• 8 Posts
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Joined 17 days ago
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Cake day: October 24th, 2026

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  • I was running a mediawiki instance for a while, and despite the very low human traffic and arguably useless nature of the site to anyone but me and a few online friends I was getting hammered by Amazon. I don’t think it got to the point of a denial of service but the traffic was excessive.

    This was a problem before AI but has only gotten worse now that AI companies are scraping sites for training data.

    CAPTCHAs and the like are often inaccessible to screen reader users, so the proliferation of CAPTCHAs has affected me greatly.

    It is what it is I suppose.










  • Double posting but…

    FOSS has problems too. Personality clashes can end or severely set back projects (MMDVM vs M17). If something isn’t fun *coughAccessibilitycough* it doesn’t get done. Projects get abandoned as devs loose interest because interest is the only motivator. Documentation usually sucks because the dev is the one doing the documenting and doesn’t understand that the end user doesn’t have their intuitive grasp of the software they themselves wrote. And 99% of the population doesn’t care a whit about code being open because surprise surprise they’re not software developers and won’t know the difference between = and ==. And no they’re not going to take night classes just to patch some program they use.


  • I bought my first Pi in (I think) 2014. It’s one of the things that got me into IT. The low price was an important feature, since I was much less reluctant to experiment and take risks with hardware that cost as much as a family meal. But nearly $400 the juice ain’t worth the squeeze.

    I guess I’m lucky in that I got a pi 5 back when they were selling at MSRP. I have a couple Pi 4’s, two 3’s (one I can’t find anymore sadly), my original Pi 1 model B, an also lost Pi zero W that I successfully soldered the GPIO pin headers to, and a Pi 400 I bought on a whim.

    When people ask me about experimenting with Linux I usually tell them to either emulate it in virtualBox or buy a Raspberry Pi if they want a bare metal experience. It was specifically because the Pi was cheap and thus low risk if something did go wrong.