Ok are you riding with two huge boxes containing all your work on an electric unicycle and I guess the hi-vis top means you're headed into traffic and the box-cords seem to be balancing at the halfway point of the boxes and this is too much anxiety for me. But hey, glad you optimized for minimalism on the PCB ♡
As soon as the thumbs-up started rotating and the severed wrist was revealed, it became apparent: I had never wondered where the rest of the thumbs-up person was before. But more chillingly: A thumbs-up from a person off-screen is fine, a disembodied hand wishing me apparent good-will? Not so good. It's a corpse-part!
Oh! And if one felt like solving the puzzle, it might lead to that person being mis-identified as being a bot. Which would be a perverse incentive to avoid wrecking the trap.
I'm suggesting that one should not be able to obviously detect that they're being challenged.
Eg I could respond in Pig Latin to you right now because I can see that's what you're asking, but if that particular request were masked or hidden or behind a puzzle, and you received a Pig Latin response well, maybe it's a bot (or a capture the flag sort of a person)
This whole thing was more of a shower-thought. But the trap I left behind was a link hidden in a full-stop in a deliberately acquiescent comment.
The link went to an imgur image. The image consisted of a bunch of numbers. The numbers were a simple off-by-n alphabet cipher (eg a=8, b=9...) which when decrypted, spelled out a message to the AI. Oh, and also the image looks very dark, a human might not even see the numbers.
This is all ridiculous. But I am wondering about other approaches to see if I can get a bot to bite and reveal itself.
ps: the message once decrypted, suggests that the commenter is incorrect about the thread. I am hoping this would give the bot the necessary pushback it craves to continue the conversation aggressively.
A local neighbourhood cake-stall marketplace. Got a great recipe and some time to bake? Put a picture of your sweet treat up, and get strangers knocking on your front door. You get cash-in-hand, delicious reviews and get to share your family recipes with your local community. No need for shopify, websites, and middle-men. Not sure what to call it, maybe something like onlynonnas.com ?
Did you take a look at one of the chat-based queuing platforms, something like https://dibsonstuff.com people seem to use it for taking turns with servers, but it sounds a bit like it might work for your use-case too.
Jotted down my backup process for home. Spoiler: it's a bunch of SSDs sitting on top of a Raspberry Pi. But there's a few fun things in there too: raid, encryption, cron, make, rsync, ssh, Home Assistant and a tiny loaner dog. Enjoy.
Just on your first suggestion, this also means that if a person or process can drop a file (unknown to you) into your ~/bin/ then they can wreak havoc. Eg they can override `sudo` to capture your password, or override `rm` to send your files somewhere interesting, and so on.
Btw on the second suggestion, I think there's a command named `command` that can help with that sort of thing, avoids recursive pitfalls.
I used to self-host email, it was mostly all initial setup and then it just worked for years. Eventually I got a bit wary about the security side of an internet-accessible box and decided to move the whole thing over to AWS SES. Wrote it up here:
Good question. So one change I made last year was to cap the number of queues the free account could utilize. It's sort of hard to know for certain if that was what moved the needle though.
There has been a suggestion that maybe the free plan could just be a time-limited trial instead.
But it feels like there is some risk associated with that - as often a customer will use the free plan for (eg) six months, before hitting the limits and becoming a paid account.
But my takeaway was more like "Give yourself permission to be bad"
Felt good to be reminded that if you want to make interesting things, it's ok to flail around. It'll feel foolish and that's completely ok, perhaps necessary.