Should you be wondering why @LWN #LWN is occasionally sluggish... since the new year, the DDOS onslaughts from AI-scraper bots has picked up considerably. Only a small fraction of our traffic is serving actual human readers at this point. At times, some bot decides to hit us from hundreds of IP addresses at once, clogging the works. They don't identify themselves as bots, and robots.txt is the only thing they don't read off the site.
This is beyond unsustainable. We are going to have to put time into deploying some sort of active defenses just to keep the site online. I think I'd even rather be writing about accounting systems than dealing with this crap. And it's not just us, of course; this behavior is going to wreck the net even more than it's already wrecked.
Happy new year :)
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Best not to mess with the squirrels in Boulder... https://www.9news.com/article/news/local/douglass-elementary-secure-status-squirrel/73-95b14d37-bea5-4260-8594-c4db613d7cca
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So is there anybody out there who can explain this image?
I bought this card in Korea some years ago after having seen this theme - a tiger and a rabbit seemingly getting stoned together - in a number of places. There must be a story behind it, but my meager search skills have never managed to turn it up. I do still love the image, though...
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Two years ago, I installed solar panels on the roof, and was rewarded with enough power to run the house, charge the car, and even run the heat pump for much of the year.
Another reward was the SunPower monitoring system that lets us track the performance of the system and see how each individual panel is working. Naturally, this system only delivers its data to some proprietary cloud system run by SunPower. Just as naturally, SunPower has gone bankrupt, and the monitoring system is now just a useless brick sitting on the wall.
...or at least it would be, had I not gone through the effort of integrating it with Home Assistant — a mildly difficult task involving hooking into a maintenance port on the device itself. So now I have the data out of the monitoring box stored on a local system, under my control, and I don't need to go scrambling for alternatives. I can obsess over my post-solstice data, waiting for production to reach decent levels again — that happens faster if I stare at it, I'm convinced.
Maybe there's something to this free software idea after all.
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Not having a cat, I'm not given to posting cat pictures ... but my daughter's cat is here for a visit, so here's my chance.
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I was digging through my bookshelves when I stumbled across this book, untouched for years.
I picked up Anybody's Bike Book sometime around the mid 1970s, after having discovered the freedom that a good bike gives to a kid who needs to move around in northern Wyoming. It taught me that there was nothing in my bike that I couldn't fix myself — an empowering lesson to learn. With a mixture of plain language, clear descriptions, and sharp humor, it was perhaps my first example of what technical documentation can be.
So, a belated "thank you" to Tom Cuthbertson for this outstanding book; there is no doubt it had a strong influence on all the words I have inflicted on the world.
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So here is a weird one ... the LWN site has been seeing a steady stream of login attempts, all using weird yahoo addresses as the username. By "weird" I mean things like lllbnwidgqeerdyi@yahoo.com and other equally unlikely strings.
These do not correspond to LWN accounts, but somebody has looked at our login form for long enough to post the login attempts directly, without loading the form first. The attempts come from all over the Internet, suggesting that some sort of botnet is doing this.
I don't suppose anybody else has seen this sort of pattern, or has any idea what it is that they may be trying to accomplish?
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On the radar: file-based memory management
https://lwn.net/ml/all/20241122203830.2381905-1-btabatabai@wisc.edu
This looks like fairly wild stuff, haven't had a chance to figure out how it actually works yet.
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Definitely a day best spent outdoors
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Maybe these AI models are onto something after all? https://fortune.com/2024/11/14/grok-musk-misinformation-spreader/
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Snowy day in Boulder
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For morbid reasons of my own I keep an eye on the Apache OpenOffice project's regular reports to the ASF board:
https://whimsy.apache.org/board/minutes/OpenOffice.html
As is normal, the September report says that all is great with the project - community health is always "improving". And they are clearly on top of upcoming problems: "Python 2 is unmaintained. We have in the development tree the external python3 support. Internal python 3 support is difficult. We are checking alternatives." They plan to fix it in "the next major release". The project hasn't made a major release in ten years, so I wouldn't hold my breath...
(OK, so I'm still clearly in a snarky mode, sorry.)
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Perhaps I am the only one out there using the Python GnuCash bindings to load and manage accounting data, but just in case: the GnuCash 5.9 release has a bug that completely wipes out an accounting file when opened in a Python program. It's a good way to get an extreme adrenaline burst, but I really don't recommend it otherwise.
GnuCash fixed this upstream on October 26, but has not made a release with the fix, so my 5.9 Fedora version showed the bug in all its glory. I've submitted a bug there (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2323303), hopefully they will include the fix soon. Meanwhile, I strongly recommend that anybody with GnuCash 5.9 installed be extra careful.
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In Japan even the cannibals are polite...I guess...?
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RIP Phil Lesh
https://www.npr.org/2024/10/25/1227749378/phil-lesh-grateful-dead-dies
He brought a lot of joy to a lot of people and will be deeply missed.
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Filled out my ballot over the weekend — a rather time-consuming task in Colorado, as we have a lot of things to vote.
Now I just have to endure a few more weeks while the rest of the country catches up. And hope I don't find myself living in a fascist nation...
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So I am not quite sure what to make of this article. It is nice to see attention paid to documentation... but this is really about the man pages, and somehow the problem is Linus's fault...? The idea that we can solve it with some sort of editorial structure in the "post-Torvalds era" seems ... weird.
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Linux-No-money-for-documentation-9978257.html
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Nature's way of telling you you're hanging out in the wrong tree: https://coloradosun.com/2024/10/09/eagle-nest-lightning-strike-boulder-county/
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"LWN is basically what ChatGPT summarization as advertised itself to be, except it's actually good and coherent and useful."
— HN commenter saagarjha https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41643325
Nice to know we haven't been overtaken quite yet :)
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So here I am in an airline lounge in Munich when suddenly everybody's phone starts simultaneously screaming bloody murder. I'm trying to decrypt the flashing red message in German, wondering if I have time to say goodbye to my family before whatever apocalypse is coming hits. Eventually I find the second version in English... It's national alert test day. I guess I can get another coffee after all.
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text/gemini
