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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Uhhhh this seems to imply that the fuselages aren’t normally checked for cracks.

    They are checked. On a schedule. Sometimes it’s discovered that the original maintenance schedule was too spaced out, and the aircraft should be checked more frequently. This means that any that have exceeded the new length of time between checks have to be checked right away or be grounded until they are, which may be what happened here.

    That doesn’t mean that even the new schedule for this particular aircraft is frequent enough, just that in general, someone does examine aircraft for structural damage and metal fatigue from time to time.

    Boeing doesn’t actually want the aircraft to come apart in the air. That’s the kind of thing that makes airlines buy Airbuses instead. Their goal is to try to figure out what the cheapest, least-frequent maintenance schedule is that will still keep the planes from catastrophically self-destructing. Too bad they suck at it.


  • It’s been at least five years since I last watched the series, so no, I don’t remember what he looked like before.

    Still, the set of people who think that he and the girls and the disembodied seifuku (who are certainly characters in their own right) are all hot must be vanishingly small. And that’s ignoring the kid and the dog, whom I certainly hope people don’t find hot. (Mind you, of all the characters, the dog seemed to be the most likely to keep its clothes on, which I’m sure was conscious irony on someone’s part.)



  • The thing is, a lot of websites don’t need to be interactive, or only need to present interactivity to a minority of visitors. Consider Wikipedia, for example. Only a small percentage of people visiting the site are interested in editing anything. The rest shouldn’t be burdened with massive quantities of extra downloads for a feature they don’t need, want, or use.

    Furthermore, you don’t need a “modern web framework” to have an interactive site, and most of them seem to be pretty bloated.

    The level of technology a site displays should be appropriate to what the site is trying to do. If your site is about services that you need an appointment for, then yes, there should be a booking setup on the site. If you’re running a store, you should have a shopping cart. Add as much of an interactive layer as is necessary to do these things, and do them well, but no more than that.

    Most of us just want pages to render quickly, stop tracking us unnecessarily, and stop choking our connections and stealing our electricity for stuff that isn’t useful to us (or to anyone except depraved corporations).



  • As someone’s already said, the concept of magical circles/diagrams goes way, way back. But the earliest example I can think of in anime is The Slayers (the first season, which would have aired in the mid-1990s). The interesting bit there is that only a few spells (I think Burst Rondo was one) create patterns there, and when they do show up, they’re on the ground, not in front of the caster.

    The earliest example I can think of of a magic circle in a JRPG is in the SNES version of Chrono Trigger, where one appears—on the ground again—in a scene where one character is attempting to summon the Big Bad. It’s part of the background graphic. Putting something like that in the combat system would have been taxing for the consoles of the era, so if there are any older examples, they’re probably also handled as background graphics.

    (This is possibly the geekiest post I’ve made in, um, at least a week?)


  • sure, but is that implying that 5% of this traffic is bad faith or rogue agents?

    Given the volume of requests that have been semi-DDOS’ing a lot of servers? 5% is probably an underestimate.

    the tools built into Claude Code and Codex surely have their own user-agent settings.

    “Surely” is like “assume”—it says more about the speaker than the entity being discussed. They almost certainly don’t use completely distinct strings (no one does—they all start with “Mozilla/5.0”); at most they might have tacked an additional bit on at the tail. And that’s if they’re being aboveboard.

    and why would they spoof Linux instead of Windows?

    Why not? But actually, this may be due to an incorrect assumption on the part of the stats collectors. Typical strings for bots that admit to being bots don’t specify an OS: “Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; ChatGPT-User/1.0; +https://openai.com/bot” as opposed to, say “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/134.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/134.0.0.0” or “Mozilla/5.0 (Android 15; Mobile; SM-G556B/DS; rv:130.0) Gecko/130.0 Firefox/130.0”. If they’re dumping anything without OS markers into the “Linux” bucket, that might do it.



  • Thing is, “Cloudflare identified this as a normal browser used by a human” doesn’t mean it actually is a normal browser with a human in the driver’s seat. There are going to be both false positives and false negatives (a browser puppeted by Selenium is still a human-usable browser, after all, and could even be taken over by a human in mid-session; by contrast, a browser whose settings have been chosen by a privacy advocate may make some expected indicators unavailable). So it’s hard to make any useful inferences.






  • Discourse is kind of a moving target at the best of times, and I wouldn’t bet on any precanned command older than a couple of months working properly.

    The server may have flagged your wget command as an unacceptable bot—as written, it’s ID’ing itself as a bot, can pull a new page every half a second if you get unlucky with --random-wait, and isn’t respecting robots.txt

    The thing with the local index page pointing to the forum threads on the server matches what the wget man page says about --convert-links where the target file wasn’t actually downloaded. Is it pulling any files at all other than the index? Do the files’ names and extensions match what shows up in the index if you don’t pass --convert-links?

    Also, I’m pretty sure there’s no way to get those images if they aren’t hosted on the same server. (This is just common sense, or an offsite link could result in wget trying to mirror the entire Internet.)