CAN I BE OF ASSISTANCE?

Saturday, December 07

Rant

Dealing With Assholes Running Web Spiders On The Internet

Your site can deal with 20 simultaneous threads crawling the entire history of all your content right?  Right.  I mean, if your server crashes it's not our problem.  Also, fuck sending a clear identifier, we're just a Mac running Safari that just happens to be downloading the contents of 70,000 blogs.

Update: We were - and indeed, still are - getting hit by a torrent of garbage requests coming through a group of proxy servers run by an SEO company.  I don't know why, but they are now all getting 404.

Update 2: I killed that, and then I discovered we were also getting scanned by a total of 175 different servers at various hosting companies.  Those are all blocked at the firewall now, and don't even get the courtesy of a 404.

If you have a problem reaching the site - say it works on mobile but not at home, or vice versa - please let me know.  I will double-check the list of blocked IPs tomorrow and convert it to a smaller number of IP ranges.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:38 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 187 words, total size 1 kb.

Thursday, September 12

Rant

Some Planes Did Something

http://ai.mee.nu/images/SomePlanesHi.png?size=720x&q=95

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:16 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 4 words, total size 1 kb.

Sunday, March 31

Rant

Twitter Is Run By Morons

Which we all knew, but anyway.

Unfortunately I didn't capture my original appeal, in which I jokingly asked, more or less, what they have against cold oatmeal. And their support system is worthless; once you submit a request it disappears, and you have no information about it whatsoever.

But unsurprisingly, I got this today:

Your account has been suspended and will not be restored because it was found to be violating Twitter's Terms of Service, specifically the Twitter Rules against hateful conduct.

It is against our rules to promote violence against or directly attack or threaten other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or disease.

Additionally, if we determine that the primary purpose of an account is to incite harm towards others on the basis of these categories, that account may be suspended without prior warning.


Of course, all of this is a deliberate lie. I never did any of this. What I actually did was use a word they, all by themselves, have decided is offensive. They never say that; the only way you can find out is by getting your account suspended. I have responded again:

I have been suspended in error.


I write in reference to your rejection my earlier appeal: Case# 0109080114: Appealing an account suspension - @PixyMisa [ ref:_00DA0K0A8._5004A1e3bMe:ref ]

You write: "Your account has been suspended and will not be restored because it was found to be violating Twitter's Terms of Service, specifically the Twitter Rules against hateful conduct."

I have NEVER engaged in hateful conduct on Twitter. Not in 11 years and 42 thousand tweets.

"It is against our rules to promote violence against or directly attack or threaten other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or disease."

I have NEVER promoted violence against or threatened ANYONE, not on any of these bases, not on any basis. No matter how broad your definition of attack may be, even down to mere criticism, I have NEVER attacked anyone on any of those bases.

You continue: "Additionally, if we determine that the primary purpose of an account is to incite harm towards others on the basis of these categories, that account may be suspended without prior warning."

Not only has it not been the PRIMARY purpose of my account to "incite harm towards others on the basis of these categories", I have NEVER done so.

I ask you to reconsider.


I do not expect a more reasonable response this second time.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:56 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 432 words, total size 3 kb.

Tuesday, April 10

Rant

Hello Blog, How Are You?

Why yes, I did get suspended on Twitter.  How did you know?

The mob got me.  Was having a nice civil discussion blazing row over a California State Senate bill legislating Orwell's Ministry of Truth and I slipped up spoke my mind reported scientifically established fact and called one of the fascists retarded:

https://ai.mee.nu/images/Screenshot_20180410-034320.png?size=540x&q=95


https://ai.mee.nu/images/Screenshot_20180410-034330.png?size=540x&q=95

Two things to note: First, it's transparently obvious that I didn't break those rules.  Second, those rules are retarded.  Third, so is the goddamn California state senate:

TITLE 14.5. False Information Strategic Plans

3085.

 (a) Any person who operates a social media Internet Web site with physical presence in California shall develop a strategic plan to verify news stories shared on its Internet Web site.

(b) The strategic plan shall include, but is not limited to, all of the following:

(1) A plan to mitigate the spread of false information through news stories.

(2) The utilization of fact-checkers to verify news stories.

(3) Providing outreach to social media users regarding news stories containing false information.

(4) Placing a warning on a news story containing false information.

(c) As used in this section, "social media” means an electronic service or account, or electronic content, including, but not limited to, videos, still photographs, blogs, video blogs, podcasts, instant and text messages, email, online services or accounts, or Internet Web site profiles or locations.

I don't know if I have ever seen a more blatant First Amendment violation, but these retards are perfectly fine with handing this power to the government even when Donald Trump - who is Literally Hitler - is in power.


Update: Twitter has now locked all my alternate accounts and won't even let me read tweets any more, though the message clearly says I can read tweets.


Update 2: I'm back, and I've saved a copy of all my tweets.  Not that anyone would ever want them, but anyway...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:56 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 317 words, total size 3 kb.

Saturday, March 31

Rant

Twupdate

From an earlier post:
Also, I'm on my 19th 20th 21st 22nd 23rd 24th 25th 26th 27th 28th 29th 30th 31st 32nd 33rd 34th 35th 36th 37th 38th 39th 40th 41st 42nd 43rd 44th 45th suspension with Twitter right now.
The only reason it's not more is you can't get suspended when you're already suspended. Pretty sure I got double-suspended at one point.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:18 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 62 words, total size 1 kb.

Wednesday, February 28

Rant

Confiscated!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:51 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 20 words, total size 1 kb.

Saturday, February 24

Rant

Twitter, Free Speech Engine Of The Interweb

From an earlier post:
Also, I'm on my 19th 20th 21st 22nd 23rd 24th 25th 26th 27th 28th 29th 30th 31st suspension with Twitter right now.
The only reason it's not more is you can't get suspended when you're already suspended.

(Bumped.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:14 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 47 words, total size 1 kb.

Monday, May 22

Rant

97 Economic Facts The Doctor Who Episode "Oxygen" Got Wrong


1. Oxygen is recyclable.  It doesn't disappear when you breathe it.
2. They're mining copper ore.  You know what a major component of many copper ores and other rocks is?  Oxygen.
3. You know what the process of refining oxide ores does?  It produces oxygen.
4. They're murdering the maintenance staff of a refinery to save money on oxygen.  Do you have any idea how expensive it is to restart a refinery after a shutdown?
5. They're rationing oxygen, but not the resources required to produce oxygen.
6. They're sending out an entire new crew of employees on an interplanetary spaceship.  The energy for orbit-to-orbit transfer alone would make the cost of maintaining oxygen for the existing crew an unnoticeable blip on the balance sheet.
7. The actions depicted are not saving money, but wasting it.  Such a company under capitalism would swiftly be outcompeted and either be sold or go bankrupt.  This sort of thing is far more likely under state capitalism or socialism than anything like laissez-faire capitalism.  (Indeed, it's endemic in socialist states.)
8. Capitalism is not a "mistake".  Capitalist theory is descriptive, unlike socialism, which is prescriptive (and normative, i.e. a fairy tale).  Capitalism is simply how people exchange goods and services when they are free to do so.  Our understanding of it might be incomplete, but it's not something that was created by mistake.  Socialism, of course, is exactly that.
9. Murdering 90% of your employees is not a good way to improve productivity, nor do we see this in capitalist economies.
10. They're mining copper ore in situ.  Why?  Just move the whole damn rock.  Might take a little longer, but what's the rush?
11. If the suits can perform the manual labour - even complex operations as we see later in the episode - then why the hell are the crew out in space in them, using oxygen?  Burning money again.
12. They're shipping out a new crew at great expense because the old crew wasn't sufficiently productive, and they expect the new crew not to notice that there's no old crew?  You don't think the ever-growing piles of corpses might have some impact on worker efficiency?
13. There's a substantial crew on an automated refinery.  The refinery is still in operation with 90% of the crew dead.  By what measure were they unproductive when there was no point of them being there in the first place?
14. If the original crew wasn't needed, what was the point of spending a fortune to send out a replacement crew?
15. A company that routinely murders its employees will not tend to have the first pick in hiring new ones.  In fact, unless they're a protected monopoly, no-one would work for them at all.  What is illustrated is not only not a problem of capitalism, it's something that capitalism corrects.
16. That crew vessel is going back anyway.  You seriously have no way of extracting value from the old crew who are already trained and experienced workers?  Again, in a capitalist economy, you're headed for the corporate scrapheap.
17. If a resource is valuable, a capitalist economy doesn't destroy new supplies of that resource; instead it seeks to recover that value.  A cartel would seek to control the supply.  When you do see that sort of destruction, you find a state behind it, and most often a socialist one.
18. Oxygen is not actually scarce in space, not if you're in a planetary system.  Breathable oxygen, yes; oxygen itself, no.  You just need a power source to break it out of whatever incovenient molecule it's formed - H2O, SiO2, CO2, Cu3(CO3)2(OH)2, whatever.  They have a nuclear reactor.
19. The society we see has access to artificial gravity.  This is so far beyond any technology we have today that their worries about oxygen are like us fretting that our neighbours might sneak in while we're at work and steal the secret of fire.
more...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:20 PM | Comments (32) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 847 words, total size 6 kb.

Wednesday, March 29

Rant

iiNot

iiNet has gone downhill over recent years.

Right now I can't reach Ace's site (though I know it's up) or the server it runs on, or the hosting provider for that server, or my other hosting provider, or the hosting provider we're moving to (which is another business unit of the first hosting provider), or my podcast feeds from This Week in Tech or The Incomparable, or BvS (and we've got a zombja invasion to deal with!), or Anandtech, or Slashdot.

Earlier today I couldn't reach GitHub either.  They fixed that, at least.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:46 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 94 words, total size 1 kb.

Monday, January 09

Rant

Disqust

Disqus comments are bloody awful.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:22 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 6 words, total size 1 kb.

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