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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1012 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 27, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Do any of the more technically-inclined people here know anything about how to get past Cloudflare anti-bot verification?

I used to be able to get past — barely — if I made sure that absolutely nothing else (no other browser tabs, no background processes) was using any of my bandwidth. Then, starting a couple weeks back, even that didn't always work, and I'd sometimes get caught in the failing & retrying loop. When this happened, I'd need to stop and try again in a few hours.

As of a few days ago, that stopped working too, and I'm completely unable to get verified as not a bot. I've tried every bit of troubleshooting I could find online (on my end) — caches, different web browsers. The only thing that worked was switching over to my phone as an internet hotspot… until I hit my monthly data cap (after only a couple of hours) and got that throttled, which made it stop working too.

Is this truly an issue with my ISP or connection itself, as it appears, or is there still something I can do? From what I've read, the slow speed of my DSL connection should not by itself be an issue — that there's no "minimum speed" for passing the Cloudflare anti-bot verification. I'm in Alaska, so that may be an issue.

(I don't have much hope of contacting my ISP doing any good.)

Did you use the same browser when doing the hotspot method? If yes, it means your home IP address must be hard flagged in Cloudflare's system. The solution is to get request a new IP from your ISP. If that's not an option, you can try doing a hard reset of your modem but that doesn't guarantee a new IP address in most cases since IP allocation is handled on ISP's end. You can also try some VPNs and residential proxies as well

You might have malware on your computer (or other computers/devices in your house) and that's what's getting your home IP on cloudflare's shitlist.

Try changing your IP. Ask Google what your IP address is (or at one of the top hits) and then reboot your cable modem, see if your IP changes and see if your cloudflare problems go away.

If it goes away for a bit and then gets worse again I think that means you're part of a botnet.

My understanding of cloudflare is that they aggregate information about how your browse the internet from the sites that use their service to see if you browse in a humanlike way. Having any sort of adblocking, scriptblocking, cache deletion, history deletion, vpn, cookie blocking, etc might interfere with their ability to verify that you're a human. If they fail-safe and block access... There you go.

That being said, your description of trying different browsers makes me think the above probably isn't your problem. So maybe Cloudflare just thinks your ip is from a region with a lot of bot traffic? Especially if russian, chinese, korean addresses get into america through fiber lines and DNS hops in the bering straight... Maybe try a VPN instead? You can start with one of the free ones online just to test (though fyi those will 100% harvest your data) then get a real service if it works.

So, what are you reading?

I'm picking up al-Katibi's The Rules of Logic, an apparently influential Arabic logic primer. The book itself is actually quite short, with the commentary by the translator taking up the majority of the pages.

It has recently been said of Peter of Spain’s Summaries of Logic, probably written in the 1230s, that no other book on logic prior to the twentieth century had such wide readership or, in consequence, did so much to shape Western ways of constructing well-formed sentences and putting them together in valid arguments. But perhaps one other logic text has had just as many readers, and as profound an impact on ways of formal discourse and argument. In the Muslim East, al-Risālah al-Shamsiyyah (literally The Epistle [on Logical Rules] for Shams al-Dīn) was written some forty years after the Summaries, by someone who was Peter’s exact contemporary: Najm al-Dīn al-Kātibī (d. 675/1276). Al-Risālah al-Shamsiyyah also came to figure in the education of nearly every aspiring young scholar, and is still read in traditional schools.

Started a long-run re-read (or, rather, re-listen, as I am using audiobooks for that) of Nero Wolfe series. I've read many of them (some in originals, more in Russian translations) years ago, and decided to go back. So far I got through: Fer-de-Lance, The Rubber Band and The Red Box. Skipped The League of Frightened Men for now as the audiobook wasn't available, plan to fill up later. There's a lot of them spanning 40 years of Stout's lifetime, so I expect it to take quite a while to go through all of them (and of course I'll be taking breaks for other books) but so far the first three had been fun. It's a bit slower paced than our twitter age made us used to, but that's fine. I'll probably also pick up the next Dresden book sometime next month, but Ghost Story was kind of intense (in a good sense) and I don't want to ruin the impression by getting through too much too soon, so I'll let it sit down for a bit yet.

Just started the last book in Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan quartet, The Story of the Lost Child. Having had my suspicions during the first three books in the series, I can now confirm that protagonist Elena Greco has taken an overdose of Dumb Bitch Juice™.

Senshiro, by Natsume Soseki. Not terribly far in yet, will report once I'm done.

Other than that, I recently read the Godfather, which was okay. Better-written than expected, but on the other hand it didn't really do much for me.

No Bad Parts by Richard Schwartz.

I finished The Best Minds this week. Author Jonathan Rosen published several novels before writing this, and there are times when you feel like you're reading a novel rather than a work of non-fiction. That's not solely due to the manner of its telling, but also because the story itself is so surprising and so saturated with dark irony. Indeed, if it was a work of fiction, a satire of well-meaning but misguided deinstitutionalization efforts, its basic premise (a brilliant but troubled young man is diagnosed with schizophrenia, becomes the public face of contemporary efforts to break the stigma around mental illness and stop the mentally ill from being discriminated against, sells the rights to tell his inspirational biography to Hollywood for more than a million dollars – then has a psychotic break and stabs his pregnant fiancée to death) would seem almost painfully on-the-nose.

While reading the book, it struck me that it's a clever subversion of a genre of books and films I call "TOA stories": "triumph over adversity". These are formulaic and sentimental stories about a brilliant individual who faces some unexpected major obstacle in his life (physical disability, disease, mental illness), struggles mightily against it, and summons strength he didn't know he had to overcome it. Something something mind over matter, inner human resolve, a moving testament to the power of the human spirit etc. The Best Minds starts off following that structure to the letter, but where a conventional TOA story would have ended with Michael selling the rights to his story, marrying his girlfriend and delivering an inspirational speech, Minds keeps going, showing that the real thing is nowhere near that simple. In the end, adversity triumphed over Michael, not the other way around. Part of the reason adversity triumphed over him was because so many around him chose to pretend that he'd already triumphed over adversity, and hence missed (or, less charitably, ignored) obvious red flags that his condition was very much not a thing of the past. Rosen notes that, prior to his murdering his fiancée, so many articles about Michael described him as having "a history of schizophrenia", as opposed to "schizophrenic". Amusingly, the phrase "triumph over adversity" does appear in the book, in the form of a press release Rosen quotes about the film A Beautiful Mind. That film originated as a loose biopic about Michael, but after he murdered his fiancée, the producers decided they needed a more palatable lunatic for their subject.

Interestingly, after a certain point the real John Forbes Nash gave up taking antipsychotic medication, but near the end of A Beautiful Mind, Nash claims to be taking meds. Director Ron Howard felt this artistic license was the responsible choice, as he did not want to send the message that schizophrenics should attempt to overcome their condition via sheer willpower. His decision feels even more poignant when you understand the genesis of the project: Michael's story must have been weighing heavily on Howard's mind, as a cautionary tale of what can happen when schizophrenics don't take their medication.

The Best Minds is easily the best work of non-fiction I've read so far this year, and the saddest work of non-fiction I've read in years. Highly recommended.

Magic-school time-loop litRPG progression slop: Serpent's Coil. Twist: The protagonist of the story is, not the primary looper, but just a secondary looper who can be erased by the primary looper if he ceases to be useful.

Mildly interesting Harry Potter short story: The Subtle Science and Exact Art of Asking the Right Question

Potions is presumably based on medieval alchemy more than anything else. Slughorn's antidote lesson is even called "almost alchemical". Why shouldn't it look like it?

Besides which, the other thing that comes up a lot in fanon is tables of ingredient interactions. With the hundreds, perhaps thousands of ingredients used in various potions, those could fill whole volumes like the logarithm tables of the 1600s. But worse is having to keep track of all the interactions within a potion that might have dozens of ingredients. (Hermione's antidote in that same lesson had 52.)

But the thing is, that's not really how real-world chemistry works. In chemistry, you make one (or a few) intermediate products at each step (such as Syrup of Adoneta here), and you only have to keep track of interactions with those intermediate products, which themselves may fall into a few broad categories. That problem is still fiendishly complex (ask any pre-med student who's taken Organic Chemistry), but much more tractable, as it scales linearly rather than quadratically.

Even fics that go all-in on Snape mentoring Harry to become a potions master rarely give a reason for the brewing steps, rather seemingly pulling names of ingredients and interactions out of thin air. They rarely even address the question of why the Half-Blood Prince's canonical potions modifications work. Treating potions like real-world chemical synthesis could go a long way to resolving those questions.

TL;DR, if I had more free time and a degree in chemistry, it would be eminently possible to create a potions-centric canon rewrite every bit as rigorous and innovative as the Arithmancer-Verse was for arithmancy. But since I don't have either of those things, let this one-shot stand as a taste of what's possible.

Mildly entertaining magical-girl novella: An Uneasy Stalemate

The Bane known as Decay has watched his fellows getting slaughtered, and decided he wants no part in their fate. When he's ordered to cross the rift to Earth himself, he's willing to do anything to survive. There may be no chance of victory, but, with a little effort and a few acts very much against his nature, it might just be possible not to lose.

This is a short story, mostly following the POV of the very confused and slightly traumatised magical girls as they try to figure out what to do with their rather atypical enemy.

Mildly entertaining grimdark Madoka Magica fanfiction: Fargo DX

In the frostbitten American Midwest, ragged Magical Girls vie for territory to survive the unforgiving landscape. One such girl is Sloan Redfearn, who wastes away in no man's land after being betrayed by her best friend. Only one goal keeps her alive: Revenge.

Mildly entertaining grimdark Madoka Magica fanfiction: Fargo DX

If you didn't already know this, the same author (Bavitz) wrote "When I Win the World Ends", which is probably my #2 pokemon fanfic.

I can't say that I'm the biggest Pokémon fan. I have vague memories of watching a few third-generation anime episodes on television as a child, I caught all the Shadow Pokémon in Pokémon XD, and I've watched a fair number of gameplay videos (speedrun and competitive) on YouTube. That's the extent of my experience with the canon—enough that I probably could give correct labels to images of all the Pokémon from generations 1–3, but not many past those. I've read very little fanfiction for it, and none of that fanfiction interested me enough that I bothered to download it. The first four chapters of When I Win the World Ends do not spark much interest in me either.

(In fact, I'm not even the biggest Madoka Magica fan. IIRC, prior to reading Fargo DX, my knowledge of the magical-girl genre consisted of Sailor Nothing, Sailor Moon season 1, and scattered 4chan webms of Pretty Cure battles, in that order. It wasn't until after reading Fargo DX that I even bothered to watch Madoka Magica.)

It may help to know that When I Win the World Ends is specifically a fanfiction of competitive pokemon, inspired by the author's onetime league of legends obsession and smogon/pokemon showdown/vgc. Pokemon-as-sports-movie rather than pokemon-as-adventure-story, with all the megalomiania, pressure for victory, and strategic complexity that entails.

...of course if you already read and dismissed the first few chapters it probably just isn't for uou.

Who here uses Tesla FSD? I finally got a Tesla after two of my friends nagged me to for years. And holy shit, the car drives itself. How does Tesla not have like 90% market share? Why are people still buying Fords and Volkswagens?

The government should be incentivizing the crap out of these. I asked Astra and it estimates the U.S. loses 0.9 QALY's per person due to vehicle accidents. We could probably reduce this by 50% at least just by rolling out FSD.

Speaking of Teslas: I've probably not going to buy a Tesla anytime soon, but I've been offered Teslas by rental shops several times and I've so far declined, because driving an unfamiliar car in unfamiliar environment is kinda risky. So I wonder what's the experience of people that did drive it - is there any adjustment from driving a regular car that is needed? Can I just start it up and freakin drive or do I need some adjustments? How easy/hard is to get a hang of it from 0 experience?

Also, if I try it as a rental, what about range anxiety? I sometimes need to drive up to ~100 miles or more in such situations, of course mostly through urban-suburban landscape so there's always a gas station within 5-10 mins drive, but I have no idea about changing a Tesla. I remember some years ago I was out on a trip with friends, and the guy responsible for transport picked an EV (not Tesla, don't remember which one) and it turned out a minor annoyance to change it because a lot of nearby chargers had some kinds of "guests only" or "clients only" policies. I wonder what's the score on that now.

I probably wouldn't rent one. The battery can degrade with non-ideal charging. I've heard horror stories of people renting them and then having to stop at superchargers every 100 miles because of cold weather and a battery degraded by abuse.

There's also a weird quirk with EV's where taking your foot off the gas triggers regenerative breaking. So you can't "coast" to a stop. Taking the foot off the gas feels like breaking. You have to keep pressing the gas, just more lightly. Takes some getting used to.

Finally, all the controls are inside the touchscreen panel which is annoying. You can use Grok to do anything and it works amazingly but I'm not sure if you'd have to set this up on a rental.

I wonder if Tesla will set up a rental program for Tesla owners where I can keep all my configs and use self-driving. That would be sick.

Can I just start it up and freakin drive or do I need some adjustments?

Do you have any experience driving an EV? If not, you need to adjust your expectations with regards to the instant torque you get with them

I've used it a few times. It's nice for quick trips (under 5 minutes) but for longer stuff I find it actually more mentally draining because I'm forced to pay attention but am not keeping myself busy with driving. I think it's an ADHD thing. I really want to either be completely driving or checked out and playing Cyberpunk 2077, but with FSD supervised I kinda need to watch someone else drive and it's hard not to let my attention wander.

I use it almost every time I drive. It's not perfect, but almost certainly better than me. I did manage to buy it outright just before they discontinued that option. You still need to pay a little attention, but you can definitely just stare out the windshield and zone out.

Haven't ridden in a Tesla with FSD in a while, but I have ridden in Waymos a number of times when visiting cities that have them. It's an impressively good experience IMO, though the price is not really noticeably lower than Uber etc. Naturally, supposedly super-progressive NYC (where I currently live) seems to be dragging their feet on approving them to operate here, while many redder cities seem to be much more enthusiastic about it.

Waymos are totally awesome, I always use them in cities which have them. All the convenience of Uber without some annoying guy trying to chat with you. It's a bit pricey but so far I can afford it, fortunately, and sometimes wait times are a bit long in busy places, so not ideal but quite good.

I guess right now the situation serves everyone except the customer. Taxi unions and cities don’t complain about technological unemployment, Waymo pads its margins, and Uber and the other companies don’t have to borrow billions at high rates to finance self driving fleets to compete with each other in a race to the bottom (which would follow full deregulation and which would drive down margins precipitously).

Waymo wait times are IME very high during peak hours despite the prices they charge being much different than Uber/Lyft. It's quite clear Waymo has a car shortage.

People really hate paying $100/month for software products. It feels like you're getting ripped off even though it's literal Jetsons tech.

I hate paying $100/m for pretty much anything. If it's not consumable/renewable (like water, food, power) I'd rather buy it upfront. I know how much money I have now, so I can figure out if I can afford it, but the future is always risky.

Literal Jetsons tech or not, I like to own things, not rent things. Though in fairness they used to offer that as an option, not sure if they still do.

Isn’t it still illegal to actually let the car drive itself? You can’t go to the back of the car and fall asleep, you can’t even officially use your phone with both hands to watch movies or play games. You can’t even look out of the window and forget about what’s in front of you. (You can do these things in a Waymo, but not in your own self driving car).

Yes. But the experience of driving is just so much better and more relaxing. It's one of those things you just have to try. My wife is completely sold as well.

I'm waiting for the F in FSD to expand past the RoboTaxis. I'd love to just read a book while software does all my driving, but AFAIK that's not allowed yet, and if I have to watch the road anyway I might as well have fun and stay more attentive by driving while I do.

An acquaintance of mine who lives closer to the city got a Tesla last year and took me for a ride to show off its FSD functionality. It mistook a crack in the asphalt for the median line and sent us swerving into the opposite lane. Thankfully it was a back road in fuck-off nowhere so we were the only ones on the road, but it did make me hesitant to rely on the technology right now. It probably works better in places closer to the core.

I think there was a phase change at some point last year where required interventions went down by 90%, making it much more useful.

IMO, the same thing happened with coding in the last 12 months where at this point I don't even bother to check if Astra's code is correct since it always is.

I have considered it, but I like my truck.

Tesla really needs to come out with a light pickup, a minivan, and a lay flat camper van.

What is your favorite dungeon crawler OST and why is it King’s Field IV?

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