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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)FC
Posts
2
Comments
84
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • What do you mean by “engagement”, exactly? Clicking on ads?

    In SEO terms user engagement refers to how people interact with the website. Do they click on another link? Does a new blog posting interest them?

    Lmao you think Google needs to go through Archive to scrape your site? Delusional.

    Any activiity from Google is easier to track and I have a record if who downloaded content if it's coming from my servers.

    The mechanisms used to serve ads over the internet nowadays are nasty in a privacy sense, and a psychological manipulation sense. And you want people to be affected by them just to line your pockets? Are you also opposed to ad blockers by any chance?

    I agree that many sites use advertising in a different way. I use it in the older internet sense -- someone contacts me to sponsor a page or portion of the site, and that page gets a single banner, created in-house, with no tracking. I've been using the internet for 36 years. I'm well aware of many uses that I view as unethical, and I take great pains not to replicate them on my own site.

    I disapprove of ad blockers. I approve of things that block tracking.

    As far as "lining my own pockets" goes, I want to recoup my hosting costs. I spend hours researching for each article/showcase, make the content free to view, and then I'm expected to pay to share it with anyone who's interested? I have a day job. This is my hobby, but it's also my blood, sweat, and tears.

    And how do you suggest a site which has been wiped off the face of the internet gets archived? Maybe we need to invest in a time machine for the Internet Archive?

    archive.org could archive the content and only publish it if the page has been dark for a certain amount of time.

  • I just sent a DMCA takedown last week to remove my site. They've claimed to follow meta tags and robots.txt since 1998, but no, they had over 1,000,000 of my pages going back that far. They even had the robots.txt configured for them archived from 1998.

    I'm tired of people linking to archived versions of things that I worked hard to create. Sites like Wikipedia were archiving urls and then linking to the archive, effectively removing branding and blocking user engagement.

    Not to mention that I'm losing advertising revenue if someone views the site in an archive. I have fewer problems with archiving if the original site is gone, but to mirror and republish active content with no supported way to prevent it short of legal action is ridiculous. Not to mention that I lose control over what's done with that content -- are they going to let Google train AI on it with their new partnership?

    I'm not a fan. They could easily allow people to block archiving, but they choose not to. They offer a way to circumvent artist or owner control, and I'm surprised that they still exist.

    So... That's what I think is wrong with them.

    From a security perspective it's terrible that they were breached. But it is kind of ironic -- maybe they can think of it as an archive of their passwords or something.

  • His aren't. A pair of high-end massage guns so they can massage each other at the same time instead of taking turns. BowFlex adjustable dumbbells. Not a gadget, but a new Tesla Model S and charging port. There's an Amazon Echo Show in a few rooms...

    I'm not saying that he shouldn't buy those things -- I'm saying he has a different mindset than I did/do, but I do believe that my mindset makes it easier to get by financially.

  • When I went to college I had saved every penny that I made. I went to a community college for two years under an earned scholarship and worked during that time; then I transferred into a four-year institution that required three years of classes. I paid for the first two years with my savings and part of the third year with a loan. I continued on to grad school and took research/teaching assistantships to provide a salary that covered housing, but received free tuition as part of the deal.

    My first semester at the four-year school was way harder than anything I was used to. At community college I had coasted along, but this required effort. Paying for it myself out my bank account made it so much more real, and I decided then that I was going to do better because I sure as heck didn't work so hard all those years just to throw it away.

    We paid for most of our millenial child's college. He ended up dropping out of college a couple of times and always spent too much money. He's now married with a wife and child, and together they make more money than my wife and I did combined up until a few years ago. They're still living paycheck-to-paycheck but have to buy every new gadget.

    Our two Gen-Z daughters just went off to college. They will probably graduate, but they also don't understand the value of money. They didn't want to work, didn't want to save... They get a scholarship that pays a monthly stipend, and they burn through that as it comes in. Their college decisions were based on things like "is that campus pretty?" "is their cafeteria food really good?" regardless of the cost. They refused to do community college.

    What's my take? These three kids have a sense of entitlement and a need for immediate gratification that I didn't really see in my generation. I'm pretty sure this isn't the result of bad parenting (we adopted the two younger ones as teens), and I see it with co-workers' children as well.

    Does that mean that every Millenial or Gen-Z is like this? No. It just means these three definitely are. But they don't get much pity from me when they complain and it was the result of bad choices. I chose my college path based on value: scholastic and economic. They chose their path based on social and sensory reasons.

  • It did get a lot of funding from the NSF in the early days, but the federal government didn't start pushing for public access to research done through grants and contracts until 2013. Before then it was only work done by federal agencies that was non copyrighted.

    The National Science Foundation also didn't start funding Mosaic until 1994, which was after CGI had been released.

    NCSA gets a lot of its funding from the private sector with partner programs, the University of Illinois, and the State of Illinois as well.

  • Which women? What are their voting records? What experience do they have? Can they work with the other party if they need to? Are they respected by foreign leaders?

    If it's this election, are we sure putting them on the ticket will survive certain legal challenges?

    Too many questions without enough answers.

    Generally speaking though, no, I don't think it would happen. I would totally support it, but I think there are too many misogynists out there. On the other hand, I never thought there would be a Black president either.

  • I found the whole copyright thing at Wikipedia for this image pretty funny.

    Even the simplest research shows that NCSA is a state-funded agency (through the University of Illinois system), not federal. If that image is in the public domain, it's not for the reason Wikipedia lists.

  • Growing up we had two large mulberry trees in the yard, and every summer I was sent out daily to pick a bucket full of mulberries. My Mom made mulberry syrup, mulberry jam, mulberry clafouti, put them in fruit salad, and, of course, made mulberry cobbler.

    This brings back memories. Thank you for sharing!

  • I was a manager, and another guy was a more senior manager in another division. We both did IT. For some reason he didn't like me and/or was trying to get our services moved to him, so he went to our director every week for over a year to tell him made-up stories about me.

    He eventually left after a lot of people realized he was a highly manipulative, but I still hear things that he told people as part of an explanation about why I was passed up "for this" or why I wasn't right "for that." It cost me a lot of raises, especially in cases where things were gossiped to other people and the source was lost. Now I'm only a manager in title, but my management responsibilities were taken away.

    Unfortunately, I'm caught in a ticking trap -- another 1.5 years and I retire with a full pension for the rest of my life. Losing that by leaving isn't worth it (assuming I live long enough afterwards).

  • I'm a big fan of netdata; it's part of my standard deployment. I put in some custom configs depending on what services are running on what servers. If there's an issue it sends me an email and posts into a slack channel.

    Next step is an influxdb backend to keep more history.

    I also use monit to restart certain services in certain situations.