busybee fluffy rambles

Some comments have happened on certain other sites from my last post about the Comma. Most of them are in the form of, “This person is insane/irresponsible/reckless for doing this.”

Some points:

1. The vertigo attacks are triggered by anxiety, and only last a few seconds. Having the safety net of automatic steering (which is really just fancy lane centering) has cut down on my anxiety significantly, and I haven’t had a vertigo attack while driving ever since I installed the Comma 3X.
2. If an attack were to last more than 1-2 seconds I would still pull over.
3. I have over 30 years of driving experience and have never caused an accident. In fact the only time I’ve ever been in a car accident while driving was when someone rear-ended me at a stoplight. This was 30 years ago.
4. I live in an area with a lot of Teslas, where it is almost certain that many people are using Tesla FSD. I am having the Comma do way less for me than what people — possibly several of the same people making comments questioning my safety — entrust Tesla FSD with. I would absolutely trust Comma’s training process far more than Tesla’s.
5. I am disabled, basically unemployed (and what little work I do, I do it from home), and don’t have reliable access to transportation otherwise. Without the Comma unit I would be completely stuck at home or reliant on Lyft/Uber, which would get very expensive very fast and not allow me to do most of the things I actually need a car for. On days when I’m having worse anxiety/vestibular issues I still don’t drive, I take Lyft or put a trip off. I am still not driving all that much, and I have, so far, about one hour total of drive time with the Comma.
6. I am taking on the full liability of using this device, and I am still in control of the braking and acceleration.
7. Also, notably, even when I have had vertigo attacks while driving, I have never lost control of my vehicle. I just feel like I might, and having a supportive presence is the best thing to pull me out of an anxiety state.

Choose kindness and charity.

Wellp, my whack-a-mole approach finally got to be too much to maintain. The last day or so my server has been absolutely inundated with traffic from thousands of IP blocks, all coming from China, and I got sick of trying to keep up with it myself.

I looked into setting up Anubis and preparing to just whitelist a lot of IndieWeb things, but it’s all just so very overwhelming and for now I’ve gone with Cloudflare, problematic as they are, because the amount of energy I can put into this shrinks every day and sometimes I just want things to stop sucking for a while.

All of my DNS has propagated but of course it’ll be a while before the bots decide to update their own DNS caches, so my server is still getting absolutely hammered, but hopefully things will subside, and in the meantime things are at least responsive.

I guess at some point I’ll have to figure out how to actually set up TLS with Cloudflare (since I’ve been using Letsencrypt wildcard certs but obviously those don’t work anymore when Cloudflare is handling my DNS) but that’s a problem for future me. Also I’ll definitely be on the lookout to make sure that Cloudflare is properly honoring my login cookies. It’d definitely be unfortunate if it gets confused about logins, which is one of the more common failure modes with HTTP proxies.

I’m also super worried that this will interfere with IndieWeb stuff, because of course most of the anti-bot things assume that any traffic coming from data centers or from headless/scriptless user agents is abusive. Which is, y'know, 99.99% accurate, but that 0.01% is stuff I really care about (namely interop).

Anyway. I resent that this is the state of the Internet right now. It’s getting really difficult for me to find anything positive about AI when this is how the industry treats everyone.

There are so many papercuts with keeping isso running and I really ought to get around to writing something better. Working on software is the last thing I want to do right now though.

On the plus side, not a single person mentioned the broken comments to me, so I’m guessing nobody actually cares about them anymore. I only noticed things were broken when I was looking at one of my particular articles and was like, wait, where did all the comments go?!

If you’re at all tuned into the EV space, you’ve probably heard of the Slate truck, for example from this Ars Technica article.

I am super into the concept. I probably wouldn’t buy one, because it doesn’t actually fit any of my needs as described (also IMO it’s kind of fugly), but I really hope that they expand their offerings a bit. In particular, I’d love to see a four-door model happen (I don’t drive other people often but when I do they usually have accessibility concerns!), and the addition of power windows would be really nice as well.

I do have my doubts about whether it can actually launch for the anticipated price, but they’re at least getting a lot of hype right now, and I love the idea of a barebones modular vehice where you only add the stuff you actually care about.

If I were to get one I’d definitely want to add a CarPlay display and audio amplifier. Fortunately there are already plenty of things on the market that could be used for this purpose, and I’m sure those will be among the first things to be adapted for the Slate if/when the vehicle comes to market.

I also hope that the hype around this causes other manufacturers to realize that there’s a market for lower-spec EVs. I’d absolutely love to see a low-spec version of a Telo, for example.

I’ve been using Gumroad as a digital asset store for years now, as well as for some of my physical goods. But I’ve been wanting to extricate myself from it for a while now, and recent developments have finally pushed me all the way there, and the timing was good given I’ve gotten a Dealer’s Den booth at Furality Somna.

My digital assets are now primarily on itch.io, and physical goods are now just on Etsy for now, although I’m not a huge fan of Etsy either, and my physical books aren’t currently available anywhere (not that they ever sell to begin with). I guess I should look at my ko-fi shop as an alternative for that stuff.

Anyway. I’ve already sent (manually-generated) itch.io claim keys to everyone who paid for my VRChat assets, and for folks who bought my books on Gumroad they can request a download key as well if they want to be able to redownload it from itch.io for some reason.

Now to figure out if I can sell my shares in the company…

Just a reminder that my choir, STANCE, is having our annual fundraiser show in a few short weeks (on May 3), consisting of both a talent showcase and a silent auction. This organization is super important to me since it helps us to celebrate trans joy and self-expression. The show can be attended in-person or online, and tickets are available for purchase either way.

These funds will go directly towards supporting our upcoming Pride concert on June 20 and 21.

I will be performing one of my own songs, and in an ensemble for another song.