Unlike this year when LLMs are more of a huge scam.

You can't really and make a profit. You pay more in electricity than you get in crypto.

...unless someone else is (unknowingly) paying for the electricity.

(Of course, when the price of crypto takes an upturn, sometimes it might get profitable again. And I'd imagine there are people mining it even when the price is low banking on the idea that it'll spike again and they can sell it.)

No joke. I'm ashamed to say I have had to endure Weblogic in the past. God was that time a massive clusterfuck.

The company I worked for decided to use two particular separate products (frameworks, specifically; ATG and Endeca, even more specifically) to use in tandem in a rewrite of the company's main e-commerce application. Between when we signed on the dotted line and when we actually started implementing things, Oracle acquired the companies behind both products in question.

The company should have cut their losses, run away screaming, and started evaluating other options. That's not what happened. Instead, they doubed-down and also adopted several other Oracle products (Weblogic and Oracle Linux on (shudder) Exalogic servers) because that's, of course, what Oracle recommended to use with the two products in question. The company also contracted with Oracle-licensed "service integration" companies that made everything somehow even worse.

And the e-commerce site rewrite absolutely crashed and burned in the most gloriously painful way possible. They ended up throwing away tens of millions of dollars and multiple years on it.

When the e-commerce site rewrite did happen, it was many years later and used basically only FOSS technologies. I guess at least they learned their lesson. Until the upper management turns over again.

The sooner the crypto bubble bursts, the fewer victims there will be of fraud like this.

So Wario, then? Maybe that makes Android Waluigi.

In this thread: Cryptobros downvoting every realistic take on cryptocurrency for being "bearish" and "FUD".

Yeah, I do know about that. (You're referring to the PPA repo thing, yeah?) But there are a couple of reasons why that isn't a workable solution specifically for me specifically.

• The major reason is that I only use Ubuntu on my work machine and my employer's compliance department won't really answer questions about whether it's allowed to add extra repositories or install things not from the official Ubuntu repositories on company-owned hardware. (And they're always really threatening and assholeish about breaking the rules they won't elaborate on, so my best option is kindof just to interpret the rules as strictly as I can and follow that. Or else flout the rules and dare them to fire me. Heh...) Raising questions like that is always a whole thing.
• "firefox" from the PPA repo and "firefox" from Snap have the same package name which makes things awkward dealing with Apt. (Unless you use "firefox-esr" from the PPA repo, which would otherwise be an acceptable workaround if that was the only issue.)

So I just use Chrome on my work machine. I dislike Chrome more than Firefox for many reasons, but I at least mitigate some of the issues with Chrome by specifically not doing anything personal on my work machine. I don't really care if Chrome invades my employer's privacy. Especially when my employer doesn't give me a choice in browsers. If anything comes of it, it's their own damned fault.

Yeah, why does Ubuntu keep snap?

Like, WTF is the deal with not having any official way to install Firefox other than snap? Firefox.

Do they play a part in commercial DDOS protection?

Absolutely! As well as mitigating other types of threats. "Web Application Firewalls" (don't be fooled, they're not like regular firewalls really) are a type of transparent web proxy that watch requests for anything that "looks like" a SQL injection or XSS payload and block those requests if necessary. Transparent web proxies may also do things like caching or even "honeypot" functionality that may shunt likely bot traffic to a fake version of the website to prevent scraping of real site content.

Ooo. This is a good one.

A computer can have more than one network interface, right? (Like, you can be plugged into ethernet at home but also connected to the WIFI of the coffee shop across the street.)

A VPN gives you a whole new network device ("virtual ethernet card" if you will) that works as if that card was connected to some LAN somewhere else. Typically, you'd forward "all" of your computer's/smartphone's/etc traffic through the VPN so that your computer "thinks it's on that remote LAN" rather than on your home WIFI or whatever.

Proxies... well the term can mean a few different things in different contexts, really. But generally you're not forwarding "all" traffic through them, just HTTP traffic (and usually only a subset of all HTTP traffic) or just traffic that is specifically told to be forwarded through them.

An opaque web proxy is one that you can point your browser (or other HTTP interface) to. It won't handle protocols other than HTTP. And when you want to use an opaque web proxy, your HTTP client has to know how to do that. (Whereas with VPN's, it's your operating system, not your individual applications, that need to know how to forward through it.)

A transparent web proxy can be something you (and your apps and OS) don't know you're even using. When you point your browser or app to a Lemmy instance, it's almost certain that the domain is pointed not at an application server that actually runs the Lemmy code, but rather at a transparent web proxy that does stuff on the instance-owner's end like preventing spamming or whatever. This type of proxy is sometimes called a "reverse web proxy" and can also only work with HTTP.

A SOCKS proxy, like an opaque web proxy, requires applications to know how to use it. (Ok, technically that's not 100% true. It's possible in some cases to have a transparent proxy of some sort forward through a SOCKS proxy in a way that the application doesn't know SOCKS is involved. There are also some cool OS-level hacks that can force an app to go through a SOCKS proxy without the app knowing anything about SOCKS. But if you're doing those things, you're a hacker.) And with a SOCKS proxy, your computer doesn't "think" it's connected to a whole different LAN. Individual applications know that they're forwarding through SOCKS. SOCKS supports more protocols than just HTTP. Probably all TCP-based protocols, but I don't think it has any support for UDP. So you won't be torrenting through SOCKS.

That's all I can think to say at the moment. There are special-purpose proxies for things like security auditing (like Burp Suite, for instance.) But I'm guessing that's not the sort of thing you're asking about.

I cannot think of any other methods

Exactly. What you're describing isn't "AI." It's "magic." And "AI" can't do what OP wants either.

No "AI" solution we have any reason to expect we'll be able to create in anything approaching the foreseeable future is going to be able to do anything remotely like this without ridiculous amounts of false positives and/or false negatives.

By false positives in this case, I mean things like not coming back from the cool little slideshows until a minute past the end of the commercial break or obscuring important details of the show having falsely "concluded" that it's a logo or some such.

And I would have assumed "without a lot of false positives" would have gone without saying. If OP is comfortable with lots of non-ad content blocked/obscured along with the ads, then I've got a 100% guaranteed zero-false-negatives solution that'll fit OP's requirements without involving a speck of "AI" anywhere that OP can implement right now: turn the TV off.

A pet pieve of mine is people randomly sticking the term "AI" into a description of some particular tech solution.

You want ad blocking. (Which is based.) But you don't want "AI". If this can be done in a way that doesn't qualify as "AI", that would satisfy you, yes?

And using the term "AI" that way makes it clear you haven't really thought through what you really even want in that feature. (Not that there's anything particularly wrong with that, especially in a showerthoughts community, but it's still kindof a "slaps me in the face" kind of thing.)

And the term "AI" is so imprecise anyway.

And particular kinds of "AI" are such a bubble right now. And that's why everybody is sticking the word "AI" into random contexts for no fucking reason. But it's also just a gimmick at best and a huge scam at worst.

And "AI" is inevitably bad about false positives and such.

I'd really rather see the word "magic" than "AI" in this context. Because at least that admits that this is an idle wish and not something you think actual real-world adult humans should be seeking venture capital to attempt.

I'm sorry for taking this out on you specifically. You're definitely not the first person I've seen do this.