The Flower King

1.5M ratings
277k ratings

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
prokopetz

funnypoeple asked:

Unsure if you are aware of this update, but apparently someone got into the Twit api and believes that the "rate limiting" is actually a cover up by Elon bc they accidenlty pushed an update DDOSing their own site, which is why he says its "temporary" in his tweet. Not sure if Elon is actually trying to cover-up, or if the DDOS is an unintended side effect of the change

prokopetz answered:

(With reference to this post here.)

As far as I can tell, the folks advancing that theory have it perfectly backwards. The rate limit isn’t an effort to address the self-DDoS situation: the rate limit is causing the self-DDoS situation.

In a nutshell, when you load up Twitter in your browser, two things are happening:

  1. In response to your initial request, Twitter’s server sends your browser the information it needs to construct the website’s user interface (UI).
  2. Once the UI has been constructed within your browser, it instructs your browser to dispatch a separate request, via the Twitter API, requesting content (i.e., tweets and ads) to fill itself with.

(It’s actually a little more complex than that, because the response to the initial request may come pre-filled with a portion of the required content in order to speed things up the first time you visit your dashboard, but that’s the gist of it, anyway.)

So, what happens now that the rate limit is in place?

Well, the rate limit doesn’t affect the first request – it’s not using the API, so your browser is able to construct the Twitter UI just fine. The moment you try to scroll your Twitter dashboard, however, that triggers the Twitter UI that’s been constructed within your browser to ask the Twitter API for more content so you can keep scrolling – and that request is subject to the rate limit.

If you happen already to have exceeded your rate limit, that request is going to receive a response along the lines of “Error 429 – Rate Limit Exceeded”. Here’s the trick: while Twitter did update the UI to reflect the addition of a rate limit (i.e., they’re not complete idiots), it turns out they did an incomplete job, and certain dashboard widgets don’t know what to do with an error 429.

Now, the fun part: apparently, what the affected Twitter dashboard widgets are coded to do when they receive a response they don’t recognise is simply to ignore it and try again. Further, nobody thought to impose a delay between attempts, so they retry immediately upon receiving the unrecognised error 429. For users with snappy Internet service, this can result in their browser making multiple attempts per second to retrieve content for the affected Twitter dashboard widgets, receiving (and ignoring) the same error code each time.

And that’s how Twitter ended up accidentally ordering its own users to DDoS its API.

prokopetz
prokopetz

Proposal for a truly adversarial tabletop RPG:

  • The numeric values of the traits on your character sheet are pre-filled, if applicable but the actual names of your traits are not: they're left blank, indicating only what part of speech – noun, verb or adjective – should occupy that slot.
  • The game includes 20–30 different character sheet designs, each of which has a different assortment of open slots, presented in a different order and layout, so what kind of slot is being filled can't be predicted from its part of speech unless you know which sheet someone is holding. The slots on each sheet are numbered.
  • Character creation begins with each player drawing a random character sheet design; the group then goes around the table taking turns calling out the part(s) of speech of their character sheet's lowest-numbered empty slot. Each other player calls out a word satisfying those criteria, and the active player must choose one of them to write down in that slot.
  • Attempt to play the resulting characters.

A basic mockup of a character sheet might look like this (though in practice they should be much more needlessly complicated):

Information

Species: (1) ________ [noun]
Profession: (2–3) ________ ________ [noun + verb ending in -er]
Alignment: (4) ________ [adjective]

Skills

(5) ________ [verb] Rating: 4
(6) ________ [verb] Rating: 3
(7) ________ [verb] Rating: 2
(8) ________ [verb] Rating: 1

Known Spells

(9–10) ________ ________ [verb ending in -ing + noun]
(11–12) ________ of ________ [noun + verb ending in -ing]
(13–14) ________ ________ [adjective + noun]

(Note that the traits presented here should not be taken as normative, so not all character sheet variants will have slots for "Alignment", or "Known Spells", or even "Skills", and other sheets may have traits not seen here.)

jelloapocalypse
huffylemon

image
ralfmaximus

Years ago I overheard (eavesdropped upon) a telephone conversation between a public parks official and a golf course owner.

Parks Official: No sir, you cannot

Parks Official: No. They are a protected species

Parks Official: You CANNOT shoot them

Parks Official: Or poison them, no. Or trap them

Parks Official: If you like, we can-- no, I'm it. I'm the ranking official here. There's nobody above me. My boss? You mean... the governor's office? Sure, I guess. Okay bye

After he hung up, he gave me this thousand-yard stare before answering my unvoiced question.

"There's a flock of flamingos at the 9th green disrupting golfers. He wanted permission to go out there with a shotgun and take care of matters, but sensed there might be... legal ramifications. So he called us."

I laughed. "Does that happen often?"

"Oh, we get calls like that a couple times a month."

fem-fatalist

Country clubs should be burned to the ground and their golf courses turned into community gardens i am 10000% serious

theconcealedweapon

Was golf created for the sole purpose of hoarding ridiculously large amounts of land just to brag about how little they use it?

blackwoolncrown

Yes, literally.