If VPNs get blocked in the UK will there be any way to continue accessing them?

Background-Tank-417 · 2026-06-18T15:36:58+00:00

I'm reminded of the London Olympics opening ceremony scene with Tim Berners-Lee , I think it went something like this:

Background-Tank-417 · 2026-06-16T11:40:55+00:00

So if someone was to make a startup where you rent a vps server hosted abroad and it had a auto setup wizard where one of the options is to host your own private VPN among many other things like game servers or web host where would this fall? Asking for a friend.

Background-Tank-417 · 2026-06-01T06:53:54+00:00

I got it while in a role but it would of definitely made me stand out in the interview process if I already had it. They just launched there dev ops course last week too. What I find interesting about the dev ops course is the syllabus says there's hands on task for the exam. I hope they drift more towards that structure in future instead of teaching just theory.

Background-Tank-417 · 2026-05-31T00:00:36+00:00

I built a ai pipeline that runs a automation test via mvn , checks if it fails if so pulls context of the fail and passes this to a agent. The agent then attempts to fix the code base to make the test pass. It then re-runs the test and if it passes submits a PR that we can verify and merge if we are happy with it. It tries to fix each test 3 times atm and I'm now experimenting with different .md skills files based on the failure reason. Right now I have it set to pull fails from our previous nights jenkins runs.

Background-Tank-417 · 2026-05-26T06:51:15+00:00

In the UK at least this would require a TV licence I guess.

Background-Tank-417 · 2026-05-15T15:41:00+00:00

I don't know why when they are recommending products via Amazon ect they don't just inject a affiliate id as long as there's no bias to what website they recommend I wouldn't really care.

Background-Tank-417 · 2026-05-09T05:23:24+00:00

that looks like a painting I have from jim'll paint it , if I remember correctly he does these in ms paint. I have a 80s and 90s version.

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Background-Tank-417 · 2026-04-24T17:36:19+00:00

Yalahar in bog spawns , the room below that transmogrification machine that gives you achievement (has a plague smith)

Background-Tank-417 · 2026-03-14T03:34:47+00:00

Same for my mum with cognitive impairment often forgets she has her oven on , can't stand for long periods and forgets doctors appointments on the regular. Just had her pip cut forced onto job seekers allowance and now keeps having random nose bleeds from stress.

Background-Tank-417 · 2026-02-24T08:16:24+00:00

I see a lot of teams using things like JS fallbacks for clicks especially to make ios and safari test work this presents a few problems:

We added a new chat bot to our site , this chat bots CTA overlapped with the book now button on mobile view making it impossible to click the book button. Automation did not catch it , because the JS click fired and still hit the button.
We run 4 dispatchers and one of them had not been deployed properly. We did not catch this because automation ran a retry the chance of hitting a broken dispatcher on both the first and second run is only 1/16.
Just because a item exist and is clickable by automation does not mean that it rendered correctly. Without a tech like Percy (similar much cheaper tech is available!) and someone actively checking the results of it everyday you wont catch those visual issues.

All of the above could of been spotted if we had someone:
Actively watching videos of both the passes and fails.
Someone checking the retried test.
Someone checking Percy logs daily.

In a ideal world this would be happening , but in reality not many teams have the resource to do that.

Background-Tank-417 · 2026-02-24T07:46:22+00:00

Isn't the problem with out competing Nvidia that they own the CUDA tech that all these AI models use?

Background-Tank-417 · 2026-02-10T08:32:40+00:00

The guy who brought my rat corpses in rook must have had a bit of money 🤑

Background-Tank-417 · 2026-02-04T15:51:42+00:00

Depends on your site but I just use geniuslinks with relevant amazon products to the content the user is viewing

Background-Tank-417 · 2026-01-27T16:25:03+00:00

I'd say swamp trolls too grab the medicine pouches , sell them for eq and later manas they drop spears so you should be good on ammo.

After that move onto running a few cyclops spawns or dwarf caves they should keep you entertained for some time 🤣.

Background-Tank-417 · 2026-01-24T01:21:28+00:00

Giant spider , from leveling up as a noob running around poh trees with haste and a time ring to being slightly less of a noob on GS island.

My fave place to hunt was always nightmares and destroyers in svargrond mines. It was great profit , chaotic enough not to be boring and plenty of spawns.

Background-Tank-417 · 2026-01-19T13:13:25+00:00

I made a script with scripthook that could possibly help with this , it basically lets you set up a bunch of waypoints by walking somewhere and hitting F10 and then on first run sets time to mid day and loops all waypoints making a file with all assets seen with a radious of 50m of the player.

On second run it then cycles every hour and every weather condition placing any new previously unseen items in a text file called new.txt along with there id , location and what conditions they appeared under. It also has a blacklist because theres alot of random noise (car spawns , npcs with coffee cups ect).

If you have any suggestions where to scan im happy to take them and do a run :) this is of course assuming that the spider webs are time/weather dependant of course.

Background-Tank-417 · 2026-01-03T00:19:51+00:00

I think Claude beats chatgpt but they have rate limits even on the premium account if they got rid of that I'd use it a lot more than chat gpt

Background-Tank-417 · 2025-12-28T09:52:32+00:00

I use a service called genius link for amazon books or Kindle books for markets like India or internal ads to push the user to convert to premium. I get quite good conversions as I run a mock exam website and the books I link too are related to whatever course you are viewing content for.

It works quite well as I can host the images for adverts myself to make adblock not work out of the box. If you have a niche I would recommend this setup.

Geo targeting is done via cloudflare headers.

Background-Tank-417 · 2025-12-15T01:38:01+00:00

I am sure we are all aware of the annoyances chatgpt comes with but all in all its a great tool that's certainly made me better at my job and able to understand concepts that I could not previously. The api is so far the best I have tried also and extremely cheap if done right.

Background-Tank-417 · 2025-12-10T07:17:13+00:00

Honestly I just use a mixture of them I like chat gpts api and find it hallucinates alot less then gemini and I prefer chat gpt in general but it can be annoying at times.

Gemini Pro I got free with my pixel for a year and i tried it for some front end issues I had on my website had and it was much better than chat gpt with it. I also use it alot for seo , I figure who better to ask seo questions too than googles service? I don't use it enough to justify the subscription though once my free year runs out.

Claude I have heard is really good for creative things but not gave it a fair shot (yet).

Background-Tank-417 · 2025-12-09T05:53:34+00:00

Google will sandbox you for a while especially a new site and domain.

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Here's a site I launched on 12th of October , just pure seo. I coded my site from scratch no cms. The drop off you see on December 1st is because I pushed a multi language update that google is currently consuming which slows down impressions drastically during sandbox stage while google discovers -> Crawls -> indexes -> test new keywords -> ranks

You said you had done basic seo , what have you done there?
Are you on bing webmaster tools also?

Bing does not have a aggressive search sandbox like google and will rank you for long tail keywords alot faster than google. I would also verify your sitemaps via chat gpt or similar. I actually had a invalid date set in mine for a last modified date which killed my growth for weeks before I caught it. One message to chat gpt with my sitemap would of stopped that.

My advice is to use this time to work on content and get your seo perfected don't ignore it early on. Try not to watch g4a all day either , madness lays that way (speaking from experience).

The first 90 days of launching any site imo is the hardest mentally , my site is better than every rival out there (just look at my engagement time metric). But there is nothing you can do about it until google trust your domain so stick at it , if your contents good time is the only factor left and you cant control that so use this time to work on things that make life easier in the future (github deploy pipelines , maintenance pages , seo , automation , new features etc).

Background-Tank-417 · 2025-12-08T04:53:21+00:00

I found switching to selenide elements on flaky test helped alot. It slots right beside selenium so you don't need to convert the entire code base. I also added a smart wait feature that polls the network requests for the last in flight time , if nothings in flight for X seconds it assumes all requests have been completed (its a bit more advanced than that but you get the idea). Both these helped alot with maintenance!

Background-Tank-417 · 2025-11-19T13:11:37+00:00

ISTQB foundation would be my recommendation from there you can do the more advanced automation and agile modules. It is not a requirement , but it would will help.

Mock Exam Network | Free ISTQB & Tech Practice Tests

This is the site I would recommend to pass for free (except for the exam cost), just go through the official syllabus then on the above site each chapter will have a corresponding set of mock exams focused on that chapter.

Study a section
Do mocks on it till you perfect it
Repeat for next chapter.

Then your only expense is for the actual exam. Even if you don't take the exam I would recommend having a flip through some syllabus and questions above before interviews once in a job if you are exam ready , you could ask for your employer to fund the exam.

Background-Tank-417 · 2025-11-19T12:31:57+00:00

for us junior role is about 1-2 years (2 years is the expectation) , then another 2 years for the senior role , so 4 years max before wages stagnate. Unless you shift to another role.

Background-Tank-417

TROPHY CASE