diyrebel @ diyrebel @lemmy.dbzer0.com

Posts

5

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88

Joined

2 yr. ago

I’m not sure how you can blame a corporation for doing the job of a corporation. It’s capitalism doing its thing.

I will blame the end users. When the masses of anti-bot pro-advertising normies decide to run browsers that play the token game, it will be on them. Just as countless shitty websites get high ranking search results today.. it’s because the masses endorse it.

Boycotts are far too rare. It’s the consumer’s job to #boycott. They don’t do their job and this is the real point of failure (which Google gladly exploits).

It would stop beneficial bots like the ones I create¹ as a small-time hobbyist because the little guy does not have the resources for this arms race. You may be right when it comes to large-scale scraping ops that are done by a business (e.g. scraping RyanAir or Southwest airlines so an airfare consolidation site can show more fares).

① e.g. I wrote a bot that scraped the real estate market sites, scraped the public transport sites, and found me a house with the shortest public transport commute.

It’s bizarre that you think the EU market it small enough to be dispensable. When GDPR came into force, many US sites had to reject EU traffic. But that was only temporary for the most part. They knew it wasn’t smart for business to exclude the EU so they got their compliance issues sorted.

Hope you guys enjoy not being able to search for things.

I would love that actually. But it’s not reality. In reality what happens is the search engines deliver a shit-ton of unusable garbage results that I would rather not see. E.g. sites that block Tor users, CAPTCHAs, giant cookie popups, etc.

If a search engine were to filter out the garbage, it would be a great start to solving the shitty web problem.

Challenge rejected.

If you want challenge, just simply try to find a search engine that filters out shitty websites (e.g. Cloudflare sites, CAPTCHA-pushing sites, giant cookie popups, countless dark patterns).

We are already failing to meet the challenge. We don’t need more challenges.

Cloudflare is an exclusive walled garden that blocks a marginalized¹ segment of people from most of their sites.

① People whose ISP uses #CGNAT, Tor users, users with text browsers, beneficial bots (which serve humans), impaired people (who can’t solve CF’s CAPTCHAs), those who distrust a US corp to have visibility on the plaintext contents of every single packet including usernames and passwords, etc.

Ad pushing is only part of the problem… These tokens will kill the #InternetArchive Wayback machine. It’s anti-library tech.

Anti-bot tech is inherently anti-human.

The heart of your stance is apparently that pernicious socially harmful mechanisms are okay as long as they finance something useful. Correct?

Or is it that you don’t see the harms of advertising?

Advertising is a wasteful arms race. Bob may not want to spend money advertising his business, but if Mallory (his competitor) spends money on ads, then Bob is forced to spend money on ads to recover marketshare loss due to Mallory’s ads.

I don’t get the “/s”.

The #GDPR is absolutely a perfect example of ½-assed laws & loopholes. I have filed reports on dozens of GDPR violations; not a single one of them lead to enforcement. The GDPR is just a prop to make people feel comfortable as the EU destroys the offline infrastructure.

Really All this is going to do is create a opportunity for AI ad removal,

It’s worse than that. As it stands, I’m blocked from ~30+% of the web because of Cloudflare. Unjailing the content into archive.org’s #WaybackMachine is indispensable. From the article:

“Websites funded by ads require proof that their users are human and not bots”

I already lose copious access to content as a human being treated like a bot. #Google’s plan is to take the next #CAPTCHA extreme. It’s the wrong direction.

Robots work for the user, not against. I created a bot to find me a house because the real estate sites lacked the search criteria I needed. I scraped the sites & found the ideal house. This would be nearly impossible today & Google brings it closer to impossible.

#Google will make you want to unplug (as Cloudflare has done to me), but if you’re in Europe you will be unable to because European governments have already killed off offline infrastructure (#digitalTransformation). There are already a number of government transactions & public services that can no longer be done offline.

The #hvactrainingshop.com link is dead to me (it’s in an exclusive walled garden not openly available to all people [#Cloudflare]). I could not find a replacement link. If anyone has a better source, plz mention it.

Thanks for pointing that out. My immediate thought upon reading the headline was how a/c could be implemented without electricity. I wondered if a compressor could be beast powered somehow. @FlyingSquid@lemmy.world should correct the title.

Plumbers are a nightmare in my area. I give some details in other replies. I am also a nightmare for them because my screwed up town gives them nowhere to park. So they often don’t even want to come. Their fee just for showing up is about what I spent on tools and chemicals.

What’s the reasoning behind that ban?

The drain infrastructure in most US cities is relatively modern. The city drain pipes are big & thus able to handle a big amount of food waste coming from residents. I think I heard some minority of US cities also ban garbage disposals because for whatever reason their pipework can’t handle the load.

Old cities have small pipes that could not sustain the onslaught of thick food waste, as I understand it. In my city, rats outnumber humans by 2 to 1 and I think they thrive in the sewer. So I’m not sure if it’s also an effort to not feed rats. In any case, the city’s preferred way of dealing with waste food is to put it in the trash.

Recently they required food waste to be separated into a different color bag than the others. So they collect the food waste together and compost it. In the end, this is probably the most forward-thinking approach despite the sewer system being quite behind.

Where do you live that sulfuric acid is illegal?!

I think it’s like this in all of Europe. I know in the US you can get 32 oz. of it at Menards for $8. But that’s not an option here. I have no idea what people do if they need to build a battery. The stuff I got would be different than what’s in batteries. Probably the battery acid is more pure. What they sell to pro plumbers is a bottle labelled as /drain cleaner/ with sulfuric acid as a main active ingredient. It likely has a cocktail of additives to optimize it for drain pipe usage or perhaps make it inconvenient for other usages.

What if you do that? Illegal to buy, own or both?

I doubt it’s a possession offense. They are controlling the sales. If you go to a pro plumbing shop and try to buy it, they will require proof that you’re buying on behalf of a company that was constituted for the purpose of plumbing.

I can’t quite work out if you’re making a prediction of a clog returning, or if you’ve not realized that there is no longer a clog.

For weeks I have been fighting clog. But the clog is finally gone and the drain is now faster than I have ever seen. The drain actually keeps pace with the faucet on full blast. In the past, even in the best of times, I think the fastest it drained was 1 liter in 20 seconds. Now 1 liter drains in 6 seconds.

You’re already hundreds of dollars into gadgets and chemicals. Stop it. Cut your losses and call a professional next time.

Pros give different results in different areas. I called a plumber for a leak once. I was out of town, but a simple leak was dripping and forming a puddle on the floor. The leak was in exposed PEX pipe visibly strapped to the wall (yes that room is quite ugly). The plumber spent little time, failed to find the leak, blamed something that was fine, and charged €200. We called him back and he made the outrageous claim that the puddle was due to “condensation”. Left and gave no refund. I would love to have a reliable & trustworthy plumber. But since I don’t have that I have to become the plumber.

My costs in the drain fight were ~¾ of €200 (less than the incompetent plumber’s charge for simply showing up). Every time I redo the pipes I’m appalled by the work of past plumbers. So I think I’m just not in a good place to hire plumbers. There is no quality control of any kind in my area. No Better Business Bureau of sorts to record complaints. So the infrastructure is not setup for bad plumbers to fail.

That’s interesting, but would you ever expect to find drain pipes in copper? My house came with a box of old scrap parts, one of which was a thick metal trap for a sink. It wasn’t copper though. All drain pipes I’ve seen in the house are PVC (mostly gray, some white and some orange).

Ok, so as you noted at the end, sulfuric acid was a bad idea for the pipes.

Not exactly. The sulfuric acid likely solved my problem (in combination with a plunger). It overflowed a little & attacked radiator pipes due to me underestimating the foam expansion rate (user error - perhaps poured too fast), but AFAIK it did not harm the drain pipes. Sulfuric acid would not be a good early stage choice, but when most chemicals and techniques have been exhausted it’s one of the most effective options.

The problem you will quickly run into is that you poored many chemicals in your pipe, so new chemicals might react with them.

That’s good general advice. But note that my episode spans many weeks. I know not to mix them (acid & bleach in particular). Every chemical went in on a different day with a water flush in between (which often took ½ day or a full day).

Bleach is not a dissolvant, it’s a disinfectant. It’s of no use to free a pipe.

I’m a bit confused on this because many of the consumer grade drain cleaners seem to rely on bleach as the active ingredient. Some of them are simply “thick bleach” (in a gel form).

To my limited knowledge, the best chemicals are acid chlorhydric or soda. Never ever use both. acid chlorhydric might be bad for the pipes though, so soda is usually better. Acid chlorhydric is best to remove limestone. Soda is best to remove biomater. Both of these are very cheap.

Do you mean hydrochloric acid & caustic soda (aka sodium hydroxide/NaOH)?

The hair-specific drain cleaner I have is based on sodium hydroxide.

The 2-component one was based on sodium hydroxide & sodium hypochlorite (aka bleach). I don’t recall what the other cleaners were.

Another point of confusion: chemists told me consumer drain cleaners are useless against hair. Then I noticed hair-specific drain cleaners on the shelf, which somewhat supports the idea that universal/generic drain cleaners lack effect on hair. But then the hair-specific drain cleaner I bought only mentions sodium hydroxide as an active ingredient, and this is the same common ingredient in many non-specific drain cleaners.

I don’t think those bladders are sold in my area, but it sounds like something that would have worked in my situation. So to be clear, once it fills with water, does not also discharge water on the opposite side that it is fed water? Is the pressure then limited to the household water supply pressure?

Can you explain why you say this?

The same branch is shared by a bathroom (toilet, shower, sink) and those bathroom drains have never had a clog. Although they always periodically stunk despite full traps so I suspect a leak was always there. But since it’s only occasional I wonder if it’s a leak at the top of a pipe, not spillage. Well, otoh there might be spillage going on in the bathroom because there are drain flies, which might be feeding on spillage from somewhere. It just seems bizarre that the odor only manifests occasionally.

The big branches meet at a main Y connector. That Y connector is new. The basement had a serious leak under the concrete a couple years ago. The basement floor was dug up and new pipe was installed. I doubt there would be any issues with this new pipework. I think the only segment that’s quite dicey is from the kitchen sink to wherever it joins the bathroom.

(edit) are you perhaps thinking that the clog has moved along and will clog again downstream? I doubt that, because the diameter of the kitchen drain is 40mm and it eventually joins a branch that’s like 90mm in diameter. If this thing were to snowball for some reason, it could probably be reached from the cleanout at the main Y fitting, no?