Live example: https://FreeSolitaire.win/wp-login.php (NB: /wp-login.php is WordPress login URL, and it’s commonly blindly requested by bots searching for weak WordPress installs.)
nginx also has "return 444", a special code that makes it drop the connection altogether. This is quite useful if you don't even want to waste any bandwidth serving an error page. You have an image on your error page, which some crappy bots will download over and over again.
> You have an image on your error page, which some crappy bots will download over and over again.
Most bots won’t download subresources (almost none of them do, actually). The HTML page itself is lean (475 bytes); the image is an Easter egg for humans ;-) Moreover, I use a caching CDN (Cloudflare).
Btw, a Tor relay can be relatively lightweight. I run one on a $5/mo VPS (which does many other things). You need 1 GiB of RAM, but a single basic CPU core largely suffices. My relay sends/receives ~150 GiB of traffic per day (~15 Mbits/s). It’s not an exit node, so no legal worries.
Oh but yes, Firefox (and Chrome) do support XSLT natively! See https://paul.fragara.com/feed.xml as an example (the Atom feed of my website, styled with XSLT).
const atom = new XMLHttpRequest, xslt = new XMLHttpRequest;
atom.open("GET", "feed.xml"); xslt.open("GET", "atom2html.xsl");
atom.onload = xslt.onload = function() {
if (atom.readyState !== 4 || xslt.readyState !== 4) return;
const proc = new XSLTProcessor;
proc.importStylesheet(xslt.responseXML);
const frag = proc.transformToFragment(atom.responseXML, document);
document.getElementById("feed").appendChild(frag.querySelector("[role='feed']"));
};
atom.send(); xslt.send();
Server-side, I’ve leveraged XSLT (2.0) in the build process of another website, to slightly transform (X)HTML pages before publishing (canonicalize URLs, embed JS & CSS directly in the page, etc.): https://github.com/PaulCapron/pwa2uwp/blob/master/postprod.x...
> and directly running it? How much more personally involved can you get?
Ms. Farmer is the CEO of BNSF Railway[1], she is the one “directly running it”.
Moreover, Berkshire/Buffet is notorious for _not_ micro-managing, for letting its subsidiaires enjoy greater autonomy than they would in an usual conglomerate.
Right, but what is the point of letting companies own other companies if this also doesn't imply transitive accountibility? It's hard to imagine we can't find reasons to imprison the board of blackrock, for instance. Such a massive company has disproportionately small social responsibility.
We should extend this logic of accountability. If your kid does something wrong every living parent and grandparent should be held accountable. The world would instantly be better.
> My pet theory is the BigCo's are walking a tightrope of model safety and are intentionally incorporating some uncanny valley into their products, since if people really knew that AI could "talk like Pete" they would get uneasy. The cognitive dissonance doesn't kick in when a bot talks like a drone from HR instead of a real person.
FTR, Bruce Schneier (famed cryptologist) is advocating for such an approach:
We have a simple proposal: all talking AIs and robots should use a ring modulator. In the mid-twentieth century, before it was easy to create actual robotic-sounding speech synthetically, ring modulators were used to make actors’ voices sound robotic. Over the last few decades, we have become accustomed to robotic voices, simply because text-to-speech systems were good enough to produce intelligible speech that was not human-like in its sound. Now we can use that same technology to make robotic speech that is indistinguishable from human sound robotic again.
— https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/02/ais-and-robot...
Reminds me of the robot voice from The Incredibles[1]. It had an obviously-robotic cadence where it would pause between every word. Text-to-speech at the time already knew how to make words flow into each other, but I thought the voice from The Incredibles sounded much nicer than the contemporaneous text-to-speech bots, while also still sounding robotic.
That doesn't sound like ring modulation in a musical sense (IIRC it has a modulator above 30 Hz, or inverts the signal instead of attenuating?), so much as crackling, cutting in and out, or an overdone tremolo effect. I checked in Audacity and the signal only gets cut out, not inverted.
The Operation Paperclip was a secret United States intelligence program in which more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians were taken from former Nazi Germany to the US for government employment after the end of World War II in Europe, between 1945 and 1959; several were confirmed to be former members of the Nazi Party, including the SS or the SA.
Prior to that they had an 'economic miracle' from WW2 till then which is probably more what people refer to. The lost decades are quite easy to understand with conventional economics - they had a property and stock bubble which got everyone left with huge debts when it collapsed.
You have a point, for sure; the _whole_ previous century (couple centuries, even) of Japan economical history is one-of-a-kind (as is Argentina’s).
However, wtr. “lost decades are quite easy to understand with conventional economics”: that’s more debatable. For example, stagflation is common(ly explained), but stag-deflation (as in Japan) is more unusual and has weirder effects. The US subprime crisis was also a real estate bubble (which, here also, rippled to the financial markets), but its burst had quite different fallouts.
Anyway, thanks for adding to the discussion, and disclaimer: IANAE (I Am Not An Economist — thanks God ^^)
Live example: https://FreeSolitaire.win/wp-login.php (NB: /wp-login.php is WordPress login URL, and it’s commonly blindly requested by bots searching for weak WordPress installs.)