I think I have one live one running in my house, but I haven’t checked on it in a while and it might actually be dead now.

I thought it might be rose-tinted glasses, thinking that the earlier internet was better, but spending time retracing my teenage steps made me even more certain that it was indeed better. So many derpy little websites made by nerds, so many fun games and websites that weren't preying on vulnerable people, and everything spread out across many places - not centralised in the hands of large corporations. I've been using LLMs to have fun recreating concepts from that time, like my own forum software, as some sort of anti-progress. It's been fun.

For the lower-resolution versions, they're very popular with video people from my understanding. The Fp was in particular popular with directors for test shots and framing, and they've leaned into that use-case with this new one I believe.

From a personal perspective, they were the only company that was interested in loaning me gear to review from right at the start of me making YouTube videos. Many other companies continue to refuse to talk with me even when I've found serious bugs.

The frustrating part is that they're currently not releasing full-frame lenses on Nikon's Z mount, likely due to a licensing issue with Nikon. And that's frustrating because for my needs, there's no "pro" level camera on L mount that I can use, and Sony hobble third party lens manufacturers' maximum burst speeds (also I don't like Sony's AF but that's another story). I ended up selling a lot of my L mount gear and consolidating on Nikon for professional work.

But I did buy myself a Sigma Bf. The Fp series is excellent but the Bf is beautiful. It's such a fundamentally weird camera that it reminds me of camera design back in the 60s-90s where companies went absolutely nuts with camera ideas. Is it my most practical camera? Very much not. Is it the camera I use to take pictures of my cat? Absolutely.

I'm always excited to see what Sigma comes out with. Their optics and manufacturing have moved on dramatically since Yamaki-san took over in 2012, and they're constantly bringing out really interesting new optics. I'm very excited to try out that new 50mm f/1.4 CL they announced, personally.

I highly recommend watching videos on the ProcessX YouTube channel that shows their factory and processes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qx14Juo4AQo.

I also do repairs and so I recently added a job management system into the POS, which has been really useful so far. Next step is to sort out the online store/eBay integration aspect!

I do want to add some stupid forum features I remember from the 2000s. An RPG mod is definitely on my mind.

Looking at you, Meta.

I do still get some requests going up to 15 minutes which is quite ridiculous, though those don't seem to be super common (maybe they're learning).

I think the shortest timeouts I've seen are between 2-5 seconds, but they're surprisingly infrequent and actually that's still a massive inconvenience for them. I did at one point just drop any request I couldn't keep open for more than 5 seconds but it actually caused more server load. I'm essentially inverting the server load by making slow requests more efficient, which is counter to everything I ever learnt about performance for web serving :D

I think the average I see is probably somewhere between 15-30 seconds. I'm guessing many crawlers don't want to go too low because they'll be trying to fetch large files like images, or perhaps they know they'll be slowing servers down and want to ensure they get the response. Most likely, the majority of crawler authors aren't expecting some arsehole to exploit this and they've just left the setting as the default.

I experienced the same thing after submitting articles from my small photography website. I did debate using some of the off-the-shelf solutions like Cloudflare, Anubis, or iocaine, but I ended up building my own L7 proxy that utterly fucks the bots up: https://robertmay.photography/journal/bwbach-my-guardian-gob.... I will make it generally available at some point once I get it optimised how I'd like, but currently I'm able to trap about 3000 concurrent crawlers in my tarpit of slow requests on two small Hetzner VMs. And that 3k is really just the limits of the networks hitting my servers right now, I think it'll go significantly higher than that.

I haven't really seen anyone else combat them this way, possibly because many of the standard proxies and servers are set up for fast requests, not serving them as slowly as possible. Deliberately serving page loads for as long as the requester will accept packets turns out to be a really funny way to stop the botnets - when I just rejected the requests they in turn hammered my server even harder. By tanking the request volume with a ridiculous BEAM-based proxy you can reduce their request speed to a crawl and I'm fairly certain a couple of them have blacklisted my server now.