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> and anyone requesting ID are required to accept them

This is the big one. I've seen a lot of states where digital drivers licenses are issued, but many retailers are like "lol no, we want the card." It needs to be legally enshrined as identical.


> HDD can be written multiple times with random data

Which costs more in compute than simply throwing the drive in a shredder


What's the disposal method for shredded drives?

Mount Doom

Not really, if we give the HDD some resale value. There's a market for used but functional hard drives.

> They work everyday. They never get burnt out.

Until they do (because everything has a failure rate) and cost thousands for an entire new projector assembly. Compare to the cost of a halogen bulb every couple 10k miles.


The MTBF for OEM LEDs is in the decades timescale. Projector assembly isn't called LED bulb for a reason. It's time to nuke this misconception from orbit. If your 17 year LED headlight has failed, you need the part that represents just the LED bulb, and not the entire headlight assembly. See price difference between part 1 and part 9 below:

https://vw.oempartsonline.com/v-2024-volkswagen-gti--autobah...


“MTBF in decades” is marketing fiction. The diode itself might last forever in a lab, but the driver electronics, thermal paste, seals, and optics sure don’t. Real-world LED headlights die from heat cycling, moisture ingress, and driver board failure long before the diode hits its theoretical limit. Most assemblies don’t even have a serviceable “bulb” to replace. Pretending you can just pop in a $40 LED chip instead of the $900 housing is wishful thinking.

I pay subscriptions to some of these sites and still use archive.is on them because it is a more pleasant reading experience. No auth failures, no annoying popover windows begging me to subscribe to their dumb newsletter. Just the internet equivalent of a static piece of newsprint.

my personal theory is that archive.is has paid subscription accounts (legit or via botnet) to most of the major news outlets and edits the html to make the sites look not logged in. I wonder if they do it by hand or by doing something like : https://github.com/pirate/html-private-set-intersection

More than a theory -- they've talked about this on their blog[1] before.

[1] https://blog.archive.today/


in my experience it's just a headless browser with a bypass-paywalls extension

It is definitely more than that for some sites and it has to be manually managed. For example this year i've seen archive.is capture paid articles of some finnish newspapers and the layout gives away that it is logged in on an account although the identifying details have been stripped out.

There have been periods of weeks/months when they don't have paid access to those Finnish sites. Tried it just now on a hs.fi paid article from today and it didn't work, but for example paid articles from just a week ago seem to have been captured as a premium user.

It is curious how they have time to do it and I wonder if news sites of other smaller languages get similar treatment.


Create vpn on a GCP ip address, use googlebot user agent, paywalls gone

Probably works against a fair few sites, but not if they are using RDNS.

I used to do the same with Lynx but enough websites have now broken it.

ublock with annoyance filters also solves this

Is there any more annoying popup than the newsletter popup? I'd rather see a targeted ad than that BS.

NO! I do not want your newsletter! I wouldn't even have an email address if it wasn't absolutely required to operate in society today. The less email I get, the better!

Email is becoming like fax machines: An old, dated technology that refuses to die.


> Is there any more annoying popup than the newsletter popup?

Rhetorical I'm sure, but actually yes! The popup that tries to get you to switch to the app when you are actively trying to give the offender money! eBay is a notable offender here (it pops up when I search for stuff to buy; why would you interrupt that?)


Sigh. You're correct.

I'd give you an award but you've hit your maximum number of free things this month. Make an account, pay for a subscription, and sign up for needless spam then we'll let you have it along with some ads for good measure.


Personally I don't mind an offer to subscribe to the newsletter but Substack is way to aggressive. They show the prompt even before I have finished the article (How do I know if I want to subscribe?) and obscure the article (actively working against what they know what I am trying to do). So I now just immediately back out when I see that. I won't visit sites that are purposely harming the experience.

Sites used to open up popup windows, then browsers got better at blocking them. But instead of taking the hint that people didn’t want that, they just moved the popups inside the page content. The prevalence of ad / tracking blockers is entirely due to the user-hostile actions of site owners.

Physical feels that way to me sometimes. In the US, I get assaulted on a constant basis by mailers and ads for things I never expressed any interest in. Waste of time, waste of paper, waste of resources.

The purpose of creating a site is to earn money, and newsletter popup is a step in a sale funnel. Text is just a bait.

Same, I also use links from HN threads and I donated to archive.is in the past. I don't want them gone.

Sharing articles I like to people I know is the other reason, when the site doesn't have any functionality for that.

It is said chanting pleases the LLM spirits and may bring forth the promised AGI god.

I remember that the Boston Museum of Science used to have a floppy disk on display with the Morris worm on it.

That exhibit is shown in the article.

“Grand Engineer”

“Ascended Engineer”

“Archengineer”

“Their Excellency, Prime Engineer”


Engirinissimo?


> Your users won't marvel at your choice of language or your usage of design patterns - they care about how the end product looks and works.

Yeah, but if the patch is unreadable slop, some tasteful choices that make the code more maintainable will make features and bugfixes come faster for users and number go up for the business.


Unreadable slop and "tasteful" choices are independent of each other. You can make "tasteful choices" that makes code unreadable (I know from experience).

Readability also has some level of objectiveness to it. There's only so many ways you can abstract a concept, and so many ways you can express logic.

In that sense, readability has way more to do with skill in abstraction, than taste. In fact picking bad abstraction layers or expressing logic in odd manners because of taste is a great way to write unreadable slop.


“Looks like you have an ad-blocker. Disable it to reactivate cooling.”


I kinda like the approach Github does: they just publish their fingerprints here: https://docs.github.com/en/authentication/keeping-your-accou...

This is served over TLS, so it's no worse than TLS. You can also benefit from the paved road that LetsEncrypt has provided. It might not be as smooth as SSH CAs once they're set up, but setting those up and the Day 2 operations involved isn't nearly as straightforward.


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