I assume this all means they have left their website to rot in favor of an app which I will never use.

interactions with new health insurance company have gone as follows:

- I have no id card, and the web page that they say contains a "digital id card" does not contain one (but has thing at the top saying "this page contains the digital id card").

- Trying to pay them results in a cgi error along the lines of "no ID parameter".

- Trying to contact support, on today, a weekday, results in "we are not available on weekends" (ok ok, it's MLK day)

Mom's birthday hike bird.

first #sourdough bake in a long time, 50/50 whole wheat. I forgot that white flour likes a lot less water than my usual 100% hydration so this was very challenging to shape and so I'm happy it turned out this well

baked between hot coals in the woodstove at 700F-500F

so begins phase 2 of solar install

what a way to end a day.. tractor trailer driver called an hour before sunset and we decided he should not attempt even the dead-end road my driveway is on, and so I hiked to the highway with a wheelbarrow to meet him there

caught a lift back to my driveway in a pickup truck and got everything hauled as far up as makes sense until the snow melts

freaking loot boxes

half mile difficulty level

waiting around for fedex in a 8 hour delivery window, snowy driveway edition, tractor trailer pallet load expansion pack

me, cat, citrus trees, house, car, all soaking up the sun before 6 inches of snow dump on us tomorrow

eff is constitutionally incapable of making this statement

https://merveilles.town/@akkartik/113794742431836312

Mind, this is not a kneejerk reaction for me. I've been keeping track for about a decade of the extent that the EFF criticized governments vs the extent they criticized major corporations. I can take the libertarian leanings as long as good things are being accomplished. At the same time, I saw how much that tendency was leaving on the table.

But once I associate you with corporate lickspittle to the extent I now do, how do you ever come back from that?

eff eff

getting a pallet load of solar ground mounts delivered on Monday and with the snow forecast, maybe I will be able to drag them half a mile up the driveway as a sled train, rather than wheelbarrowing them. lol

up to 775000 unique ips crawling my gitweb

starting consulting on "leveraging blockchain to supercharge AI training"

$$$

... I'll just be teaching their scrapers how to tell they're crawling gitweb, and do a git clone

solar fence rules on a snow day, making plenty of power without needing any cleaning

Did some further investigation and I was wrong about the causalty here -- there was an ongoing crawl distributed amoung thousands of IP addresses before the fast crawl that I blocked.

Both crawls did start at close enough to the same time that they might be linked somehow, but blocking one didn't trigger the other one.

imagine using a botnet of 600 thousand unique ip addresses for days and all you get is a few git repositories you could have cloned in seconds

running at 200 new unique IPs per minute now, no problem, keep em coming

thing is, 80k hits is a tiny amount of hits when you're not running expensive perl scripts.. gitweb is a pig though and its load average checks are a joke when there are 500 of them all running before they are able to check load

70 thousand unique ips now

I have enough (non-ip-blocking) amelorations in place that things are working again now.

40 thousand unique IPs and still climbing

DDOS seems to be from all chinese IPs although the initial scraper was running on google cloud