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Comment Didn't we have this on KDE2? (Score 1) 49

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.

Comment Did the same shit on early 2000s Websites (Score 1) 50

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.

Comment Re:Belt & Suspenders (Score 1) 78

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.

Comment Re: I had the same shit from Anthropic's Claudebot (Score 1) 78

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.

Comment I had the same shit from Anthropic's Claudebot (Score 5, Interesting) 78

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.

Comment Never use cloud services (Score 1) 150

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.

Comment Re:IoT garbage (Score 1) 133

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.

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