Usually it’s this, but sometimes the Recaptcha doesn’t even load (looks like an IP ban). I just submit the form, and then get an error message saying I must complete a Recaptcha, but there’s no evidence in the page of any Recaptcha to fill out.

I’m on a residential ISP. I’ve checked every IP address reputation system I can find, and see no problems (except from “Clean Talk”, but they’re so small that I doubt Google uses them).

Also, I hate knowing that I’m doing unpaid labor to help train an AI that will make the world a worse place.

I can’t make an account, because I can’t complete a Recaptcha. Google Recaptcha is used on every ubuntu.com signin page. (This means I also can’t submit bug reports.)

I have self hosted my email since 2006. I gave up on self hosting outgoing mail in 2021, but I still keep the server up for incoming mail, and still set up throwaway accounts on there.

The hard part of hosting email is getting Google and Microsoft to accept outgoing mail. Tons of businesses that do not have visibly outlook .com or gmail .com addresses are still hosted by those servers.

I had SPF, DKIM, and a static datacenter IP address with no reputation problems. I still couldn’t get through to Microsoft, not even in people’s junk mail directory, until they manually whitelisted my address. Microsoft didn’t allow them to whitelist a whole domain. Google was a little easier, but they added new demands monthly.

In 2025, I can’t get reliable delivery to gmail .com addresses even sending from a hotmail .com address in the outlook .com web interface.

Yeah, true, but that’s mostly fixed costs, and has a pretty low incremental cost for each video delivered. The fixed costs we have to pay regardless.

Electrical engineer here. There is almost no difference.

The cost of streaming video from a server to your computer is pretty small, basically just transferring the bytes from a hard drive to a network card. This happens in a datacenter on a big server designed to be efficient at it, and serve a ton of people at once. Your own electricity consumption on your viewing device is likely much higher than that. You can calculate your electricity consumption using a Kill-A-Watt or similar device, but here are some averages of measurements I’ve made on my devices:

• PC with 27" LCD monitor: 150W
• 50" TV: 300W
• Laptop with internal 14" screen: 40W
• Phone with 5" screen: 10W roughly, but it’s complicated
• Phone with screen off, speaker only: 2W (guessing here)
• Handheld FM radio: less than 1W

If you look at your computer’s CPU usage while watching video, it’s mostly idle. So most of the power consumption is the screen’s backlight.

Assuming worst-case coal power, releasing 0.4kg of carbon per kWh, and a large TV, and let’s say 10% overhead for the server’s energy cost, that’s 0.13kg of carbon per hour. So don’t worry about it.

I got GOG Galaxy working in Steam, through Proton, as an “Add a non-Steam Game”. I’ll have to try Heroic Launcher.

Doesn’t it freeze there? It’s in northern Illinois.

Could we put Einstein’s bones in a centrifuge, and run at 200km/h?

Not sure how much you’re paying for your VPN, but a virtual private server can be had for about $5 per month. You’ll get a real IPv4 address just for you, so you won’t have to use non-standard port numbers. (You can also use the VPS as a self-hosted VPN or proxy.)

$5 per month doesn’t get you much processing power, but it gets you plenty of bandwidth. You could self-host your server on your home computer, and reverse-proxy through your NAT using the VPS.

The point of the blockchain is to achieve distributed consensus of what’s in the database. That way, one entity can’t unilaterally change what the database says.

If you have a public non-profit institution maintaining the database, obligated to serve all legal customers, with serious consequences for tampering with it, you can get pretty much everything blockchain can do, for a billionth of the computing power.

But with that system, you would lose these features:

• partially-anonymous participants
• service of all customers, even illegal ones
• immunity to court orders

I did not know about soft turn signals until I saw this post.

I question why this feature exists. Drivers should be aiming to signal 10 seconds ahead. When making a lane change or turn, you should be keeping your signal on until the maneuver is completed. I can’t think of a circumstance where 3 blinks is enough. 1 blink looks more like a mistaken signal.

Even if Discord wasn’t doing it, public Discord guilds are known to be scraped by a number of different bots. Previously, it was for spies, cops, and private investigators who wanted to search for messages by username. If those bots could do it before, AI bots will be doing it aggressively today.

Cloudflare has IP banned me before for no reason (no proxy, no VPN, residential ISP with no bot traffic). They’ve switched their captcha system a few times, and some years it’s easy, some years it’s impossible.

killall -u 1001

I think top has a way to do it interactively.

No video game’s story has ever made me cry. But I’ve cried a little from games that I loved, but played to death, getting every achievement and realizing there was absolutely nothing more to experience.

In the Odyssey DLC, there is a scenario where you start with a ship.

Raid strength is proportional to your wealth, as shown in the history tab. You can reduce raid strength by donating wealth (using caravans or drop pods) to potential allies.

How do you add a custom service to systemd? Let’s say /usr/local/sbin/foobar . I can never seem to get it to work, but can do it easily in sysvinit.

What others say is true. Most Linux installers have an option to overwrite data.

If you want to destroy data independently, Darik’s Boot and Nuke used to be good, though it seems discontinued now. ShredOS looks like a modern alternative.

Unfortunately, I think most platforms for novels allow AI, so they end up full of AI trash.

Instead of using a platform, try looking up authors you’ve read before and liked. Then see where they publish. Or try and find a fandom for the genre you like, and ask humans for recommendations