StefanoC

This would be perfectly fine if they provided a refund, adjusted for inflation. I'm quite surprised that they haven't, it seems so obviously necessary to me.

I remember the first and only time I used browser stack, almost 10 years ago. I found myself logged into the Google account of somebody else. I could freely access their email, drive files, everything. I had reported this to them, and they quickly dismissed it as impossible. The dismissal itself was enough proof for me of horrific practices.

Can anybody share their setup using 64GB macs? I have an M2 Ultra studio and I'm trying Qwen 3.5 MLX models hosting them from the CLI, but I'm a bit stuck picking bigger models, more context, 4/8 bits, Opus-Reasoning-Distilled, coder... There are a bit too many permutations between mlx CLI flags, env variables, and models.

At the moment I'm exploring:

- nightmedia/Qwen3.5-27B-Claude-4.6-Opus-Reasoning-Distilled-qx64-hi-mlx

- BeastCode/Qwen3.5-27B-Claude-4.6-Opus-Distilled-MLX-4bit

- mlx-community/Qwen3-Coder-Next-4bit

Adguard works great. UBlock on Firefox also does the job.

Seems to me that the most important questions have barely been asked (I saw just one scrolling through that Twitter feed, unanswered): 1) Was any work done during time paid by the company? 2) Also, but I'd be flexible with this one, was work equipment used? 3) Was the developer able to produce this work thanks to what he learned from proprietary systems, at work?

It's easy to grab the pitchfork, I hate that contract clause as all of you do, but without clear information on the above this case could go either way.

When evaluating whether to buy something: is it worth the amount of hours of work that took me to be able to afford it? I know roughly how much money I make per hour (money into my bank account every year / how many days I work every year / how many hours per day I work). So, say that something costs 100£ and it takes me 3 hours to make that money; would I work 3 hours to buy it?

Also when buying something: sometimes I feel like under a spell, really wanting to make a purchase. Then I just sleep on it. Usually the day after the spell is gone, and I can better understand if I really want to buy that something or not.

When doing something new: I'm the kind of person that - when learning to draw - spends more time looking at the perfect paper and pencils than actually drawing. I'm sure some of you can relate. I enjoy this process, but the truth is that to learn to draw you don't need anything else than any piece of paper and any working pen/pencil. So, learn to recognise when you go too far off track and go back to actually learning how to draw. There will be a time to hunt for the perfect paper. If you don't want to go back drawing, maybe you didn't want it that much to begin with.

When spending money: spending money on things (objects) is almost always less worth than it feels. Unless it's a tool that you use (e.g. a DIY tool, or a kitchen knife, etc). Spending money on experiences (traveling, concerts, etc) and learning (books, courses, etc) is almost always more worth than it feels. Especially, as an introvert, there is something inside of me that tends to dodge "experiences".

To be happy: I learned this recently from the Dalai Lama. You should learn the difference between happiness and pleasure/desire, and prioritise the former. E.g. when looking for a job how ethical a company is and how good you'd fit is more important than the salary, job title, and prestige of a company.

Tools around creating a gmail filter to remove recruiters' emails from my inbox

https://github.com/StefanoChiodino/i-dont-want-to-be-recruit...

ELI5: how will they get the money out of there without getting busted?

Ruthlessly cut down the scope of the project to what you can achieve in 2 minutes

I think this is due to where you are on the path of learning English, and maybe because people feel more comfortable asking to repeat something when you are talking amongst not natives. Also not natives speak slower.

Comes a point where you get so used to what is, admittedly, such a weird and non sensical pronunciation, that the same mistakes I used to make as an Italian native I don't understand at all from a Spanish native that doesn't pronounce as well as I'm used to. Only after I realise what the word is I understand where they are coming from.

Also the every day vocabulary is not that big and fancy, I tend to use some "fancy" words sometimes just because that's the word I would have used in Italian, and it's correct in English, but not widely known. Then again I'm now reading Stephen king and having to use the dictionary every few pages, just because something is mostly obvious by the context but I want to double check.

First "bug" raised this morning about naked domain not redirecting to www...

SEO departments in my experience still insists that the www subdomain is necessary (e.g. they have no idea so better not touch it), yet Google instead of publicly coming out saying that it's pointless goes as far as hiding it. I don't get the point.

I've had Audio-Technica ATH-M50X at work for around 5 years and despite having used them most working days they still look mostly new, and are quite comfortable for my (large) head.

Never had a set with NC, so maybe I don't know what I'm missing. However I can't hear much else at all when I'm listening to music.

None taken. Believe it or not I'm mostly on your side. I published this because I've managed to do this in 4 hours, for fun. It exploits the url based blocking which is so prominent but so easily subverted, and If I've done it anybody can, so I wanted people to know.

Having said that, I must add, I don't think this is malicious software. Beside the legalities and the GDPRities which I may have overlooked, when you ask a website for its content that comes with analytics, but you want to block analytics. I don't think you can complain about the content provider bypassing your attempt at blocking it. Don't get me wrong, when I come across websites that stop me from browsing them because I use uBlock I usually bypass their block, or close the tab, but I can hardly complain at their attempt, or deem it as malicious, IMHO.

I checked the analytics dashboard yesterday and updated the website: the only data that I'm not getting though is the users country/city and their provider. So in a sense it's better for your privacy: the IP is not your own!

I'm not an expert of Analytics but I'm also assuming that since the cookies are different (because the HTTP call to analytics happens on a different domain than usual) it shouldn't be able to track you just as well: G Analytics don't know your IP and have no trace of your previous anonymous IDs set in your cookies!

I would be interested in knowing myself. From my analytics dashboard I can tell you that I get some browser data, like language. But I'm not sure if it's safer for the users, or the data is any worse for the tracker!

The cookies will be different because the host is different, but I think that Netlify does a good job at keeping the connection like for like.

You think?

Looking at my dashboard now I can see data on language, browser, mobile model, referral, etc. I think some are just not present in the mobile version of analytics, but I can't see what data this would not be collecting.

However a lot of GA's stalking behaviour relies on having cookies on a specific Google-controlled domain

This also reminds me that this simple technique can bypass 3rd party cookies rules.

author's nefarious goal.

You clearly misunderstood my goal.

I have this on my phone and it doesn't stop this technique.

Setup please? It works for me on 2 different computers/OS + phone and had other people confirming it.

As someone who just received a cold call from recruiter I never heard of, with a 4 years old CV and haven't been on a job board for more than a year I must say that GDPR didn't do much. I actually previously reported a recruiter to the ICO for 3 different violations (no data disclosure, cold call, old CV) and they did nothing but advising not to keep CVs for more than 1 year.

/rant off

I feel that your point, even if valid, doesn't quite apply to what I'm describing, which is to go around ad blockers.

As described, rather than disabling js you may want to look into something more complicated, because if you do then the <noscript> side is going to kick in.

I think the noscript solution offers less data collection but can still be reverse proxied (try for yourself on the page).

To go further on the proxy idea, I think that the best strategy could be to actually do server-side calls to GA: https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/hit-builder/ (yes there is an API for server-side hits).

Yes, probably big players would like to use server side analytics! But that's a bit too involved for small websites.

The minus of the proxy idea, is that since you don't have access to *.doubleclick.net (which should be blacklisted by any decent track/adblocker) you don't get demographics info back into GA.

When I pull down Google Analytics I also change its content to make it point to the reverse proxy itself. I didn't find any call to that domain being blocked, so I didn't do it for that particular case.

I think that the data collections is done via https://www.google-analytics.com/r/collect, which I do proxy. Notice however that sometimes an easy list filter kicks in and blocks that just because it happens to match "r/collect". I think there is a race condition somewhere that makes it not work sometimes, because I couldn't replicate it consistently. Anyways, it would be as simple as changing that domain specifically to something else. I tried doing so, but Netlify's redirects where playing up (possibly because I'm on the free tier) so I gave up. The concept of masking the domain/url still applies.

Please explain, I use Little Snitch too!

Interesting, do you know if they rely on the same principle of using several domains, making it harder to block?

It's a proof of concept. If it doesn't work for you then you are meant to know that :)

It's not a bug, it's a feature!

That's interesting, and good to know! I wonder if the heuristic can be bypassed by changing the code (e.g. adding a semicolon) or changing the URL further.

Could you please expand on fudging numbers and fraud filters?

The original question that I was trying to answer was if the numbers that I was seeing for mobile users were skewed by how much more difficult it is to get an ad blocker for mobile.

If you were to reverse proxy from the same domain then yes, you'd get blocked eventually.

The problem is that creating reverse proxies on random domains is too easy, by distributing this to different domains it wouldn't be possible to block this effectively!