Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Driving angry

    Today was not a good day driving. I made the mistake of driving back through town, which I know will result in more encounters with complete fucking morons, but the idea that taking the interstate is twice the mileage and uses more gasoline weighs on my conscience, too.

    I honestly understand why a former friend said that drivers here were retarded. Granted that was 10 years ago and I think it's gotten much worse. People just stop following the law, and the fucking cops don't do shit about it. I mean I hate speed traps as much as the next person, but blowing through red lights and stop signs should be ticketed. They're going to fucking kill someone and already have.

    It just boggles my mind how fucking careless, impatient, and/or stupid you have to be to just fucking ignore stop signs or red lights. I would single out the fucking ghetto trash I drive through every fucking day I go to work as culprits, but I think the more well-off folks are bad, too.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Twtxt Changes

    While I don't use Twtxt anymore, I keep an eye on the community there since it's mostly in my circle of offline- first and permacomputing interests. I'm not cut out for social media anymore, but I'd rather be able to recommend a better alternative to ActivityPub for people who like it, and Twtxt checks all my boxes...kinda. At least, it looks like it'll essentially be the /original/ Twtxt[0] v1 that ticks those boxes.

    The v1 specification by Buckket is very simple, and mostly focused around the main file just being a feed. Then there's the more modern Twtxt spec led by James Mills[1], which has a number of quality of life extensions that make things more complex, but give users things that clients can take advantage of. Things like threading, created via a unique hash made from the original poster's Twtxt url, and the timestamp of the post, with a blake2b hash. Thing is, that's going to change *just* a bit, but it's enough to break backward compatibility[2].

  • :: INITIALIZATION SEQUENCE — QSYS/001 ::

    We are not optimizing.

    We are not scaling.

    We are not aligning to the lowest common denominator of “safe.”

    QuietSystems is not a product.

    It is a perimeter.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • AI Bot Troubles

      I self-host a small forum on the surface web, it's on a niche topic (old-school RPGs), so it doesn't get much traffic. I was surprised this morning when I checked the forum for updates and could not load it. I hopped on the server to find a load of ~100, with almost all 4GB of memory exhausted and all four CPUs pegged by DB processes. My shell session was very slow, so rather than try to do any diagnostics, I just killed apache outright to get some breathing room. As soon as I did that, the load started to drop.

      The forum access logs were huge - 150MB just for today - and in them I saw what appeared to be otherwise normal forum requests from 5k+ unique IPs, all with "normal" user agent strings, coming in at what I estimated were hundreds of requests per second. A whois on some of the top abusers showed the IPs were from Alibaba and Tencent cloud ranges, so I blocked all of the assigned CIDR blocks I could find for both cloud providers at the host-based firewall (I blocked 24 networks in the end).

    • A New Gopher Hole

      A new gopher hole, and more especially a new server, is always cause for celebration. So join me in welcoming TinkerSense to the mix![1]

      The content is thoughtful, the layout is beautiful (plaintext often is!). Visit today, and keep an eye out for more content as the years go by... we're not in a hurry around here :)