I went to prison for 18 months, my digital and physical life was stolen from me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45451567 applies to my Dropbox account (and Apple but separate problem); I just received the "your account will be going bye-bye" email. I have very important dead-mom-club stuff in there, and support is useless. :(

Edit: Thanks unofficial Dropbox support channel; thanks Drew :)

Edit edit: Try my luck with my Apple account now, I guess—Tim Cook, you busy?

I'll take a look. Thanks!

What's the next-closest thing? wal-g? barman? databasus? I only get to cosplay as a DBA.

The shitty part about what Spain is doing is that it punishes its own residents who have nothing to do with piracy.

Sports piracy is fundamentally different than music or movie piracy. The Spotify analogy that gets tossed around is wrong. Steam is less wrong but still wrong. Music piracy got "solved" because the labels decided that some revenue was better than no revenue, and the math works when you have a bunch of product in your back pocket that cost you nothing to distribute; gaben made piracy slightly less convenient to those in developed countries.

Sports rights are valuable because they're exclusive and because they're live. In the US, there are blackouts around sports: if you're physically located in New York (at least, according to whatever IP address data vendor a platform is using), you're unable to watch the New York Knicks using league-sanctioned products. That's the US version of this—restricting access to the content itself to protect the rights holder's revenue. It's internal logic and fundamentally sound (though infuriating) if you're one of them.

This is without a doubt categorically worse. A blackout says "you can't watch this game" and Spain is saying "you can't access the internet while this game is on, whether you're interested in the game or not." It's as if the NBA convinced the DOJ to shut down half the internet every time a game was on, just in case.

Before it was DMCA notices (useless) -> lawsuits (whack-a-mole, check TorrentFreak) -> ??? -> infrastructure-level blocking. (I'm an outlier for many reasons but we won't go into those.) Each step is more destructive and less effective than the one preceding it. Spain has reached the end of the playbook, thanks to political interests: ban the internet!

Fans are the product. La Liga's real customer is Movistar, who pays roughly a billion euros a year for exclusivity so they can bundle it into packages nobody would pay for otherwise. The IP blocking isn't an anti-piracy measure—I'd argue there is no such thing as anti-piracy but that's a different thread. The IP blocking is a signal to the next bidder: the government will protect your exclusivity at any cost, even if that cost is the country's internet.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45844197

I was about mid-way through my bid when another inmate told me "new guy in B3 is a another hacker." I got really excited—I'd have someone to talk shop with, at the very least.

My takeaway from him was that they're a bunch of contemporary "script kiddies" with a lot of time on their hands.

This tracks.

I still remember retiring that computer. The first thing I did when I got my Pentium IV chip a year later was download Macromedia Dreamweaver. Did me well.

I was having a conversation with someone about OpenClaw, and they proposed this idea of OpenClaw being used for inventory tracking at the retail-level. I let them continue. They said it'd be the best option for tracking when purchases are made and what SKUs are sold at what time of day. They weren't talking about prompting, they were talking about it as a data store.

I didn't bother mentioning how long this problem had been solved.

It's not you being a curmudgeon.

I'm very disappointed to not have made the list—going to federal prison for 18 months didn't help my score.

I live in Minnesota. This is my backyard.

mostly about the federal prison system (for which i am an alumnus) and ruby. some essays about autism, too.