We have an American Pope. But it not being Micheal Ian Black is a wound my younger self may never recover from.

I played enough Zork that I’m never surprised by grues.

Shortened lives, hastened climate change, and stunted development is a small price to pay for being able to see a nude version of any photo posted to xitter.

Somebody send a gift basket to the Skype CEO, he’s not doing so well.

Animal Detective: The dog you’re looking for weighs close to 200lbs, walks exclusively inside shoe prints, and (based on the trash in the area) is fond of playing Edward 40 Hands.

I’ve always appreciated that the black rat’s name is Rattus rattus. It’s the rattiest rat that’s ever ratted, it’s right there in the name.

David Cronenberg keeps himself busy.

This is a post that reminds me I’m not wearing my reading glasses.

My experience is with systems that handle nearly 1000 pageviews per second. We did use a spread of haproxy servers to handle routing and SNI, but they were being fed offender lists by external analysis tools (built in-house).

Most often because they don’t download any of the css of external js files from the pages they scrape. But there are a lot of other patterns you can detect once you have their traffic logs loaded in a time series database. I used an ELK stack back in the day.

When I was serving high volume sites (that were targeted by scrapers) I had a collection of files in CDN that contained nothing but the word “no” over and over. Scrapers who barely hit our detection thresholds saw all their requests go to the 50M version. Super aggressive scrapers got the 10G version. And the scripts that just wouldn’t stop got the 50G version.

It didn’t move the needle on budget, but hopefully it cost them.

“Significantly better than ChatGPT” and “Good” aren’t the same. Like ipecac is significantly better to drink than sewage water.

I went long enough without using Google (probably a year-ish) that, when I accidentally made a Google search a few days ago, it was a jarring experience.

It felt wrong the same way other search engines did when I first deGoogled. It was kind of nice actually.

We’re pretty lucky to have him, too.

Today happens to be the first anniversary of us adopting Laszlo (shelter name Timber).

There’s been a lot of snuggles in the last year.

Peanut butter and sweet onion

I eat pb&o sandwiches then the local sweet onions are in season.

And they didn’t do a heart with a banner in front of it that says “Mom”?

When I was in college my roommates and I would open all those offers standing at the mailbox, seal the empty envelopes back up, then put then right back in the mailbox for the carrier to grab the next day (or maybe mail thieves, who knows). We figured just mailing them all back was going to cost something.

I know a flying cat when I see one