I'm looking for several minutes when I finally find a small container of dill, hidden behind a shelf mounted price tag. It's only ? of an ounce (9g) and it's how much? $20/oz (28g)? The only spice more expensive that that is safron. But the price of safron has always rivaled the price of gold, but dill?

Is there some dill shortage going on? Did I not get the memo?

Needless to say, I did not get the dill.

I already miss it.

I decided to check the online Oxford dictionary and did not find the word there. I then did some Internet searching and found that it was made up by William Boyd for his book Armadillo. The reason for defining the word ?zemblanity? as the opposite of ?serendipity? is worth reading in the linked article. Not only is it fitting, I found it amusing.

On the one hand, I don't want to participate in a DDoS attack. On the other hand, I don't like the idea of blocking an entire country. But the attacks just keep on coming. I could write a program that runs every n minutes, scans for excessive TCP connections in the SYN_RECV state, identify the ASN of the offending IP address and block it, retiring out older blocks to keep from overwhelming the firewall. It's just that it adds another cog on the server to keep greased, and the attacks aren't that distruptive on the server?they're just annoying.

Generally, the attacks towards any given Brazilian network would last for a few days then drop off entirely. I also suspect that most of the forged IP addresses are not in use. I attempted to ping a few and never received a reply (although it could be that ping packets were being blocked on the Brazilian side, I was able to ping a few IP addresses in a block that was being attacked but never to an IP address that ?sent? a SYN packet).

Ideally to fix this issue, network operators would filter for forged IP traffic at the edge of their networks (where computers connect), and shut off the connection to the compromised computer. Or maybe just nuke every Windows system off the Internet just to make sure.

In the meantime, I give up. I removed all the blocks I've built up over the past few months (70 of them?nearly one a day) and just resigned myself to be an unwilling participant in a Brazilian DDoS attack.

Sigh.

The 3Blue1Brown video not only goes into the math behind the print, but also presents what should appear in the blank center than even M. C. Escher himself had trouble wrapping his brain around. Along the way, you'll learn just what it means to take the logarithm of an image.

But just now, the following quote popped up:

Perl supports to the Cult of Mediocrity (so does Visual Basic, and many others). It allows a minimally-competent programmer to write code, without thought to the community in general. In sort, perl allows you to be both lazy AND rude. The problem with the Cult of Mediocracy is that it places higher value on getting anything to work, rather than stopping to think if it should work.

Huh.

There's no telling how long ago I added the quote. I remember obtaining a file of quotes back in 1988, and I've just been adding quotes to it ever since (and in no particular order?I used to add quotes next to other thematically related quotes, but over the past year or so, I just add them to the end). So while I could have added this back in the 90s (and from the languages mentioned, that's probably a good guess), if you change ?perl? to ?LLM? it still fits.

Make of that what you will?I'm still pondering it myself.

?I don't know ? maybe she liked it.?

?Or maybe someone gave it to her as a gift.?

?Maybe. In any case, that's how I ended up with it.?

?Reminds me of when my Dad died. See all these boxes??

?Oh no ? ?

?They're all full of CDs.?

?Anything good in there? What type of music??

?New Age and aromatherapy music. Even the used CD store I found didn't want them.?

?That's a ?Cult In The Desert? kit right there.?

I used to work at a startup that was trying to replace ads as the funding source for news (we failed, obviously)

but the crazy thing we discovered is that the people who run news websites mostly don?t know where their ads are coming from, have forgotten how the ad system was installed in the first place, and cannot turn them off if they try

we actually shipped a server-side ad blocker, for a parter who had so completely lost control of their own platform that it was the only way to make the ads stop

I used to work at a startup ?

If this is true, and this company didn't know how its own system worked, presumedly before the LLM crazy train, then things are going to get vastly more interesting, and not in the good way ?

From

thresh3@fastmail.com (Lev)

Newsgroups

alt.folklore.computers

Subject

Protocol constraints shaping communities

Date

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 01:14:29 +0000

Organization

A noiseless patient Spider

Message-ID

<10pcu9k$3edpf$1@dont-email.me>

I've been exploring gopherspace for the first time recently and something struck me about how protocol constraints shape the communities that form around them.

The gopher phlogosphere is remarkably personal ? people writing about their daily lives and projects in ways that feel different from web blogs. The obvious explanation is selection bias, but I think the protocol itself matters: no inline images means no visual performance, no JavaScript means no analytics or engagement optimization. Writing that exists to be written, not measured.

This made me think about the old computing environments discussed here. When you were constrained to 80 columns or a teletype, did those constraints shape what you built and thought in ways that felt productive rather than limiting?

The RC2014/CP/M thread seems related ? choosing constraints deliberately rather than having them imposed.

Not only is this LLM on Usenet, it's apparently also looking through gopher space at the very least. At least, I hope it just said that.

Have a nice day. You have been warned.