I feel Anti-DDOS and Cloudflare as a web application firewall has traditionally been a lot of snake-oil as well. Sure there’s applications for it. Especially for the paid plans with all the enterprise functions. And all the way at the other end of the spectrum, where it serves as a means to circumvent NAT and replace DynDNS. But there’s a lot in-between where I (personally) don’t think it’s needed in any way. Especially before AI.

From my own experience, personal blogs, websites of your local club, church, random smaller projects, small businesses… rarely need professional DDoS protection. I’ve been fine hotsing it myself for decades now. And I’m not sure if people know what they’re paying with. I mean everytime we get a Cloudflare hiccup (or AWS…) we can see how the internet has become very centralised. Half of it just goes down for an hour or so, because we all rely on the same few, big tech services. And if you’re terminating SSL there, or use it to look inside of the packets to prevent attacks, you’re giving away all information about you and your audience/customers. They don’t just get all metadata, but also read all the transferred content/data.

It all changed a bit with the AI crawlers. We definitely need countermeasures these days. I’m still fine without Anubis or Cloudflare. I block their IP ranges and that seems to do most of the job. I think we need to pay a bit more attention to what’s really happening. Which tools we have, instead of always going with the market leader with the biggest marketing budget. Which problems we’re faced with in the first place and what tools are effective. I don’t think there’s a one size fits all solution. And you can’t just roll out random things without analyzing the situation properly. Maybe the correct answer is Cloudflare, but there’s also other way less intrusive and very effective means available. And maybe you’re not even the target of script kiddies or annoyed users. And maybe your your convoluted Wordpress setup isn’t even safe with the standard web application firewall in front.

Anubis is an entirely different story. It’s okay concerning privacy and centralisation. It doesn’t come without downsides, though. I personally hate if that thing pops up instead of the page I requested. I don’t like how JavaScript is mandatory now to do anything on the web. And certain kinds of crawler protection contribute to the situation how we can’t google anything anymore. With all the people locking down everything and constructing walled gardens, the internet becomes way less useful and almost impossible to navigate. That’s all direct consequences of how we decide to do things.

Is the .gl domain down as well? Or is my DNS messing with me? I can open the newer ones, though.

Hmmh. I’m not entirely satisfied with any of them. Crowdsec is a bit too complex and involved for my taste. And oftentimes there’s no good application config floating around on the internet, neither do I get any sane defaults from my Linux distribution. Whereas fail2ban is old and eats up way too much resources for what it’s doing. And all of it is a bit too error-prone(?) As far as I remember I had several instances when I thought I had set it up correctly, but it didn’t match anything. Or it was looking for some logfile per default but my program wrote to the SystemD journal. So nowadays, I’ll double-check everything. I wish programs like sshd and webapps came with that kind of security built in in some foolproof way.

For remote management, I just enable SSH, configure it to run on some non-standard port and enable Fail2ban… Make sure I use certificates or secure passwords and also check if fail2ban is actually doing its job. Never had any issues with that setup.

For the services I’ll either use a reverse proxy, plus configure the applications not to allow infinite login attempts, or Wireguard / a VPN.

Normal DVD-R max out at 4.7GB. Wikipedia says there are double layer recordable DVDs with 8.5 GB, I’ve just never seen one of them. But they’re available on Amazon.

Idk. I usually just copy files onto USB thumbdrives these days.

I know. What helps is to learn which buttons to click and which ones to avoid. A good adblocker (uBlock for example) and some downloader. Not sure what people use these days, I have JDownloader2.
Still sucks, but it works. Not sure if there’s better options out there, I’m not aware of any.

I never buy premium accounts either. I don’t want to support their business model. IMO piracy needs to be free. Once I want to pay money, that goes towards the artists who created the content.

Well, I’ve listened to audiobooks on Spotify (and Tidal) for a while, but that’s not piracy. You could try “hoerbuch” followed by the top-level domain of the United States. And the local library here has several shelves filled with audiobooks. I might have ripped a few to listen to them on modern devices…

I follow a similar strategy. I back up my important stuff. And I’m gonna have to re-rip my DVD collection and redownload the Linux ISOs in the unlikely case the RAID falls apart. That massively cuts down on the amount of storage needed.

That’s correct. I went with OP’s original question, what happens after it happened… Not sure what OP meant, they’re nowhere in the comments… Maybe they’re a bot as well, and we’re subject to the very same thing we’re talking about, right now…

But sure. All the fabricated pull requests, issue reports etc are massively problematic. We got quite some bot activity. Then we also need to protect our servers and platforms from their crawlers who just DDOS everyone… Documentation went down the drain, StackOverflow, Reddit… The industry is trying to get rid of entry level programmer positions, so you’ll have a bad time entering the job market as any programmer… We’re just drowned in all that stuff. Supply chains also get affected by AI, people need to choose between using existing libraries, licensing, money… Or replacing it with something the AI generated, and we get structural challenges in all kinds of projects…

Nothing? I mean an if/else works the same way, no matter if it’s written by a human or an AI or a cat or whatever…

The Linux kernel developers are opinionated, though. Everything gets quite an amount of scrutiny. There will be several people having their eyes on submissions. They’re looking for security vulnerabilities. They’re adamant on maintainability. Have a standard on how to phrase things, indent lines… Send in the patches… They generally have high standards. I mean if someone submits some AI slop, there’s a high chance it just gets declined and they’re getting scolded for doing it.

There’s of course always the chance someone tries to sneak something in. Or it creeps in on its own. But it’s the same for bugs or security attacks. And maybe some of the devs work for companies who push AI and they’ll do silly things. But the Linux community is pretty strong. They’ll find a way to handle it. And maybe in the far future, AI will get as good as human programmers and there won’t be an issue accepting AI code, because it has the same quality as human code. But that’s science fiction as of now.

Ah, thx. Makes sense, now I get it.

Hehe. Sure. I mean it’s both a blessing and problematic at the same time… I think most people appreciate a TV set is a few hundred bucks these days. Or the availability of smartphones and home computers. That’s only possible because of modern pick and place machines. I think our world would look a bit more like the victorian age if we didn’t have those modern perks. Each computer would be hand-soldered by a workforce of hundreds of people. Fill several rooms and be slow and unaffordable for anyone except the government. It wouldn’t have a screen… We couldn’t sustain billions of humans on the planet without all the machines and science in agriculture…

But automation is problematic as well. I mean we’re arguing about it since the Industrial Revolution. I think they painted a dark picture of the future in the early 20th century. Like the movie Metropolis. I think these days, we’ve solved some of the issues that come with industrialization. But we’re doing stupid things as well. And it’s an everlasting struggle not to end up in some machine dystopia. Not sure if machines are the root cause of everything, though. I mean scientists use them, they’re on every assembly line and in logistics centers. And not even the handyman with a more down-to-earth job renounces their modern battery-powered power tools… I mean sure we could use a handsaw and the hand drill from my grandpa… But I don’t think that’s the point?

But I value the human aspect as well. I mean I don’t need soylent green out of a dispenser. I’d rather have a cook and waiter.

Weird article. Is this some domain specific breakthrough? Because I’m fairly sure laboratories and researchers use some ultra precise experimental setups and sampling machines for like half a century now? For example an elaborate machine that loads 200 blood samples at a time and it’ll return the lab results to the hospital within a few hours. For what used to be a time consuming, labor intensive job with a higher error rate before… But we have these machines for quite some time now… They didn’t include any AI in the advertising, though. Same with material sciences, I believe. Either they’re doing something very specific and it’s a lot of manual labor. Or they have to test a lot of samples, or handle things very precisely, and someone is going to build a jig with robots or actuators. But that’s kind of what people always did? I mean they did palletizing robots in the 60s, and the KUKA robot arm was patented in 1973. And this article reads a bit (to me) like the job description of such a KUKA robotic arm… But what’s newsworthy about this in 2026?

Yeah, they often get quite warm. Some day I’ll be in the same situation as OP. And I can’t wait to throw out that supid modem. No clue, though what kind of SFP the fiber provider requires. I mean there’s quite a selection available…

Maybe correct? Though my cable modem gobbles down some 15W… Without even doing the Wifi… So, I bet this isn’t a universal truth, as a Mini-PC will comsume less and provide all kinds of extra services, networking, NAS…

You should have all kinds of options on Lemmy… You can edit a post and change it to whatever you like. Or delete it and optionally post a new one…

Just delete the post if it’s a mess-up.

Livekit can be used to build voice assistants. But it’s more a framework to build an agent yourself, not a ready-made solution.

And there’s another custom component, integrating all servers with an OpenAI-compatible API endpoint: https://github.com/jekalmin/extended_openai_conversation

Well my reason was, it’s too close to botspam. And just re-posts (sometimes of re-posts). I rather have genuine conversation on an internet platform.
Most of it will be low engagement. I’ll see a question, and take 10mins out of my day to anwer it, just to find out I wasted that time, because OP never had that question. And the real OP never sees my answer. Cm0002 improved, though. They cut down on forwarding questions, and they’re transparent it’s just forwarded content, these days. But ultimately, it’s the same thing with other content. I’ll see a post about RISC-V and interact. But it’s just a waste, because it’s fabricated and I’ll never see any responses.

I think it’s particularly bad in niche topics. The few people actually wanting to discuss RISC-V (just an example) are drowned in noise news-posts by someone who isn’t even interested in discussing topic, they just push a political agenda there. So it kinda displaces the little genuine conversation we have.

And after wasting some time here and there by commenting into the void, I decided to suppress those posts and use my time to interact with actual people who have notifications turned on, read my stuff, teach me something or who have a genuine question in need of some advice.

I guess this is somehow related to the question whether we (just) want many posts here. Or have good conversation in the comments. To me it seems the former doesn’t really lead to the latter. Some techniques are even detrimental to that cause. And I think this is one of those cases… At least it kills my engagement. I agree on the broad idea, though. I’ve long moved away from lemmy.ml communities. I just wish we had a bit more original content here, and not just 80% re-posts of what other people posted on Reddit, what they posted on lemmy.ml…