this pretty much sums it up. I thought trump would be incoherent, but some of the stuff out of his mouth was borderline surreal. Harris had completely tuned herself to ‘beat’ trump, and while it worked, it’s painfully clear that she doesn’t have a single original thought - nothing but platitudes, the same canned phrases about working families and small businesses, same tired defence of Israel.

you can still get the logical journey of the zoombinis on steam (and on android/ios). no joke, I think that game taught me deductive reasoning

it’s still mostly red hat even for arm, though Cray (who still supply a lot of machines here in the UK) ship a horribly butchered version of SLES

typeset my thesis using latex, biber and zotero. Very painless, the only slightly painful part was configuring the character encoding

because they’re not a vigilante justice organisation they just want the media to talk about it

it’s the only way they can get the news to engage with it

last time I signed into my Microsoft 365 account for work I got two separate 2fa prompts and two captchas, it was like being in an episode of the crystal maze. the mere act of signing into something is now tedious and difficult

I run a small personal blog/portfolio website that doesn’t get more than a hundred or so human visits per day, but it gets hammered with bot traffic, not just malicious bots but tons of different search indexers and scrapers, many of which don’t respect robots.txt

after setting up cloudflare I noticed a very significant drop in malicious traffic and in bandwidth use, which also corresponded to less bandwidth and CPU usage for my VPS.

I know cloudflare has recently had a few bad customer service stories but for small and medium sized websites their service is invaluable

my own personal criticism of cloudflare is that, as a VPS user, I get hit by cloudflare challenges more. but now that they’ve moved to hcaptcha it’s not too bad

in my opinion this is very straightforward. the people working directly on power, water and materials don’t have any control over how those things are used and often don’t/can’t know what they’re being used for. however, at some point, a decision is made - for example, someone at the company that makes the steel alloy decides to sell it to raytheon - and so whoever made that decision is responsible.

and yes, if you work on a weapon safety system, you are working on an essential part of that weapon and so are responsible for its use

i mean, i probably wouldn’t resent you for mopping the floors at BAE. but if you actually design or build the missiles, yes, that is unethical

a lot of people are using the example of ukraine to say ‘sometimes the missiles are for the greater good’, and while i would agree with that specific example, you don’t have control over where your missiles go. russian tank, yemeni refugee, etc

i also think saying ‘the parts will be made anyway’ is kind of a dodge, the question isn’t whether the parts will be made, it’s whether you will make them

The geoblocking is in place to prevent people from buying keys in one (cheap) region and activating them in another (more expensive) one. It’s about both, you dolt.