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if you care about right to repair and the ability of regular people to make a living and choose their own destiny(i.e. live independently of a mega-corp), this type of error message should bother you. HTML is a mature tech. There is no reason for this type of error
(posting this in both comments about this) i am the author of the article.
the adafruit blog is not trying to block you my dude(s). we are under constant automated scraping and ddos, largely from ai crawlers, and we use cloudflare to keep the site online at all. the nature of of these things will cause false positives depending on browser, extensions, network, or referrer.
the site respects do not track, privacy badger, and similar tools. the site will probably never pass the purity tests for everyone, the goal is to stay independent, publishing, without selling readers or folding into a mega-platform. we're open source and vc free, chill out about us, ok?
if you still can’t get an article and want it in html, markdown, text, or pdf, email me and i’ll send it directly, i will read it on the phone to you, i am not kidding.
we’re trying, and we’ll keep trying. you gotta meet somewhere.
Cloudflare is ridiculous. I can't even open it using Cromite (privacy enhanced, but not over the top, android browser).
I get:
blog.adafruit.com
Verifying you are human. This may take a few seconds.
blog.adafruit.com needs to review the security of your connection before proceeding.
And this hangs forever. What difference does it make if I access this site using a browser (blocked anyway) or I asked my LLM to fetch the content? I bet my LLM coukd get it anyway as I'm using basic local scraping with firecrawl for backup. So my LLM if it fails to retrieve using my basic local crawl4ai will use my paid firecrawl api and those guys can scrape EVERYTHING.
I do not understand why do you (as a site owner) care? Are these bots generating so much traffic? Can you set it up to serve text only version to them then?
this isn’t an adafruit-specific stance, it’s a web-wide problem. automated scraping and bot traffic is enough to take independent sites offline, and cloudflare is a tool we use to keep the site available at all. we publish full-text rss with no blockers here: https://blog.adafruit.com/rss
. if cloudflare trips on your browser and you want an article, email me and i’ll send it in whatever format you want, we're always working to make it easier, it's hard, would rather have help than snarks and dunks.
My office uses ZScalar and lots of sites automatically block that because the company running the product make the product seem like an "open anonymous proxy".
When companies that earn their money by selling things deliberately make their website hard to access (especially for scrapers -- of any sort), then they're making a choice to abandon their customers.
It seems ruthlessly disappointing to consider, but maybe Adafruit isn't cut out for this whole Internet thing.
Can you elaborate on the logic that makes preventing scrapers (note, you didn't mention actually hindering accessibility technologies) customer antagonistic?
When a product doesn't show up at all using the [potential] customer's chosen tools (whether a search engine like Google, or an LLM like ChatGPT), then that product is invisible.
An invisible product is one that may as well not exist. When a person can't find it, then they also can't purchase it.
(posting this in both comments about this) i am the author of the article.
the adafruit blog is not trying to block you my dude(s). we are under constant automated scraping and ddos, largely from ai crawlers, and we use cloudflare to keep the site online at all. the nature of of these things will cause false positives depending on browser, extensions, network, or referrer.
the site respects do not track, privacy badger, and similar tools. the site will probably never pass the purity tests for everyone, the goal is to stay independent, publishing, without selling readers or folding into a mega-platform. we're open source and vc free, chill out about us, ok?
if you still can’t get an article and want it in html, markdown, text, or pdf, email me and i’ll send it directly, i will read it on the phone to you, i am not kidding.
we’re trying, and we’ll keep trying. you gotta meet somewhere.
Yeah you can't predict anything with 100% certainty either
By repeating propaganda at you though desperate financiers can hack your brains innate prediction loop to convince you you're knocking on the door of infamy.
Look, I get you. You're trying to fill the hole created when father never came back with cigarettes. Mom always blamed you for his leaving. But little Warboy screaming "Witness me make line go up !" everyone else is a self selecting meat suit too working unintentionally (simply distracted by their own lives needs they never encounter your pitch) and in some instances intentionally (fomenting economic and political instability) against you to support themselves.
Webdev new hotness monkey poo flinging software development is not these people's schtick. Hardware is.
God forbid whatever library they use to make their website "easy" and detract less labor from their endeavors not have default settings in perfect accordance with their politics.
I bet they don't compile their OS from source either.
The "new hotness" in webdev is what causes these errors. Plain old HTML pretty much never has these issues. Clearly they are into the new hotness in webdev.
Exactly. Unless they want to make a project out of their website they're at the mercy of the packages and frameworks they depend upon, who are run by people who generally like webdev stuff and have no qualms about the new hotness.
If you're using a browser more than a year old it's also much more likely you're vulnerable to zero-day exploits. Browser tech is a lot different than it was 10 years ago.
That error message almost always means someone is using an extremely obscure browser that doesn't pass Cloudflare's not-a-bot-check.
Either the browser has Javascript disabled (Tor), or its Javascript engine is very outdated/broken (a couple of old Firefox forks) or doesn't support Javascript at all.
It doesn't necessarily mean the browser is vulnerable to anything, just that it's not a browser normal websites would expect to encounter so the bot check fails.
> The researchers directly observed atoms known as “bosons,” which bunched up in a quantum phenomenon to form a wave. They also captured atoms known as “fermions”...
Is this a typo? Aren't those subatomic particles? This is repeated throughout the article.
...the linked paper[1] is titled: Measuring Pair Correlations in Bose and Fermi Gases via Atom-Resolved Microscopy
Maybe i am missing something? i can only read the abstract.
"...Still in the early stages, Loops is not yet open sourced, nor has it completed its integration with ActivityPub, the protocol that powers Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube, and other federated apps..."
Hey, PeerTube is already open source, and works on ActivityPub:
This. It's by @dansup@mastodon.social and if there's anything I've learned about this internaut it's that dansup delivers. The work on Pixelfed is exceptional.
So, to be fair reddit is supposedly the 18th most visited site online today[1]. Given it's popularity i guess i won't hold it against Stross. I, myself, find it somewhat hard to avoid, though i try my best and steer clear. IMHO it's just one of those toxic places, though there are many of them online. Actually it's becoming sort of like a fundamental law of tech and online these days(that everything is toxic - actually there are a few places that aren't so bad, but they are becoming harder to find). Someone should write a book. Funny, i didn't realize Ohanian had a connection to HN[2].
> As for me, I still believe in open source, and even in the commercial potential of open source. It requires creativity and a clever business acumen to identify and exploit market opportunities within this collaborative framework. To win in open source you must embrace this collaboration and embrace the fact that you will share the commercial market for the software with other entities. If you’re up to that challenge, then let’s keep beating the open source drum together. If not, these new movements(source-available software) may be a home for you – but know that a lot of hard work still lies ahead of you in that path.
This article feels more like a critique of the new "source-available" trend in tech whereby existing OSS projects sell out and try to retroactively re-license themselves to be more closed-source friendly. I've been sort of aware of this phenomenon since there was a small upset when Muse Group bought Audacity, though it appears it is still GPL[1].
Anybody know a quick work around for the middle mouse button? Actually it appears I'm also having trouble with the keyboard too. My wireless keyboard+trackpad worked fine yesterday on raspberry pi os. It is refreshing though to see an OS that is lightweight and quick to install, and doesn't give you any surprise errors after you got it all updated about stuff like the web-browser is not supported on your model B+(even if i wasn't able to connect to internet and actually test functionality). Life is tough! I'm spending too much time trying to figure out all this random half-baked tech.
I forgot this is an 8 day old thread. There is actually a lot about RISC OS that i think seems favorable over running raspi os, just based on the tiny amount of testing i did on both, and getting neither to work for my use-case: I like how small RISC OS is, and it seems to have a better method for adjusting scan to my TV - raspi os doesn't seem to have a way to adjust that. It does seem like there could be some improvements at making it more plug and play; or maybe it is my wireless keyboards fault. i'll have to report back after i get that figured out.
Ok, well final story is, i rummaged around and found some wired keyboards and mice. It was a little frustrating, but i finally found a pair that seemed to function. I'm still not sure what the point of 3 mouse buttons is; it seems like right and left click do the same thing(that is with the mouse i was able to actually get working - maybe RISC OS doesn't like any of my mice). Also the [FN]+Q,W,E,arrows trick didn't work on my keyboard that actually had a Function key. I guess i could have rummaged more(and maybe i will), but my hardware generally works fine with the linux distros I have used(mostly MX). It seems like some more work could be done here. Also, my wifi dongle seems to be recognized but incorrectly as a usb-ethernet interface, so i have an IP, but no internet, and i can't find a way to change that. riscosopen.org says sign-ups are disabled i need to email the webmaster; maybe i will; i am interested in trying out RISC OS, but it doesn't give me much confidence with my experience so far. ...it looks like MX still publishes a 32bit version, so i guess i can try and run that on my old Model 2 B+? ...but i bet it's going to have the same problem with no web-browser. So i guess all my 32bit stuff is bricks now? on a side note, i noticed some degradation in the desktop experience with the latest version of MX on my old laptop(it is a Thinkpad T510 with an intel i5). It is still functional, but i can feel the walls closing in.
Well, i went back to raspi os, and installed midori, and it successfully ran and loaded a page, though it quickly became apparent that raspbery pi os on an old model 2 B+ was not going to work(cpu + mem overload = slow) I have a vague memory of connecting a screen+keyboard+mouse to my raspi some years ago, though I can't really remember what the UX was like. In any case, it is unusable now with the latest version of raspi os. Here's a pic if you don't believe me(not that it is very much proof, but notice the scan is messed up - there is no way to fix it apparently): https://i.postimg.cc/3NjBDR6f/KIMG0503.jpg
I'm going to have to figure out another solution for my idea of turning TVs into cheap workstations. Sadly it seems like nobody is interested in making retro-computing accessible, and my favorite brand of linux seems to be slowly moving on to new hardware support(things seem degraded after updating). It's just that it makes it hard to participate(and contribute) when simple setup is so difficult, and hardware support becomes degraded. Maybe there is some project out there i just haven't seen yet that will fix all my problems, but it just seems less likely the longer i hang around. Actually there are a few options that come to mind, but testing OSs takes time, and so i think i'll just leave it at that for now.
It's good to do the math and think about the big picture sometimes. ;)
p.s. i tend to feel somewhat skeptical about a lot of renewable projects i read about in the news. And even if the math all works out and it really IS The Best Solution i cant help feeling we are ignoring the elephant in the room(population growth). Maybe human beings should start preparing themselves to live with less(and be happy with that).
Even if that were true (and it won't be for another 5-6 decades using current predictions at least), energy consumption is anything but. And if there is a risk of electricity usage plateauing, they'll just find something new like training AI models or spinning GPU's to churn out digital money (where said churning is entirely artificial).
After reading a bit of the comments thread above, i couldn't resist adding a bit more.
> The single most important assumption in this paper is that energy consumption will increase by 2% per year.
Quick reality check: 1.02^1000years = 398,264,652x increase! This could potentially be an unrealistic projection. Let's consider what we know from the article(and google).
Here's a few numbers pulled from the article for reference:
~1.73 x 10^20 J tidal energy lost per year naturally
5.67x10^20 J was the total global energy consumption in 2013(10^18 is 1%)
So 398,264,652 x 5.67x10^18 J = 2.258 x 10^27 J! That does seem like a lot. In comparison total sunlight absorbed on earth's surface each year is roughly 3.85 x 10^24 J.[1]
> It might also be that tidal energy extracted by humans, comes out of some fixed 'budget'
So lets compare that to what is already being consumed and think about what amount of energy generated might be realistic. Top google result tells me global energy consumption is about 5.80 x 10^20 J2 these days.[2]
I guess the next question is what would be a realistic upper limit for the amount of energy we could harvest globally from the tides? Referencing the Stanford article again, we have an estimated annual energy loss of 1.73 x 10^20 J total from natural friction of the tides globally. Is it realistic to think we can harvest an equivalent amount of energy for the grid? I wonder what sort of impact a turbine project that size would have on the earth? Is it even possible? For sake of being rational, let's say we think a network of turbines 1% of that size(10^18J) is potentially possible. How many turbines might you need to make for something that size?
So lets take the kite-turbines from the article at the top. Each one of the produces 1.2MW. Does that mean it produces 3.78×10^13 J annually? Or is it closer to half that(1.89×10^13J)? In a 10^13 J ballpark we would need to produce about 10^17 to approach our max limit 10^20 J harvested. Correspondingly a project 1% the size still needs 10^15(a quadrillion) of these turbines globally. That seems like a lot and it just sort of seems in my mind(maybe i'm wrong) that there would be some sort of environmental impact. Also, now that you have shrunk your project the total energy produced is now a fraction of 1% of the current total global annual energy consumption, and grows more insignificant every year consumption rises.
Not sure I agree that population growth is over, but isn't it true that energy consumption per capita is also increasing? Either way I think we still have the realistic expectation of continued 2% growth in global energy consumption for the next few decades at least, doubling every 35 years. Unless we can find ways to harvest larger quantities of tidal energy without breaking the ocean it just doesn't seem like a silver bullet to me as far as climate goes. Assuming we could harvest 25% the quantity of what occurs naturally, that only gives us 0.4325x10^20J annually, which is only 7% current global consumption - in 35 years that number will only equal 3.5% of the total consumption. I guess it's a question of how much you want to screw up the environment in order to save it.
TLDR, saving the planet with tidal energy seems kind of misrepresented imho. Build wooden megaliths instead. ;)
if you care about right to repair and the ability of regular people to make a living and choose their own destiny(i.e. live independently of a mega-corp), this type of error message should bother you. HTML is a mature tech. There is no reason for this type of error
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