I confess, AC, I don't even know who voted their comment up.

I did note the 'increasingly' bit in the summary. That's because, as you know, this isn't new. Malicious actors have been doing this for a long time. They use these IPs for things like spamming, DDoS attacks, hiding traditional hacking at scale, and things like that.

They're just doing this more often because finding reliable hosts to provide them with compromised addresses. Then again, those hosts were already using hacked residential IP addresses.

And, yes, it's more difficult these days. I've been trying to find a reputable company (at a reasonable price) to just do a simple DDoS for me.

No, not for anything illegal. I just want to test some of my own infrastructure. It has gone through a DDoS attack a couple of times and has been just fine. But, those were short-lived (under an hour) and not very impressive as far as the numbers go. I'd like to find the breaking point so that I can work on that.

I've been doing some retro-computing stuff. It hasn't reached the point of 'serious hobby'. I just already had some old stuff and wanted to experience some stuff Id' missed back in the day. Like, I never owned an Amiga.

But, I think it might be interesting to get an SGI to play with. I'd like to see what it'll run today but, and this is something some folks overlook, it'll still do the tasks it was designed to do in the era it was meant to do so.

That or it seems like a good case to fit a modern computer.

You were quite fortunate, I should think, to have used one of those SGI workstations at the time. Though, it must have made your home computer seem pretty slow.

Then again, if that was your home computer, you were doing quite well.

You're right. Those are interesting.

For reasons, namely that they helped sponsor my research in grad school by providing hardware, we had a lot of DEC gear back then.

Then, there was the writing on the wall and you could see the demise of DEC coming, so we had a lot of Sun gear after that. At the time, depending on your position in the company, you could use a Unix or Windows. Even if you chose Windows, you could install X (X11) to access the server in a graphical way.

We did have people with beefy workstations but none of those were SGI. My company modeled traffic which was really only graphically heavy when we needed to present something to a client. Then, we'd have large scale simulations that would let you zoom into a very narrow focus. This was useful to show things like our predictions that depended on the traffic decisions they made.

I did employ traffic engineers but that was a service add-on and for in-house expertise. We mainly modeled outcomes, eventually even modeling pedestrian traffic and doing things like optimizing fleet traffic. (For example, watch a UPS truck carefully as it moves through its daily deliveries. One of the first things you'll notice is that they'll go out of their way to avoid taking a left into traffic - especially in congested areaas.)

Hmm... I'm rambling mindlessly, at this point.

But, we did sometimes need to render some pretty heavy graphics - even animated graphics with a great degree of fidelity.

Something like SGI workstations would have been great for that. We rendered the graphics on 'big iron' for the longest time.

I heard Trump issued an executive order mandating that all countries holding US companies accountable to follow their laws will get a 100% tariff raise and will be excluded from any military support.

Good luck with that shit however. One thing thats been *very* clear in polling is that voters will not tolerate governments selling out to the americans for stupid shit like this. We just had the LNP absolutely thrashed by Labotr for boasting that it would do trumpy shit like DOGE and would "work very closely" with the US. Most of the country actually wants us to pull out of AUKUS so we dont blow our entire budget on a handful of submarines we wont see for another 30 years.

Medieval murder maps is a great little timewaster site to just read various accounts of , well, medieval murders.

An interesting recurring theme seems to be someone does a murder, then flees to the church for sanctuary, which the priest is duty bound to provide, and which seemingly the sherifs have no power to overrule. Then after some period, often weels, flees and is never found again.

Its odd that the police of the time seemed so capable of "solving" a murder but absolutely useless at finding the murderer once they've done the priest-and-split routine.

Would have been an interesting time to live. Probably not a fun life though.

The problem with PHP is that its had two eras of developers and both are kinda awful.

The first developer era (which I shamefully was a member of in the 1990s) where grossly incompetent, barely structured their code and filled their code with SQL injections , used magic globals and just made absolute horror shows. Thats the era that got PHP its bad rep. Mostly gone now. Wordpress however IS a relic of that era.

The second developer era overcompensated by basically going full java creating codebases with 20 level deep class heirachies, and all sorts of weird java patterns like dependency injection, inversion of control, delegates, blah blah blah, all that stuff that makes java "proper" but ends up leading to some very mystifying code that can be nightmarish to understand. Worse, it often deployed those methods in an attempt at replicating Ruby on Rails glory, creating mutants like Laravel that would take the bad features of ROR (like RORs awful ORM. Devs, if your going to steal an ORMs design, steal Djangos one, that thing is a minor miracle) but trying to implement them without the metacoding that makes Ruby fun and productive to with. Its just a mess. And even its "lightweight" web framework Laravel really does feel like a bloated enterprise thing now, and lets face it why would you do big cumbersome enterprise in PHP when Java and C# are RIGHT THERE.

PHP on its own isn't a bad language. Its got a lot of bad cruft in it, but its basic design largely is competent and featureful. But its ecosystem has turned it into a barely competent immitation of javaa and the worlds moved well beyond that in 2025.

You're missing the point. I didn't say "do nothing", I said UBI is not the solution. The litmus test for how correct I am is to ask yourself if you'd be satisfied living on exclusively UBI. I'd venture it's a safe bet to say that unless your income is $0, that's not an arrangement you'd be happy with. Most people want a lifestyle better than what basic government assistance can provide, so it's not a true fix for AI and automation rendering the majority of jobs obsolete.

And the "meritocracy" people claim this is in pursuit of more educational opportunities for American students without a molecule of irony.

Actually, during the period of enhanced unemployment benefits during Covid, we saw a bunch of business owners complaining that they'd have to offer better salaries in order to attract workers. It was one of the reasons many red states fought to end the enhanced benefits early, because people weren't willing to take jobs that paid less than sitting around doing nothing.

Taking the "U" out of UBI would actually fix most of its problems. If it was given only to the unemployed, the negative economic effects would be lessened, since everyone actually earning a living wouldn't be getting money that they technically don't need. You wouldn't have the "Neat, an extra $1,000/mo? I'm gonna get me a new Tesla!" problem, which ultimately results in higher prices as supply and demand find a new equilibrium. Since UBI pretty much only benefits the unemployed anyway (everyone else would see their UBI gobbled up by the free market), might as well just fix the existing unemployment system instead.

Of course, the elephant in the room with any system where you're expecting a substantial percentage of the population to live on a government stipend, is that those people are no longer able to participate in the upward mobility part of capitalism. In this regard, it's still just putting a dollar store band-aid over the wound caused by AI taking jobs, not an actual fix.

Yup. That's the one. I'm reasonably convinced (from pictures and Wikipedia) that was an SGI Octane.

I was impressed with the RAM that it had. At the time, there were still some servers that had less RAM and only expensive workstations had that much RAM.

One of the big contributing factors to Discord's popularity even with console gamers is so that you aren't risking your console's account for shit-talking another player. It really only makes sense to use a console's built-in chat feature if you know for sure you'll be able to watch your mouth. That becomes even more ironic with games such as the GTA series, where the NPCs are dropping f-bombs left and right, but if you tell another player "Go fuck your momma, you fucking cuntbag!" and they report you out of spite, you might end up with a nastygram and a suspension.

And that's how it is on the consoles that are ostensibly for adults, so it's no surprise at all Nintendo would behave in a similar manner with a console that's still largely geared towards the younger demographic.

Google is absolutely collecting your personal information.

They aren't really selling it, however. You can't go to Google and say, "Here's ten bucks. Let me see KGIII's information."

They're selling access to your metrics, however. You're profiled and assigned a market segment with pretty good accuracy. They know who you are, what your interests are, what your interests really are, all the pages you've gone to, etc.. (Royal you, not you specifically.)

The people paying Google are paying them to target people in X, Y, and Z categories for the purpose of promotion. They don't actually sell your personal information - at least not from what I can tell (and I have purchased ads before). They weren't very good ads. I wasn't even selling anything. I just wanted to see what buying ads did. (It did very little. My case should probably not be considered as data.)

I guess you could say that they sell access to a person's predicted behavior and not their actual information.

But, from behind the curtain, I didn't see any magic box to search for KGIII's data and then an option to buy said data. They sell that information in aggregate, seemingly keeping it pretty well protected. My own government has lost control of my data. Google appears to have not done so. It's kind of weird that way.

Yeah, it can be a pretty fun debate topic. I'm not sure that I'm willing to invest the energy into doing so, as there's no real benefit.

Even if we reached a point of agreement, or even enlightenment, there'd be little benefit. Few people are willing to change a firmly held belief, even when faced with conflicting information. It happens but we're rationalizing beings instead of rational beings.

That said, I think many people might (if properly coaxed) agree that we, from a view of pragmatism, should 'cull the herd'. The big difference will be who it is making those decisions. I'm not sure that I'd agree with that viewpoint when there are adequate resources. (We currently have adequate resources, they're just poorly distributed for so many complex reasons that can be summed up as 'we humans are kinda shitty'.)

In the long view, I'd not be even a wee bit surprised if we caused our own extinction. I also think it's hubris to believe that we're the evolutionary end-game and the true apex.

Man... I now kind of want to eat a bunch of mushrooms and then mull this one over for a bit.

You do know that you can buy insulin needles without a prescription, right?

If you're not mainlining your Tang, you're doing it wrong.

That sounds right. They worked for a very famous studio at the time, perhaps even a couple of them, doing things like CGI.

Said machine was a beast in its day. The specs and specifics have long been forgotten but I recall that performance levels were quite high. They worked on some pretty famous movies and were good enough that they did so via remote work even back then. He did have high speed internet to his home but I think it was just a T1 or maybe some ISDN line. I don't think he had a full T3 but he might have. It's not like he was paying for it out of his pocket. We're talking 25 years ago, or something like that. So, the details are quite fuzzy.

I've never been into video manipulation or creating graphics but he was quite skilled and worked on movies I'm sure you're familiar with. I guess it's not doxxing him to point out that he worked for Pixar for quite a while. So, whatever Pixar used might be what he was using. I haven't heard from him in decades. He would sometimes talk about making his nest egg and getting out. He may have done that.

Yeah, as I think about it, SGI sounds right to me. The case was blue-ish but I'm partially colorblind.