dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️

Right above Dat Boi is the Distracted Boyfriend meme.

Given the look on its face, the owl may be an O Rly?

I’m drawing a blank on the egg and its army, and the guy in the group of four with the nice hat.

Aside from the terrorism aspect, the remaining non-blown reactors were still providing power up until I think 2000 before it was finally fully shut down. Russia has obviously had a fixation on trying to destroy Ukraine’s infrastructure and outside of any other potential fuckery is probably concerned that Ukraine will be able to power it back up again if they need to, especially if more of their infrastructure elsewhere is blown up.

Plus, even if the Russians lose Ukraine will still be left holding the bag for cleaning up and repairing whatever additional damage was done to the containment structures.

It’s also an incredibly stupid bureaucratic clusterfuck of the magnitude that only customs and border people can achieve. Surely there should be some mechanism wherein you can send a letter or something to the Russian authorities to inform them, “Hey, we’re trying this stupid stunt and here is our plan, let us make our declarations now and we’ll pick up all the paperwork on the way once we get there.” But there probably isn’t, and then you wind up with crap like this.

The tinniest of tin-pot jumped up little dictators are never to actually be found in your nation’s capital. Instead they’re all lined up along its borders acting like these various lines in the sand were laser-etched there by god and aren’t ultimately just arbitrary and, indeed, historically much more fluid than they’d like to pretend.

Task Manager is launched by the listener in winlogon if you use the Ctrl + Shift + Esc method though, right? I’m pretty sure you can still launch Task Manager, and from there attempt to relauch Explorer, even if Explorer is borked or not running. You’d just have to know how to do that and that you can.

That’s what I always do when Explorer’s ears inexplicably catch fire and I’m either too lazy or too naively hopeful to reboot.

For anyone following along at home, Windows Explorer is also responsible for displaying the start menu/taskbar. In the example in the article there’s something else funky going on inside Explorer, though, because the taskbar and even the desktop icons are all there, it’s just not rendering correctly. (Explorer is also responsible for showing all of your desktop icons.)

I’ve never retrobrighted anything because I always had a hunch this would be the case. It turns out I was vindicated. We all know full well that oxygenation is one of the things that deteriorates many materials, including embrittling plastics, and what you’re doing with this stuff is literally just oxygenating the shit out of your plastic in order to bleach it.

For stuff that I’ve really cared about de-yellowing, I’ve always just cleaned it thoroughly and painted over it. This has the added bonus of the paint being an additional protective layer rather than a destructive chemical reaction inflicted on the material itself. Sure, it sucks that you also paint over any logos printed on it or whatever, but you can recreate those with stickers if you really care. I figure that if anybody can’t identify what an NES or Dreamcast or something is shaped like, even without the logos on it, they’re probably not invited to any more of my parties anyway.

Then they can kick rocks. Anyone who claims you “need” to use the Bullshit Machine to achieve productivity is a moron who is setting themselves up to lose. If any interviewer tries to tell me this is required I’m picking up my stuff and walking out right then and there.

If nothing else those people are outright admitting that they’re not offering stable employment because the corporate dream is that these LLM schemes will allow them to eliminate all of their coders, tech writers, artists, and marketing department. Not only this this an anathema to anybody earning a living, it’s also mathematically impossible. So why would I even want to work for them in the first place?

When the inevitable collapse occurs, these idiots will have to pay the remaining dwindling number of competent people left to come back and bail their stupid asses out, and that’s even if any of us deign to do so for them.

I don’t use generative “AI” and I never have. Not even once. What I create is my own, I can understand and document all of it, and I can maintain it in perpetuity. Every pixel I’ve pushed, every line I’ve written. All of it, without exception. That’s not changing.

“Calls.”

There’s only one call, and it’s coming from Tim Sweeny at Epic. It’s just more of his usual yelling at clouds, because he’s got a pathological hate-on for anyone else who runs a storefont, including Apple and Google but especially Valve. He hasn’t made any positive contribution to the world since about 1998, and at this point we can all safely discard his opinion with nothing of value being lost. He wants to allow AI slime on his own platform because he thinks it’ll make him free money, but maybe he ought to worry about the smell coming from his own house before he goes around trying to dictate at others how they should run theirs.

“You yadda-yaddad a homie stock? You can’t yadda-yadda a homie stock!”

Are we still doing “Oh, exploitable?”

Uh-huh. Now ask it how to center a div vertically.

In my case the pattern appears to be some manner of DDoS botnet, probably not an AI scraper. The request origins are way too widespread and none of them resolve down to anything that’s obviously datacenters or any sort of commercial enterprise. It seems to be a horde of devices in consumer IP ranges that have probably be compromised by some malware package or another, and whoever is controlling it directed it at our site for some reason. It’s possible that some bad actor is using a similar malware/bot farm arrangement to scrape for AI training, but I’d doubt it. It doesn’t fit the pattern from that sort of thing from what I’ve seen.

Anyway, my script’s been playing automated whack-a-mole with their addresses and steadily filtering them all out, and I geoblocked the countries where the largest numbers of offenders were. (“This is a bad practice!” I hear the hue and cry from specific strains of bearded louts on the Internet. That says maybe, but I don’t ship to Brazil or Singapore or India, so I don’t particularly care. If someone insists on connecting through a VPN from one of those regions for some reason, that’s their own lookout.)

They seem to have more or less run out of compromised devices to throw at our server, so now I only see one such request every few minutes rather than hundreds per second. I shudder to think how long my firewall’s block list is by now.

I have and there’s nothing noteworthy, other than tons of other retailers selling the same thing of course.

It doesn’t quite work that way, since the URL is also the model number/SKU which comes from the manufacturer. I suppose I could write an alias for just that product but it would become rather confusing.

What I did experiment with was temporarily deleting the product altogether for a day or two. (We barely ever sell it. Maybe 1 or 2 units of it a year. This is no great loss in the name of science.) This causes our page to return a 404 when you try to request it. The bots blithely ignored this, and continued attempting to hammer that nonexistent page all the same. Puzzling.

Maybe, but I also carry literally hundreds of other products from that same brand including several that are basically identical with trivial differences, and they’re only picking on that one particular SKU.

They also need to be able to replenish that stock at current prices. I’ve worked retail many times in my life and arguably kinda-sorta do so now (albeit largely over the Internet) and I’ve never run any store where we did not set our pricing by replacement cost rather than original invoice cost. In my current operation there are some rare exceptions for clearance items and the like, but for the vast majority of products we sell for what it’s going to cost me to get the next one to put back on that shelf, not what it cost me for the one I’m selling you now.

I don’t have any insider insight into other companies’ operations, but I imagine a lot of other retailers work things the same way. Especially these days.

Negative. Our solution is completely home grown. All artisinal-like, from scratch. I can’t imagine I reveal anything anyone would care about much except product specs, and our inventory and pricing really doesn’t change very frequently.

Even so, you think someone bothering to run a botnet to hound our site would distribute page loads across all of our products, right? Not just one. It’s nonsensical.

I run an ecommerce site and lately they’ve latched onto one very specific product with attempts to hammer its page and any of those branching from it for no readily identifiable reason, at the rate of several hundred times every second. I found out pretty quickly, because suddenly our view stats for that page in particular rocketed into the millions.

I had to insert a little script to IP ban these fuckers, which kicks in if I see a malformed user agent string or if you try to hit this page specifically more than 100 times. Through this I discovered that the requests are coming from hundreds of thousands of individual random IP addresses, many of which are located in Singapore, Brazil, and India, and mostly resolve down into those owned by local ISPs and cell phone carriers.

Of course they ignore your robots.txt as well. This smells like some kind of botnet thing to me.

I’ve got a Timex Expedition that I’ve had since high school. That means I bought it some time during the early Triassic. Its stainless steel backplate is held on with four Phillips screws and I have never in many decades had any problems undoing them when I need to replace the battery every six years or so. It remains resolutely waterproof. I know this because it lives outside rather frequently: at the moment I have it stuck to the gauge cluster on one of my motorcycles with Velcro.

“All” digital tech?

I don’t think most people realize that any powertrain new enough to even have fuel injection is going to be a “computer vehicle” in some capacity. How are you with carburetors?

Windows 98 SE, maybe. We didn’t gain much traction there until about Win2k or XP.

Windows 98 in its original flavor didn’t even support USB mass storage devices out of the box without drivers. Hands up everyone who remembers having to carry around one of those tiny driver CDs that came in the box with every single Sandisk Cruzer for a couple of years? Yeah? How quickly we forget.