I had some good fun writing non-gaming apps for the playdate console including a browser [1] and Kagi news mirror [2] and feel the device has great potential as an alternative to android/iOS duopoly
I would've got one if it wasn't so pricey for these specs.
You can get a cheap Anbernic for 40-60$ running linux, with decent ARM CPU and a good backlighted screen.
...but what do you do with it? Play emulators? The Playdate has bespoke games designed for it, and many people say it's worth the price.
Tbh I find it a bit weird to talk about leisure devices like a handheld in terms of pure specs as if it was a server for number crunching. I use it to have fun, and (for me at least) a huge part of that is UI and ease-of-use.
Yes, emulators up to PS1/NDS. There are also many bespoke and commercial linux games that run on these devices via portmaster[0] (for commercial games you need to provide your own files).
I use my 34XX clamshell to listen to podcasts and audiobooks in rockbox [1].
If you take some time to setup alternative OS (e.g. MuOS) there is a good video player and even terminal emulator available with root shell.
And of course, you can write your own games and apps to run on it (SDL, pico8, Godot, Love2D, etc).
> The Playdate has bespoke games designed for it …
Not quite as many as [every 2D home or portable console]. For instance, I enjoy [dozens and dozens of Nintendo games], but there are thousands of others to choose from.
It's a neat piece of hardware, but honestly I never wanted to play any of the games. I don't really know for to do discovery for it, and none of the ones I tried stuck for me, honestly, I prefer to emulate games from my childhood, or retro/indie games I already have on my back-log.
I was given one and it had some fun gimmicks but if doesn't really last beyond a few sessions. The ecosystem is strange and I just went back to a "real" device a bit after.
I really like my playdate! Lots of indie games, and their Lua API is very good, coming from someone with no prior experience with Lua or games programming.
Here’s a nice YouTube video about GameBoy WorkBoy; a hardware addon and software productivity apps for the game boy,’unreleased and recently recovered https://youtu.be/1Y98jj3Kn84?si=dMII3mTmeDI0XrCn
Sorry if it’s in the article, I can’t access it either
The story has not changed much. Every so often I will remove most of the blocks put in place, and within a few hours I'm back to having to block them. Many of the cheaper VPNs are also hosted on AWS / Google Cloud / Azure (or other cloud providers), which are also unilaterally blocked.
I would much prefer we did not have to do this, but it is what it is.
VPNs even from big public providers have not been a reliable way to protect anonymity for a while now. Use VPNs for cryptographic security and circumventing region control.
The problem is the whack-a-mole game with hackers and script kiddies. It used to be the case that banning known colo ASNs was enough to get rid of nuisance by STROs, then there was a flood of hacked routers being used for DDoS that was really annoying to get rid of, and then came "residential IP" VPNs and commercial VPNs, both of which get routinely abused by AI scrapers and frankly, the AI scrapers are a worse enemy than the skiddies of 10 years ago. They ruin everything.
And you as a site operator can't really tell apart skiddies, griefers, AI scrapers and legitimate users apart any more.
In what I have seen personally, creating absurdly more load by hitting "expensive" pages that no normal user would ever click in that frequency. The AI scraper bots are really, really dumb - they just follow everything that looks like a link.
Another particularly annoying thing was when spam bots got brainy enough (if I were to guess with AI?) that managed to bypass our maths captcha. That one really still pisses me off because I don't like to torture users or having to use GDPR-violating services.
If all the traffic you see from a particular netblock is people posting hate speech, you're probably not losing much by dropping everything from that whole range.
> Almost as if you shouldn't be banning users because of their IP unless that IP specifically has openly attacked you.
There is no net benefit to allowing non-residential IP addresses by default, maybe add the Google search indexer to the exception list. And with residential IP addresses, unless you're international, it doesn't make sense to allow regions other than your target markets.
The only way to deal with the bot traffic plagueing the modern internet is to cut off as much traffic as you reasonably can.
I've never seen anyone using a VPN for anything other than disruptive behaviour. I had to block vast swathes of mobile broadband providers in a certain warlike Middle Eastern country because if I didn't I'd have anywhere from 100 to 1000 new users every single morning who'd all posted hate speech that won't post here for fear of triggering the right-wing apologists.
Now they just do that over VPNs, which makes keeping them out all the more difficult.
Yeah, the community run TCRF wiki is banning VPNs just so they can mine your data along with the luxurious $400/mo they're getting from Patreon. And not because they're constantly being besieged by rampant bots that they have to resort to such drastic measures.
This is fascinating to me, because you just said you can't see it, but also that there are "trackers from multiple big corporations". Can you tell me what those are?
I ask primarily because we explicitly don't use any trackers, to a degree I actually pride myself on running a website that doesn't contact anything else:
https://mini.xkeeper.net/private/C58L77azpY.png
The sole exceptions are YouTube embeds, afaik. I even switched out the MediaWiki and CC badges to be local.
On the “ Sorry, you are not allowed to access tcrf.net right now” page I get tracked by Google, YouTube and DoubleClick according to the report by Safari.
I also have 924 kilobyte of data stored on my device after visiting tcrf.net without any consent.
uBlock Origin shows nothing out of the ordinary but Youtube, Google and Doubleclick, so Google, Google and Google, and I assume all of those are due to the embed.
If you mean the block page, yes, that's just the YouTube embed. You'll see the same results on any wiki page that has a YouTube embed for the same reason; it's not tracking or anything I have control over (other than outright not having YouTube embeds). But I think if anyone has concerns over that, they're better addressed at the local-user level by disabling all unauthorized iframes.
There are lightweight YouTube embeds like https://github.com/paulirish/lite-youtube-embed.
It’s lauded for faster page loads, but it likely has good privacy implications too since it basically just loads a thumbnail unless you click on it.
I remember this being shown in Nintendo Power. As the kind of kid who liked computers and gadgets I really wanted one, and read the article many times.
Me too. I even cut out the pictures from the magazine and pasted on to cardboard to pretend I had it already. I can't believe the YouTube guy got one ...?!
Sorry, you are not allowed to access tcrf.net right now.
If you are using a VPN, try disabling it first. We block many VPNs because of abuse.
If that does not work, the block may be due to one of the following reasons:
You are connecting using a network we have blocked.
Your connection is still using a VPN or proxy (incl. Apple Private Wi-Fi, CloudFlare relays, etc.)
You are a badly-behaving or unwelcome bot (ChatGPT, bingbot, yandex, etc.)
You are using a badly-behaving extension (eg. Imagus, etc) that is trying to load every single version of a file in the background
If you were able to view pages before, and this error message has suddenly appeared in place of what you were expecting, make sure you are not running any extensions or tools that are attempting to download everything at once. It is possible you were manually blocked, and it might be removed soon. If not, well, sorry.
If this page always apppeared, there is likely not a lot you can do. If you are using a VPN, turn off your VPN and try again.
Sorry for the trouble. We have been under a long-running DDoS attack.
From my logging, most people can access it just fine.
As for "what gives", I have no idea. The article itself isn't interesting and doesn't contain much of value; the "game" itself is what is interesting, but that's not what the article is there to cover.
So my guess is it's just only the people who can't see it, because for others there's not really much to discuss. I don't know why this was even posted here, to be honest.
It's probably a bot account that tried to read the article to come up with a reasonable comment, but TCRF likely serves a "you're a bot, go away" static response page when it's accessed by bots. Pretty funny.
There do seem to be annoying false positives, but this particular account really is a bit strange. Months of silence after signing up, and then this non sequitur…
https://archive.ph/t3SI6
I had some good fun writing non-gaming apps for the playdate console including a browser [1] and Kagi news mirror [2] and feel the device has great potential as an alternative to android/iOS duopoly
[1]: https://github.com/remysucre/ORBIT
[2]: https://github.com/remysucre/cranky-news
I had never heard of the Playdate but it looks like a very interesting device... and... I want it? Would you suggest getting one?
I would've got one if it wasn't so pricey for these specs. You can get a cheap Anbernic for 40-60$ running linux, with decent ARM CPU and a good backlighted screen.
...but what do you do with it? Play emulators? The Playdate has bespoke games designed for it, and many people say it's worth the price.
Tbh I find it a bit weird to talk about leisure devices like a handheld in terms of pure specs as if it was a server for number crunching. I use it to have fun, and (for me at least) a huge part of that is UI and ease-of-use.
> but what do you do with it?
Yes, emulators up to PS1/NDS. There are also many bespoke and commercial linux games that run on these devices via portmaster[0] (for commercial games you need to provide your own files).
I use my 34XX clamshell to listen to podcasts and audiobooks in rockbox [1].
If you take some time to setup alternative OS (e.g. MuOS) there is a good video player and even terminal emulator available with root shell.
And of course, you can write your own games and apps to run on it (SDL, pico8, Godot, Love2D, etc).
[0] https://portmaster.games/
[1] https://portmaster.games/detail.html?name=rockbox
> ...but what do you do with it? Play emulators?
Yep!
> The Playdate has bespoke games designed for it …
Not quite as many as [every 2D home or portable console]. For instance, I enjoy [dozens and dozens of Nintendo games], but there are thousands of others to choose from.
It's a neat piece of hardware, but honestly I never wanted to play any of the games. I don't really know for to do discovery for it, and none of the ones I tried stuck for me, honestly, I prefer to emulate games from my childhood, or retro/indie games I already have on my back-log.
I was given one and it had some fun gimmicks but if doesn't really last beyond a few sessions. The ecosystem is strange and I just went back to a "real" device a bit after.
I really like my playdate! Lots of indie games, and their Lua API is very good, coming from someone with no prior experience with Lua or games programming.
The games are quirky and too many use the crank, IMO. That said, if you want something a bit more unique than everything else it’s a fun toy.
The linked video seems to provide a much deeper story: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SZcrPM-jDqY&ra=m
yes, amazing complement to a super rare non-release (but protoype) exists.
Here’s a nice YouTube video about GameBoy WorkBoy; a hardware addon and software productivity apps for the game boy,’unreleased and recently recovered https://youtu.be/1Y98jj3Kn84?si=dMII3mTmeDI0XrCn
Sorry if it’s in the article, I can’t access it either
Site blocks VPN users.
Unfortunately true. I wrote about it early last year here: https://blog.xkeeper.net/uncategorized/tcrf-has-been-getting...
The story has not changed much. Every so often I will remove most of the blocks put in place, and within a few hours I'm back to having to block them. Many of the cheaper VPNs are also hosted on AWS / Google Cloud / Azure (or other cloud providers), which are also unilaterally blocked.
I would much prefer we did not have to do this, but it is what it is.
This is why you should self host your VPN.
Does that not defeat the anonymity aspect?
VPNs even from big public providers have not been a reliable way to protect anonymity for a while now. Use VPNs for cryptographic security and circumventing region control.
You mean pseudo anonymity, from advertisers mostly?
But where do you self-host it? Most sites that block VPNs also block VPSes
Many of us only like legitimate users, and therefore block VPNs.
What makes a VPN user inherently “illegitimate” in your view?
The problem is the whack-a-mole game with hackers and script kiddies. It used to be the case that banning known colo ASNs was enough to get rid of nuisance by STROs, then there was a flood of hacked routers being used for DDoS that was really annoying to get rid of, and then came "residential IP" VPNs and commercial VPNs, both of which get routinely abused by AI scrapers and frankly, the AI scrapers are a worse enemy than the skiddies of 10 years ago. They ruin everything.
And you as a site operator can't really tell apart skiddies, griefers, AI scrapers and legitimate users apart any more.
What are they doing exactly?
In what I have seen personally, creating absurdly more load by hitting "expensive" pages that no normal user would ever click in that frequency. The AI scraper bots are really, really dumb - they just follow everything that looks like a link.
Another particularly annoying thing was when spam bots got brainy enough (if I were to guess with AI?) that managed to bypass our maths captcha. That one really still pisses me off because I don't like to torture users or having to use GDPR-violating services.
Almost as if you shouldn't be banning users because of their IP unless that IP specifically has openly attacked you.
Or I guess you can just DENY ALL.
If all the traffic you see from a particular netblock is people posting hate speech, you're probably not losing much by dropping everything from that whole range.
> Almost as if you shouldn't be banning users because of their IP unless that IP specifically has openly attacked you.
There is no net benefit to allowing non-residential IP addresses by default, maybe add the Google search indexer to the exception list. And with residential IP addresses, unless you're international, it doesn't make sense to allow regions other than your target markets.
The only way to deal with the bot traffic plagueing the modern internet is to cut off as much traffic as you reasonably can.
They're using a VPN.
I've never seen anyone using a VPN for anything other than disruptive behaviour. I had to block vast swathes of mobile broadband providers in a certain warlike Middle Eastern country because if I didn't I'd have anywhere from 100 to 1000 new users every single morning who'd all posted hate speech that won't post here for fear of triggering the right-wing apologists.
Now they just do that over VPNs, which makes keeping them out all the more difficult.
Well, you can just give me a list of the domains you operate, and I can put them in the network blacklist.
Blocking Apple iCloud privacy is pretty extreme.
It isn’t blocked. It is on for me and the site loaded fine.
It was at the time. Now it’s loading fine. In the 403 screen it specifically called out iCloud privacy.
It was on for me again, 6 hours later.
Ah, another domain for the blacklist.
It’s basically “give me your IP address before you can continue so we can better data mine you”
Yeah, the community run TCRF wiki is banning VPNs just so they can mine your data along with the luxurious $400/mo they're getting from Patreon. And not because they're constantly being besieged by rampant bots that they have to resort to such drastic measures.
I don’t know anything about TCRF or what they do as their website blocks me. I do see trackers from multiple big corporations on tcrf.net.
What bots are using Apple Private Relay?
This is fascinating to me, because you just said you can't see it, but also that there are "trackers from multiple big corporations". Can you tell me what those are?
I ask primarily because we explicitly don't use any trackers, to a degree I actually pride myself on running a website that doesn't contact anything else: https://mini.xkeeper.net/private/C58L77azpY.png
The sole exceptions are YouTube embeds, afaik. I even switched out the MediaWiki and CC badges to be local.
On the “ Sorry, you are not allowed to access tcrf.net right now” page I get tracked by Google, YouTube and DoubleClick according to the report by Safari.
I also have 924 kilobyte of data stored on my device after visiting tcrf.net without any consent.
uBlock Origin shows nothing out of the ordinary but Youtube, Google and Doubleclick, so Google, Google and Google, and I assume all of those are due to the embed.
If you mean the block page, yes, that's just the YouTube embed. You'll see the same results on any wiki page that has a YouTube embed for the same reason; it's not tracking or anything I have control over (other than outright not having YouTube embeds). But I think if anyone has concerns over that, they're better addressed at the local-user level by disabling all unauthorized iframes.
There are lightweight YouTube embeds like https://github.com/paulirish/lite-youtube-embed. It’s lauded for faster page loads, but it likely has good privacy implications too since it basically just loads a thumbnail unless you click on it.
Maybe don’t do YouTube embed if it’s just a flickering logo. Use a GIF for that.
I’m not disabling my VPN if a website with multiple trackers asks me to.
> I don’t know anything about TCRF or what they do as their website blocks me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cutting_Room_Floor_(websit...
Funny it works for me while being on a vpns that gets blocked everywhere…
Why not use a captcha or turnstile?
ooo free data!
When I try to share this page on iMessage it unfurls the link as "LLM / AI Standard Test Page" so I guess I won't share it!
you can do the period trick:
> . http://example.com .
https://www.idownloadblog.com/2024/03/15/how-to-send-links-w...
You can choose to display the text of the link,
instead of letting your device’s defaults decide who you are,
and then telling all of us about it.
Downvoters: Just press and hold, lol…
Does anyone know where can I find contents for the 2020 gigaleak?
nvm, I found it in archive.org
I remember this being shown in Nintendo Power. As the kind of kid who liked computers and gadgets I really wanted one, and read the article many times.
But of course it never came out.
Me too. I even cut out the pictures from the magazine and pasted on to cardboard to pretend I had it already. I can't believe the YouTube guy got one ...?!
Applaud the preservation.
Access seems pretty strict
——
403 Forbidden
You are unable to access this site.
Sorry, you are not allowed to access tcrf.net right now.
If you are using a VPN, try disabling it first. We block many VPNs because of abuse.
If that does not work, the block may be due to one of the following reasons:
You are connecting using a network we have blocked. Your connection is still using a VPN or proxy (incl. Apple Private Wi-Fi, CloudFlare relays, etc.) You are a badly-behaving or unwelcome bot (ChatGPT, bingbot, yandex, etc.) You are using a badly-behaving extension (eg. Imagus, etc) that is trying to load every single version of a file in the background If you were able to view pages before, and this error message has suddenly appeared in place of what you were expecting, make sure you are not running any extensions or tools that are attempting to download everything at once. It is possible you were manually blocked, and it might be removed soon. If not, well, sorry.
If this page always apppeared, there is likely not a lot you can do. If you are using a VPN, turn off your VPN and try again.
Sorry for the trouble. We have been under a long-running DDoS attack.
That's weird, I can connect just fine over mullvad.
I'm on Mullvad and got blocked.
[flagged]
30 out of 34 comments are about the content blocking.
Only four comments are about the content of the article, and none of them really go into depth.
This has been at the top of HN all day. If people can't see it, what gives?
People who can see the article can see that it's incredibly mid and not worth commenting on.
But for people who can't see the article, it could be anything! For all they know, they're being kept out of the greatest content of all time!
From my logging, most people can access it just fine.
As for "what gives", I have no idea. The article itself isn't interesting and doesn't contain much of value; the "game" itself is what is interesting, but that's not what the article is there to cover.
So my guess is it's just only the people who can't see it, because for others there's not really much to discuss. I don't know why this was even posted here, to be honest.
[flagged]
Four AA
Anywhere with enough ambient light.
10 AA
[flagged]
Where are you seeing this?
It's probably a bot account that tried to read the article to come up with a reasonable comment, but TCRF likely serves a "you're a bot, go away" static response page when it's accessed by bots. Pretty funny.
I take that back! It seems to be happening to multiple people using VPNs. My bad. I should have been more charitable.
Funnily I think you are still right re. the specific account under discussion.
There do seem to be annoying false positives, but this particular account really is a bit strange. Months of silence after signing up, and then this non sequitur…
The style is also very LLM-y, though not a complete slam dunk.