I learned COBOL programming on that system. COBOL’s sequential file data type was all about space-delimited text files. Part of a program would define the various input & output files. For example a numerical userid might take up columns 1-8 then the first initial would be in column 10 then the last name in columns 12-20 and so on…

I have no idea if this is true or not but I was told it harkens back to very early multi-user operating systems where user credentials were stored unencrypted in plaintext files that used white space as delimiters.

I tend to believe this might be accurate because I learned programming back in the 1980’s on an Onyx Systems microcomputer. There was a bug that some of us learned about in its rudimentary email program that would dump you into its otherwise-protected system directory. In that directory was a file containing both usernames & passwords in clear text. I don’t recall if it used white space as a delimiter, but given everything was in clear text and not encrypted I think that might have been the case.

Reminds me of The Password Game…

Warning: you have been warned!

What’s your name soldier?

Number two, sir!

Always with the negative waves, Moriarty. Always with the negative waves.

That would surprise me. Companies like Akamai maintain very up-to-date lists of Tor exit nodes, commercial VPN exit nodes, etc. My employer uses Akamai and blocks all traffic from Tor given the huge volume of malicious traffic coming from it. It would be trivial for us to block VPN traffic as well if we wanted to. Those blocks occur on Akamai’s systems before it ever makes it to ours. No browser-based tool is going to get around an IP based block like that.

No idea if Reddit is doing something similar here, but my guess is they are.

💩

robots.txt is 100% honor based. Well known bots like Googlebot, Bingbot, etc. definitely honor them. But there are also plenty of bots that completely ignore them.

I would hope the bots used to collect LLM training data honors them, but there’s no way to know for certain. And all it really takes is one bot ignoring it for the content of your website to end up in a random set of training data…

Try using “curl -A” to specify a User-Agent string that matches Chrome or Firefox.

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Parks Canada has some YouTube videos from trail cameras they installed in order to see what wildlife actually uses these and how quickly they started using them once construction was complete. Pretty neat to watch.

I’d look up links but I’m on mobile and lazy…

My understanding is that robots in warehouses like these are controlled by a central computer system that manages their movements, etc. It makes sense to have a central authority that manages all activity in an enclosed environment.

Whereas the Boston Dynamics ones are largely self contained. A number of years ago they developed a 4-legged “Pack bot” as a proof of concept. It was designed to carry hundreds of pounds of supplies and follow soldiers as they hiked through all sorts of terrain.

If you’re in the Boston area or nearby suburbs the all the sewage goes to the Deer Island treatment plant which eventually pumps the treated water out into the Atlantic…

My understanding is that the lava house became an attraction more than a personal home. Folks would hike in there to stay a few days, B&B style, to get married there, etc.

I used to work across the street from their labs and we would regularly see them testing their robots in the parking lot. There were lots of areas of uneven ground that made for great testing. Eventually they reached out to us and a few other companies to offer tours of their facilities.

When we took them up on the offer one of the things I immediately noticed in one of their indoor testing areas was that everything was marked with what looked kind of like QR codes. The guy giving the tour said that the computing power in the robots was still fairly limited, and they needed as much of it as possible to focus on the actual robotics. So rather than have a ton of image/video processing they opted to label things that told the robot “this is a box”, “this is a door”, “this is a table” etc.

They could then send an instruction like “pick up the box, carry it through the door, and put it on the table”. The robot would then look for the appropriate QR codes and figure out how to complete the task.

That was 10+ years ago at this point. I don’t think they need those QR codes any more.

They did that in Hawaii decades ago when Kīlauea covered Chain of Craters road and others.

Kīlauea said “Fuck that” and covered the roads again and again, along with entire neighborhoods. The Hawaiians just let it all go back to nature now. You can drive roughly 10 miles of Chain of Craters Road now, which is in Volcanoes National Park, until it ends very much like the road in this picture.

Speaking of Kīlauea, you might be interested in reading about Jacks Lava House which survived for years as the entire neighborhood around it was reclaimed by the volcano. It was eventually reclaimed by Kīlauea as well about a decade ago.

First there were sharknados, now there are bearicanes. Where will it end?

Sponsored by Red Bull?

Dude sitting on the left also has six fingers. And all the hats are gibberish.

Thanks! I think you nailed it.