It has been almost a trope that every time the discussion of them buying up the used market and cutting them up to scan, some apologist comes along and says that these books are mass produced garbage and not rare.

Use a gell cell lead acid battery (the kind that go in regular UPSs). No fire hazzard, ans bonus, they can survive freezing temperatures just fine if outdoors. Downside is replacing a cheap battery every 3 years.

Wouldnt productivity have two knobs? Efficiency and energy/effort input?

Also efficiency sometimes goes against “right”? If you need resiliancy you then “right” migh include redundancy. In software, that could also be guardrails like memory safety that necissarily take some extra abstraction to implement and a processing penalty?

Case in point: Alberta. As a landlocked province, they have been struggling to get oil and gas to markets, being limited by the pipelines other provinces or the US is willing to build. Now, the vast, vast majority of the planned ai datacentres in Canada are in Alberta, with insane sweetheart deals from government.

They found a way to get paid to burn gas within their borders and are going whole hog.

For a while, I thought their end-game was simply to get “too big to fail” before the bubble burst and get that bailout. But you are right - they either overshot or have some other idea in mind because now they are too big to bailout.

Security by obscurity is when the design or archetecture of the system is obscure enough to supposedly styme attackers (it doesnt), and as soon as people understand the design, your security is broken.

A hard to guess unpublished subdomain is a transparent and standard archetecture - nothing obscure about it and publishing that you use such a scheme doesnt break the security.

The subdomain is a bearer token that serves as an access control and just like a key or passphrase, has a security value proportional to the bits of information an attacker has to guess.

The real limitation is that browsers and humans are not great at not leaking domain names, so its very possible it will get leaked eventually and hard to rotate. Thats the reason they are weak. Still, they can be usefull to stop scanners just trolling for unpatched services.

Hopefully they get access back and someone learns enough to at least apend a few grand on some cold storage tapes.

Heck its pbs. They should have publically archived it so anyone could keep a copy. At least the old stuff.

That sounds like the vast majority of “app” developers.

These things are a casino market.

You are conflating micropayments (sufficient to pay creators) with gateway monetization, which would need to be small enough you could still use the internet (lets say thousands of pages a month) but high eough to dissuade scraper bot operators. I am not sure such a price exists. Maybe for some bot operators, but the various AI companies have more money than all regular internet users.

In other words - car usage expands to the limit because human nature is to use the resource until it gets inconvenient. The gas expands to fill the container.

Overlay networks are also feasable.

But the liberals were just as bad. They made our little kids learn about consent in sex ed. So aweful. /s

The term was useful back when we used coal gas. It stopped being useful 100 years ago.

Indeed, I log in pretty rarely.

Their admin interface is slow and awkward, but otherwise happy. Their deals are always changing and I currently have good specs for the money. EU company and my machine is in Montreal, so I was happy with non-American hosting and green electricity.

Not going to disagree, but “web usage” is basically everything. You can literally run an entire desktop operating system from 2007 on a virtual machine emulated in JavaScript in your browser now.

There are constant scanners on any site and scrapers on websites, but it is far less of a problem than you would imagine unless you have a big wiki or software forge with hundreds of nested commit history pages for them to spider into.

I also run private servers on hidden subdomains (with wildcard certs and DNS entries), so the low effort scanners never bother them.

DDOS attacks take money, so they aren’t typically going to go after some random homelabber. If it did happen, I would either just shut it off for a while or change the VPs IP. Ovh also has some of its own ddos protection.

Keep in mind that you wouldn’t route local traffic through it, so everything watched at home would be direct and not count.

I have a $5/mo VPS with OVH and they allow unlimited bandwidth within reason. Unless you have multiple households streaming from your server all the time, likely totally fine. If you do end up with one relative streaming 24x7, then I would look at installing the tailscale app on their TV and configuring things to connect that one user direct to your home server.

A VPS takes some learning, but IMHO, it is the “correct” answer and worthile learning.

If it weren’t for the overwhelming harm and the insane ramblings of those pushers, we could actually rationally discuss all of the useful things that can be done with it. There are plenty - its a pretty good tool in any engineers toolbox - but there’s no point in itemizing them because the much greater issue is the ai psychosis taking over our entire financial, economic, and governmental systems.