This nobody has a lot of opinions 👴

You underestimate the murderous-ness of chickens.

It’s not sad. Let the man have his fun! He may have been saving for decades.

The meme is so nerdy I love it.

Unfortunately there is significant overlap between plain-text-password-servers and servers that can’t be bothered to use antivirus. Also, the string may not work if it’s not at the start of the file. AV often doesn’t process the whole file for efficiency purposes.

It is effective at discouraging bots when looking at real world services today, but indeed you have found the primary downside. It does impose costs on users even if the costs are disproportionately placed on bots.

The best part is there’s already a default error handler! If the program dies, you know there was an error.

Monkey brain touch naked booty button. I think that’s the strat.

I think the idea is to have a small government of one dictator who tells everyone else what to do.

Oh that was a nightmare. And you didn’t even know if the new ones you were getting were actually better.

It saves no energy. In fact, it costs more energy at first, but the hope is that bots will turn their attention to something that isn’t so expensive as hitting your servers. The main goal is to get your service online so that you’re not burning all your own resources on fake users.

Your understanding is consistent with mine. It spends a small amount of effort (per user) that makes scaling too expensive (per bot-farm-entity). It also uses an adjustable difficulty that can vary depending on how sus a request appears to be.

It’s not a perfect solution by any means. It doesn’t protect user data. It doesn’t do anything to help with the energy problem. It merely makes it possible for someone to run their server without getting taken offline by automated systems.

It works by asking your system for a small computation before handling the request. It’s not too intrusive for normal users, but it drives up the costs for bot farms.

I’m old enough to remember the hard drive shortages.

They literally don’t care if people buy them or not. Overwhelmingly profit is in the server and enterprise areas now.

Some people will still buy at those high prices and they are more than happy to stick with that small slice.

No wonder Nvidia is the world’s most valuable company.

We absolutely have a plutocracy, not a democracy. We live in a system of government where money is the same as speech, votes, and power. Not human beings. The money votes and the money always wins. Money is represented above all else.

Capitalism easily leads to this exact situation. Some people believe that it’s the inevitable result that capital erodes regulation, but I don’t think it’s necessarily so. It depends on whether the political system remains strong enough to represent the public interest instead of the concentrated interests of wealth. When democratic institutions are healthy, regulation can evolve alongside capital to preserve fairness and competition. It’s our responsibility as voters to preserve it. But, when they weaken or become captured, capitalism naturally tilts toward monopolies and self-reinforcing power, which is the situations that we have today. It’s very difficult to come back from that, so there’s a massive and scary temptation to throw out the idea entirely and give communism a try.

I’m a pessimist. I think voters are too stupid and lazy to fix this problem until they are literally starving. I’m also a believe in that words should have meaning. Is capitalism the reason America is sick? Not exactly. It’s a vulnerable system that like everything else has rotted to the core when you don’t take care of your country.

Can the universe not also approximate? Why must it be an exact result whenever a rule is applied?

I feel our core problem today is concentration of wealth and power. I think many layman calls this concentration and abuse capitalism in the same way that many people call any kind of social service communism.

Now, I personally believe that this is the end result of capitalism due to regulatory capture, and that capitalism is inherently unstable without a resilient regulatory framework to keep the system working. Still, I’m not sure that the term capitalism is perfectly fit for our situation today. I like the concept of a free market, but we don’t have a free market. We have a market where the rules are set by the big players to their maximum advantage.

Extreme and rapidly accelerating wealth inequality will be the death of us if climate change doesn’t kill us first.