palsecam

> You have an image on your error page, which some crappy bots will download over and over again.

Most bots won’t download subresources (almost none of them do, actually). The HTML page itself is lean (475 bytes); the image is an Easter egg for humans ;-) Moreover, I use a caching CDN (Cloudflare).

  # Nothing to hack around here, I’m just a teapot:
  location ~* \.(?:php|aspx?|jsp|dll|sql|bak)$ { 
      return 418; 
  }
  error_page 418 /418.html;

Live example: https://FreeSolitaire.win/wp-login.php (NB: /wp-login.php is WordPress login URL, and it’s commonly blindly requested by bots searching for weak WordPress installs.)

Btw, you can also apply an XSLT sheet to an XML document using standard JavaScript: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/XSLTProcess...

FTR, there’s also XSLTProcessor (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/XSLTProcess...) available from Javascript in the browser. I use that on my homepage, to fetch and transform-to-HTML said Atom feed, then embed it:

  const atom = new XMLHttpRequest, xslt = new XMLHttpRequest;
  atom.open("GET", "feed.xml"); xslt.open("GET", "atom2html.xsl");
  atom.onload = xslt.onload = function() {
    if (atom.readyState !== 4 || xslt.readyState !== 4) return;
    const proc = new XSLTProcessor;
    proc.importStylesheet(xslt.responseXML);
    const frag = proc.transformToFragment(atom.responseXML, document);
    document.getElementById("feed").appendChild(frag.querySelector("[role='feed']"));
  };
  atom.send(); xslt.send();

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathryn_Farmer

We have a simple proposal: all talking AIs and robots should use a ring modulator. In the mid-twentieth century, before it was easy to create actual robotic-sounding speech synthetically, ring modulators were used to make actors’ voices sound robotic. Over the last few decades, we have become accustomed to robotic voices, simply because text-to-speech systems were good enough to produce intelligible speech that was not human-like in its sound. Now we can use that same technology to make robotic speech that is indistinguishable from human sound robotic again. — https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/02/ais-and-robot...

For ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip (I didn’t get it at first)

The Operation Paperclip was a secret United States intelligence program in which more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians were taken from former Nazi Germany to the US for government employment after the end of World War II in Europe, between 1945 and 1959; several were confirmed to be former members of the Nazi Party, including the SS or the SA.

Nevertheless, he has a point when he mentions Apple and CSAM (Child Sexual Abuse Material). Apple has shown that using homomorphic encryption could be 1) actually practical, and 2) helpful on such matters. Cf. https://www.apple.com/child-safety/pdf/CSAM_Detection_Techni... & https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/homomorphic-encry... & https://repositorio.fgv.br/items/047aca31-ccdc-45bd-a7d3-6c0....

According to him, mathematical teaching has become overly abstract, leading to students being disgusted by maths, seeing it as disconnected from reality. Some of these students then end up being ministers… Original quote:

« Comme de telles mathématiques scolastiques, séparées de la physique, ne sont adaptées ni à l’enseignement, ni à aucune application éventuelle à d’autres sciences, les mathématiciens se sont fait haïr des lycéens (dont certains ensuite sont devenus ministres) et des utilisateurs. »