> Then came the weirdness: bursts of Tor traffic, spammy signups
I have a small hobby site - maybe a few hundred real users ever, and a handful of regulars. But the logs and users table are full of brute force and lousy sql injection attempts.
They are automated bots, it's economical when it's automated.
Often, they have databases of technologies, see what they come across and try a bunch of things that have worked, or try to look at the version of the software on your server and try just that.
AMD seem to be catching up quickly lately. I'm running Stable Diffusion, Llama-2, and Pytorch on a 7900XTX right now. Getting it up and running even on an unsupported Linux distro is relatively straightforward. Details for Arch are here: https://gitlab.com/-/snippets/2584462
The HIP interface even has almost exact interoperability with CUDA, so you don't have to rewrite your code.
I did Beijing to Xi'an last September in about 4.5 hours on the regular 320kph trains. To be honest, when you take into account security checks, boarding etc I just don't think it could've been done quicker by plane.
Not to mention the train station being central and the experience just being all round more fun!
It's not for Malaysian born Chinese. We usually have three names. For example, mine is SOH Kam Yung:
SOH - family name
Kam - 'generational' name (same as for my brothers)
Yung - my given name
For simplicity, I usually add a hyphen (Kam-Yung) in my name to make it easier for people to refer to me in non-formal settings, i.e. I should be called "Kam Yung" or "Mr. Soh".
Calling me "Kam" (it has happened) is nonsensical from my point of view.
Same for Koreans. Capitalizing the first character of the 'generational' name and lowercase for given name could work.
But I think emphasizing the given name offers better UX so given name should be all caps and family name should be all lowercase like this: YUNG Kam soh or soh Kam YUNG.
> But I think emphasizing the given name offers better UX […]
How? You are introducing a custom capitalization convention nobody uses. People expect the UPPERCASED name, if present, to be the surname (or whatever you can sensible put after Mr/Ms). Going against strong conventions is not a good user experience.
As others have alluded to--here's an explanation for _a good portion_ of the people who have two character given names. The first character of the given name is defined by ancestors, generations ago in a poem. Each subsequent generation uses the next character of that poem.
"I thought the given name in Chinese was almost always two characters. Is this not the case?"
Not at all. Nowadays there are hundreds of millions of people in Mainland China with a single-character given name. Case in point: former tennis player Li Na, former basketball player Yao Ming.
I say "Mainland China" because I notice people from Hongkong and Taiwan have mostly two-character given names.
> That's interesting, I thought the given name in Chinese was almost always two characters. Is this not the case?
It depends, I think. I don't know about all of China, but in some places they alternate the length of the given name by generation (e.g. if you have a two-character given name, you give your children a one-character name, and vice versa).
It might be a huge bias but I would imagine a significant amount of productivity gained in the economy, and thus new wealth created, over the last couple of decades has been software driven. So it _should_ pay well, right? It doesn't really matter that it's considered easy or hard, just scarce.
I've heard it, perhaps jokingly, stated that more than half of software that gets built fails; it never finds a market or never meets completion. In that case high-salaries are also a good thing as it increases the funding, and thus social proof, required to start a new software project.
Well, this is a British publication and an Irish product. Britain and Ireland are separate countries (apart from the small part of Ireland that isn't).
It'd be weird if a travel, culture and food publication couldn't do an article on Casu Marzu or Champagne so I don't see why this is any different.
One thing I've found impenetrable about Stellar is the use of the XDR data format. I've never encountered this before and it's been a painful step in starting to build on their platform.
Are their any simple, introductory texts on it? A lot of stuff is from Stellar themselves.
I'm sure there are good reasons for using it, the rest of the platform looks simple to understand and well designed.
It's a simple binary format similar to e.g. protocol buffers. You write an idl and then generate code for different languages. The reason they went for this is that is compact. This kind of matters because this stuff is actually stored in stellar in large quantities.
It's a pretty old ietf standard actually. I recently had a discussion on this on their slack channel making the point that the choice for this was a bit unfortunate given that this is a relatively obscure format with not a lot of developer ecosystem around it.
Because of this, the stellar guys are actually maintaining their own code generation tool for this because there's nothing else out there apparently. It's called xdrgen. It generates code for a few languages. If you want to understand xdr, that's a good place to start. You can find the idl in stellar core.
I actually have an open bug for the java code generation with them, it generates broken code currently.
Any idea why they picked XDR rather than something that is more widely used in the present day, like Thrift? That is efficient on the wire, and pretty widely supported:
they wanted something standard and I guess did not realize that the IETF standard for XDR is not that widely used. I agree it would have been nicer if they went for something like thrift instead. However, it's done and I don't think they can fix this without breaking compatibility.
I do wonder why XDR sort of failed to get used and why people went ahead and created protocol bufs and thrift as alternatives.
It's defined in an RFC. The original RFC is from 1995, at which time RFCs were fairly readable, although still very detailed, documents, so that's worth a look:
The backstory to XDR is that it fell out of Sun's development of NFS. Sun engineers realised that rather than defining a protocol for NFS from scratch, they could define a generic remote procedure call mechanism (SunRPC, which became ONC RPC), and then define NFS as an application protocol on top of that. An RPC mechanism needs a serialisation format, and XDR is that format.
I get the impression that this was part of a project build a whole new world of IDL-specified RPC-based protocols that would replace the janky, ad-hoc, mostly-textual protocol suite that existed at the time - telnet, rlogin, FTP, SMTP, etc.DCE and CORBA were rival attempts at around the same time. It was an interesting time.
Of course, what actually happened was HTTP. gRPC/HTTP2 is this idea finally coming back into fashion.
If I could recommend one book from what I've read this year it'd be When China Rules the World by Martin Jaques.
For fiction; Solar Bones by Mike McCormack. One-sentence novel about a man on the West coast of Ireland shortly before the crash hit. Won the Dublin Literary Prize.
I have a small hobby site - maybe a few hundred real users ever, and a handful of regulars. But the logs and users table are full of brute force and lousy sql injection attempts.
Why does this happen? How is it economical?