Symbiote (u/Symbiote)

Symbiote commented on UK's largest battery storage facility at Tilbury substation nationalgrid.com/national... · Posted by u/zeristor

tialaramex · 14 hours ago

Yup, this happens for any technology with journalists. A noob journo will be absolutely clear that it's crucial they interviewed Jim Smith and not Jane Smith even if it so happens that gender was not at all important to the story, like maybe Smith witnessed a massive lightning bolt destroying the bandstand.

But they will muddle bits and bytes, nanograms and milligrams, volts and amps and they barely even seem to notice that they did it.

Symbiote · 11 hours ago

Sometimes they insist on being incorrect.

The Guardian refuses to write the degree symbol for temperatures, for example, and have even put this error into their style guide.

https://www.theguardian.com/guardian-style-guide-c

Symbiote commented on Running our Docker registry on-prem with Harbor dev.37signals.com/running... · Posted by u/airblade

nchmy · a day ago

> the marginal cost of 2, 4 or 8 cores and 4, 8 or 16GB RAM isn't much when we buy our own hardware

this is the crux of it all. RENTING bare metal (eg from hetzner) is 10x cheaper than aws ec2. So, I can only imagine how much cheaper it is when you buy the hardware directly.

Symbiote · 21 hours ago

At a very rough estimate with Hetzner's calculator, which doesn't have exactly the systems I most recently bought, our servers cost about 18 months of renting the closest Hetzner dedicated server.

Add to that rackspace costs, staff time doing installation (or cost of remote hands etc). I don't have our figures for rackspace costs, but staff time is fairly low — an hour or two when the server is purchased and later thrown out, and maybe the same to replace a HDD at some point in the 5-8 years we keep it.

Also add the time to get competing quotes from Dell, HP etc and decide on the configuration, but then a similar process is needed to choose from Hetzner vs their competitors.

Symbiote commented on When the sun will literally set on what's left of the British Empire oikofuge.com/sun-sets-on-... · Posted by u/bediger4000

ozim · 2 days ago

Dude lives in Buckingham Palace In UK … that’s kind of a dead giveaway :)

Symbiote · a day ago

He actually lives in Clarence House (when in London), Buckingham Palace is currently only used for official business, parties etc.

Arguably, Buckingham Palace should be turned into a museum (like several other former royal residences, e.g. Tower of London, Kew Palace).

Symbiote commented on Running our Docker registry on-prem with Harbor dev.37signals.com/running... · Posted by u/airblade

fastest963 · 2 days ago

Why does the Harbor VM need 32 cores and 64GB of RAM? Especially if it's only serving 32,000 pulls over 2 months.

Symbiote · 2 days ago

For what it's worth, I have an on-prem Nexus server with a Docker repository. It has 8 cores and 16GB RAM. It has 82000 hits/day in the webserver log, though 99.9% of them transfer only a few kB, so I assume it's a metadata check and the client already has the correct version.

The same Nexus is also hosting our Maven and NodeJS repositories. That has 1,800,000 hits per day, although all but 120,000 of them return HTTP 404. (I think one of our clients has misconfigured their build server to use our Maven repository as a mirror of Maven Central, but as it's just an AWS IP I don't know who it is.)

I'm sure it's overprovisioned, but the marginal cost of 2, 4 or 8 cores and 4, 8 or 16GB RAM isn't much when we buy our own hardware.

Symbiote commented on The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch positiveblue.substack.com... · Posted by u/positiveblue

davepeck · 3 days ago

Okay. Which, specifically, are the "AI scum" companies you're speaking of?

There are plenty of non-AI companies that also use dubiously sourced IPs and hide behind fake User-Agents.

Symbiote · 3 days ago

I don't know which companies, of course. They hide their identity by using a botnet.

This traffic is new, and started around when many AI startups started.

I see traffic from new search engines and other crawlers, but it generally respects robots.txt and identifies itself, or else comes from a small pool of IP addresses.

Symbiote commented on The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch positiveblue.substack.com... · Posted by u/positiveblue

immibis · 3 days ago

There's actually not much evidence of this, since the attack traffic is anonymous.

Symbiote · 3 days ago

HN people working in these AI companies have commented to say they do this, and the timing correlates with the rise of AI companies/funding.

I haven't tried to find it in my own logs, but others have said blocking an identifiable AI bot soon led to the same pattern of requests continuing through a botnet.

Symbiote commented on Show HN: Hacker News em dash user leaderboard pre-ChatGPT gally.net/miscellaneous/h... · Posted by u/tkgally

globular-toast · 3 days ago

Not in ASCII. My definition of plain text is roughly "the characters I have on my keyboard". Unicode is like a superset of all possible plain texts. Useful, but I really don't like my own files containing characters I can't (easily) type. If I regularly typed in another language I would acquire a keyboard for that language. I'm not even convinced typographical symbols like various dash types even belong in Unicode at all to be honest. It seems like you have to draw a very arbitrary line somewhere.

Symbiote · 3 days ago

Drawing the line at "OK-ish for American English" is far too restrictive.

You can't write CO₂ or m², use a fraction like ½, claim © or mention a price in Euros or Pounds Sterling.

You can't even write major American place names (San José, Oʻahu).

Symbiote commented on Show HN: Hacker News em dash user leaderboard pre-ChatGPT gally.net/miscellaneous/h... · Posted by u/tkgally

LeoPanthera · 3 days ago

I took a peak at zmgsabst's comments, but they use them with spaces around the dash — like this.

ChatGPT always uses them without spaces—like this.

Symbiote · 3 days ago

Changing the filter to

  text LIKE '%—%' AND text NOT LIKE '% —%' AND text NOT LIKE '%— %'

puts westoncb in the lead, followed by mucholove, trebbble, _zzaw and lexcorvus.

Symbiote commented on Show HN: Hacker News em dash user leaderboard pre-ChatGPT gally.net/miscellaneous/h... · Posted by u/tkgally

Symbiote · 3 days ago

Using the HN public dataset in Google BigQuery [0], which I think fits easily in the amount of free queries allowed:

  SELECT 
    EXTRACT(YEAR FROM timestamp) AS year, 
    SUM(CASE WHEN text LIKE '%—%' THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) AS withDash, 
    COUNT(*) AS total, 
    SUM(CASE WHEN text LIKE '%—%' THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) / COUNT(*) AS fraction
  FROM `bigquery-public-data.hacker_news.full` 
    WHERE type = 'comment' 
  GROUP BY year 
  ORDER BY year;

  year with—   total  frac
  2006     0      12 0.000
  2007    13   70858 0.000
  2008   461  247922 0.001
  2009  1497  491034 0.003
  2010  3835  842438 0.005
  2011  4719 1044913 0.005
  2012  5648 1246782 0.005
  2013  7881 1665185 0.005
  2014  8400 1510814 0.006
  2015  9967 1642912 0.006
  2016 12081 2093612 0.006
  2017 14530 2361709 0.006
  2018 19246 2384086 0.008
  2019 23662 2755063 0.009
  2020 27316 3243173 0.008
  2021 32863 3765921 0.009
  2022 34657 4062159 0.009
  2023 36611 4221940 0.009
  2024 32543 3339861 0.010
  2025 30608 2231919 0.014

So there's definitely been an increase.

Querying for the users who use "—" most as a proportion of all their comments:

  SELECT
    `by`,
    SUM(CASE WHEN text LIKE '%—%' THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) / COUNT(*) AS fraction,
    COUNT(*) AS total,
    MIN(timestamp) AS minTime,
    MAX(timestamp) AS maxTime
  FROM `bigquery-public-data.hacker_news.full` 
  WHERE 
    type = 'comment' AND 
    timestamp < '2022-11-30' 
  GROUP BY `by`
  HAVING COUNT(*) > 100
  ORDER BY fraction DESC
  LIMIT 250;

zmgsabst uses them the most [1], westoncb [2] is an older account that uses them fourth-most.

[0] https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/product/y-combi...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=zmgsabst

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=westoncb

Symbiote commented on Show HN: Hacker News em dash user leaderboard pre-ChatGPT gally.net/miscellaneous/h... · Posted by u/tkgally

9dev · 3 days ago

…which is the appropriate character for ranges, i.e., page 1–2.

I find it a bit sad that using proper typography is now frowned upon, but it seems that ship has sailed.

Symbiote · 3 days ago

From the discussion with our head of communications (whose pedantry I approve of) US usage avoids spaces—like this—and should use an em-dash.

But British usage – instead – uses spaces, so an en-dash or an em-dash is acceptable.