Posts by bert_hubert@eupolicy.social
(DIR) Post #B4JwmnY5WmIgWR4u0G by bert_hubert@eupolicy.social
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@danielskatz This was from a panel where experts could raise a "bullshit" sign if politicians went off track. It as wonderful, but I don't think they would be eager to repeat this experiment..
(DIR) Post #B4hBoWI0dU6LWKulZA by bert_hubert@eupolicy.social
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After receiving the first LLM-generated pull requests, I have decided to blanket no longer look at those. When studying a PR, I take into account who made it, and if they've previously been careful developers. LLM-generated code I have no idea about, and the amount of scrutiny required is just too much. Because I have to assume you have no idea what you are doing.
(DIR) Post #B4oPFmbIl4TlRDzKeu by bert_hubert@eupolicy.social
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"Graphic design is my passion"
(DIR) Post #B53ZhBtmip3qd8jxxI by bert_hubert@eupolicy.social
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Amazing that to stay sane in 2026 you have to convince yourself that a presidential threat that "A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again" is actually not serious.
(DIR) Post #B5gVGYO0BUFNu3M1Y0 by bert_hubert@eupolicy.social
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Had to reread https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/how-to-get-a-unix-epoch-from-a-utc-date-time-string/ today to solve a DST issue. If you ever feel lost in UNIX/POSIX date/time processing, I hope this page is as useful to you as it keeps on being to me.
(DIR) Post #B5kYkmXxB37t0GxE9o by bert_hubert@eupolicy.social
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RE: https://social.treehouse.systems/@mgorny/116465292654071299There are millions of these single query scrapers. As open projects we should band together and block them preemptively. This is the only way we can put a stop to this.RT: https://social.treehouse.systems/users/mgorny/statuses/116465292654071299
(DIR) Post #B5kYkmrS0Yipyk4nY0 by bert_hubert@eupolicy.social
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Here are 91,372 IP addresses pretending to be normal browsers, while sending a *single* query to me today. http://berthub.eu/tmp/singlequery-2026-04-26.csv - feel free to block them all!
(DIR) Post #B5kYkn4DF6vkcK2zRI by bert_hubert@eupolicy.social
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Automated this a bit, and it is fascinating that the bulk of what looks like residential proxies has their language set to zh-CN:
(DIR) Post #B5kYknEqbZRB9J1U12 by bert_hubert@eupolicy.social
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Meanwhile, the IP addresses used mostly come from Brazil. Iraq, USA, India, Bangladesh, Chile, Argentine, France. This from a site hosting Dutch parliamentary documents. country | count ---------+------- BR | 9214 IQ | 3685 US | 3597 IN | 2291 BD | 2116 CL | 1822 AR | 1697 FR | 1667 CA | 1577 PK | 1570 TR | 1499 ES | 1449 GB | 1323 PH | 1248 IT | 1246 CO | 1219 RU | 1151
(DIR) Post #B5kYknUneGCJwmUDse by bert_hubert@eupolicy.social
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As an experiment, I briefly sent the crawlers with a specific Chinese language setting to https://www.foreignersintaiwan.com/blog/taiwan-is-a-country-heres-why and they *all* vanished. Very odd & I can't quite explain it. Still, not complaining!
(DIR) Post #B5kYknsYDxCF8RbBtw by bert_hubert@eupolicy.social
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(the crawlers are back in full force! but they are all getting some great news about Taiwan in response to their queries)
(DIR) Post #B5kYkoJ8d6SoSu2QLI by bert_hubert@eupolicy.social
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Their runs look like the graph below. I assume they task their network of residential proxies with a massive list of URLs to retrieve, and as the list gets smaller proxies run out of work:
(DIR) Post #B5kYkoiJ7Wb3ixoWZc by bert_hubert@eupolicy.social
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So I did another experiment and redirected the crawlers to a ~10GB file. This was a brief experiment, but it is reassuring to know my setup can stream 300+Mbit/s without ill effects!
(DIR) Post #B5kYkp63hDayucvUau by bert_hubert@eupolicy.social
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After some suggestions I'm now serving a gzip-bomb, but since these IP addresses only visit me once, I don't know if they suffer ill effects. But rest assured knowing many dozens of gigabits of content are now being served every second!
(DIR) Post #B6iAf60ndD5DaGY4yu by bert_hubert@eupolicy.social
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🥳 https://www.politico.eu/article/netherlands-blocks-us-takeover-vital-digital-supplier/?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication
(DIR) Post #B6se4EJ4ljnWni28ie by bert_hubert@eupolicy.social
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On AI: at an embarrassing age I learned that almost everyone hates reading. Most writers are also avid readers, and are often not aware that 20% of the population is (almost) illiterate. Reading is a chore for the majority of people. For a typical author this is an unpleasant and hard to grasp truth. But once you believe it, you can change your writing for the better. By for example never "burying the lede". Just start your letter/advert/post/whatever with your main message. 1/2
(DIR) Post #B6se4EWXxeZbTUKtiS by bert_hubert@eupolicy.social
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Lately, I've been wondering if I was not only wrong about reading, but also about thinking. Like most of my friends, I enjoy thinking. I love to do research. It is one of my big hobbies. But perhaps I'm like my runner friends who also struggle to believe that not everyone likes running. Might *thinking* be painful for people? Something to be avoided? This would explain lots of stuff. Like the rampant AI enthusiasm. Thoughts? 2/2
(DIR) Post #B6tsRHcAEI0QEjoC7U by bert_hubert@eupolicy.social
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Last time I saw a sentence like this was in 1998: “The PC is being reinvented,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “For forty years, you launched apps. Click. Type. With RTX Spark and Microsoft Windows, you ask — and the PC does the work." - https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-microsoft-windows-pcs-agents-rtx-spark
(DIR) Post #B7M7zmeXJ9K6JGVjTU by bert_hubert@eupolicy.social
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RE: https://mastodon.social/@nixCraft/116752805722997877Actual IT departments. Most places now only have "Big Tech Departments".RT: https://mastodon.social/users/nixCraft/statuses/116752805722997877
(DIR) Post #B8aeS5PpWiFswYqL5s by bert_hubert@eupolicy.social
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@ariadne same - but weirdly I sometimes still forget it. And then when I need to do really big data processing I *marvel* at the speed when all that data is in a single contiguous slab of memory, with actual locality of reference and no memory allocations scattering things about.