwise) have been smart enough to not hit the site so hard they take it offline. This is the background noise of the ~10k hits per day with likely >90% of that being bots. When that is the case I just don't really care. Its when a bot like Claude in this case effectively DDOSs the site that it causes problems.

It seems these companies running AI training bots are under pressure to grow their LLMs, so they don't give a shit about breaking small sites like this and they are hitting the internet with an unlimited rate with no concern for the damage.

I should have mentioned that the website I manage is for a small .org non-profit, so we are not a commercial entity of any type. Our site just hosts information for our members and has nothing for sale.

I also run a small website and it got take offline due to exceeding our plan's rate limit for database queries.
Our plan't limit is 150,000 database queries per hour and Claude was going way beyond that. We went from a normal background of ~10k hits per day to ~1.2M hits per day for 4 days.

Yeah, some dudz are gonna say: "Well, you should have configured your robots.txt properly."

1. Sure, it is now, however this has been fine for ~15 years and I suspect large swaths of the internet are configured this way.
2. There are tons or reports all over the internet reporting that Claudebot doesn't respect robots.txt.

So, yes, I have not configured my robots.txt properly, but I also contacted Anthropic who, to their credit apologized and put me on their do not crawl list, and I've seen almost 0 traffic from them since.

You've been able to do this with openHAB and HASSIO for years... https://www.openhab.org/addons...

This is the inherent problem with cloud services for things like video systems and smart home:

1. You don't own the data
2. The service can go out of business leaving your hardware useless

Move to video systems like Zoneminder or BlueIris and the data lives on your system and you can chose to do what you want with it.

Move to home automoation systems like Home Assistant and openHAB (and hardware with local controls) and the data lives on your system and you control your data and you don't have to worry about the company going out of business making your hardware useless. Even if these open source projects somehow folded, the local control of the hardware means there will always be a solution available.

Right - this is why you don't allow ANY login via uname/passwd on any server ever. Use certificate based logins only and the issue with passwd cracking techniques disappears.

You just need to look slightly deeper before you write a remark about a system that you don't understand: There are two different pieces of hardware that can control an Insteon system: A powerline modem (PLM) A hub - which is essentially an Ethernet controlled PLM The PLM connects to a PC and directly over USB or serial RS-232 and is controlled locally The hub could use the companies servers/app, but can also be controlled locally over a local LAN TCP connection. Yes the company's (very poor) cloud service is no more, but the PLM and the hub can both still control Insteon systems. There is a large list of opensource software that is designed to work with hubs and PLMs with the two big ones bring: openHAB and Home Assistant. So, some people are freaking out because they relied on the companies cloud, but that cloud is not required to actually use Insteon. In fact, using openHAB or Home Assistant is a MUCH better experience than the company's cloud service ever was, I think its just an uncomfortable experience - especially for those who have less technical skills.

Here is the thing: over many years/decades since cable and later high speed internet was introduced once company or another have basically had a monopoly in this area. No one wants to invest the money into building out another network in the city as much of the city is quite old and stringing up new infrastructure is expensive. Also some parts of the city can be low income so no company wants to invest somewhere that has competition and low income. Same for the rural parts of the county, people tend to be low income and even if not, spaced far apart making the economics hard for would be providers. Since there is no economic forces that will drive the change to high speed internet access the area wants, they need to do it themselves. As far as your lame "taxation w/o representation" statement: this isn't quite correct. The people paying taxes around America have voted representatives into congress in their local districts. Congress, made up of those repräsentatives, passed a bill which provides funding for infrastructure projects in various parts of the country from tax monies collected. Hence, taxation with representation. You may disagree with the exact use, but this is how nations work. Some very small part of the money you pay towards federal taxes will very likely be used elsewhere in the nation to build a better nation. Later some small portion of the money I pay may very well be used to pay for something in your town. If you don't like that model, I suggest you find some other nation to call home, although I'm not sure where, as I suspect most nations work this way.

I mean, I've never had the post office go down in all the years I've been alive and 100% of the things I have sent have been delivered. Also letters get from NY to LA overnight if you buy the right service. So I hope that all internet service has the speed and reliability of the post office as it is quite good.