dgerard

ahem Little Big

quite amazing that (a) Microsoft basically bought open source with GitHub (b) and are now trying to fuck it up so hard people leave

new Ziz story, coupla days ago https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/ziz-rationalism-lasota-pasek-20323332.php

also featuring our old friend Zack Davis

a shitload i expect. but checking authorities actually exist is probably gonna become an obvious thing to do lol

I mean this post seems largely correct and reasonable, but ehh be a little cautious

word i hear is that too many lawyers fucking love this shit, they see plausible words and think that's sufficient to ~~replace~~ supplement the office peons

then this happens to them and lol

If you're after streams-crossing - this guy is a rationalist who does Manifold Markets

finally we have constructed a completely unsexy robot

someone said it was Kendrick and Drake, i thought it was two Drakes pointing at each other

it will explain its position with interpretive twerking

Egan already told Hanson to fuck off in a previous story, Zendegi:

"My IQ is one hundred and sixty ... You can always reach me through my blog, Overpowering Falsehood dot com, the number one site for rational thinking about the future —"

jwz gave the game away, so i'll reveal:

the One Weird Trick for this week is that the bots pretend to be an old version of Chrome. So you can block on useragent

so I blocked old Chrome from hitting the expensive mediawiki call on rationalwiki and took our load average from 35 (unusable) to 0.8 (schweeet)

caution! this also blocks the archive sites, which pretend to be old chrome. I refined it to only block the expensive query on mediawiki, vary as appropriate.

nginx code:

        # block some bot UAs for complex requests
        # nginx doesn't do nested if, so we set a test variable
        # if $BOT is both Complex and Old, block as bot
        set $BOT "";
        if ($uri ~* (/w/index.php)) {
            set $BOT "C"; }

            if ($http_user_agent ~* (Chrome/[2-9])) {
                set $BOT "${BOT}O";}
            if ($http_user_agent ~* (Chrome/1[012])) {
                set $BOT "${BOT}O";}
            if ($http_user_agent ~* (Firefox/3)) {
                set $BOT "${BOT}O";}
            if ($http_user_agent ~* (MSIE)) {
                set $BOT "${BOT}O";}

            if ($BOT = "CO") {
                return 503;}

you always return "503" not "403", because 403 says "fuck off" but the scrapers are used to seeing 503 from servers they've flattened.

I give this trick at least another week.