Not that I know of. In the end you are editing the browser rendering parameters. Anyone can inspect the page and see that the opacity on the page is being turned down. Finding where it is happening is the only thing you can really make hard. Have a couple of the pass through scripts be machine generated and you can have it use nonsensical variable names and a bunch of dummies that lead on wild goose chases. It could all be fixable, but you can make it a pain in the ass. Add a redundancy or two and it will make debugging a nightmare because even if one is fixed, the others will make it look as though it has not.

The real answer is to have NEVER do freelance web development inside the client’s firewall. Never. If they try to require it, walk away. If it is inside their firewall then they can just take the source code and stiff you. If they try to spout some BS about security, say that is precisely what you are concerned about and point blank ask them what safeguards they are willing to allow you to put in place for developing in their system. If the answer is none, walk. If they are willing to let you VPN in, run the code from a local copy over the VPN and node lock it so if someone attempts to serve it from another machine it fails.

Apologies. I’m tired and hate businesses taking advantage of “Independent Contractors”.

Bury it six JavaScript and 2 php scripts deep so it is a pain in the ass to find.

No, they will continue to do that because it makes them uncomfortable.

Tbh I have always had the same feeling about the absolute limit of speed being the speed of light (and thus most of relativity). I have always been curious if the behavior we observe that lines up with the theory is something akin to transition energy in a material. Once a material reaches the appropriate temperature to phase change, additional energy is needed to actually change phases. If you were able to raise water to precicely 100°C and only impart exactly as much energy is lost to infrared radiation and other effects, it would never actually start boiling.

Hypothetically, of we were water mocules observing our environment, that transition energy might look like a hard barrier with no way to observe the other side. Same idea here, we see masses increase and time slow down based on acceleration, and it appears asymptotic, but there is nothing saying there is not some here yet undiscovered energy level where the fabric of space begins to behave differently and the transition to superluminal velocities becomes possible.

As hard as it is and as much as I would like help, I am so happy to be the only Dev in my company capable of working on my projects and to have bosses who essentially give me carte blanch on how to code and deal with issues.

I have had to stop telling people that HTML is not a programming language. I crushed too many souls that way.

It would be of the state flags, with resolution and compression determined by the state supreme courts obviously.

We can use bits instead of bytes. That way it can look 8x bigger than it really is and have no real bearing to modern computing.

I had some dude here trying to tell me, a mathematician and data scientist who is developing AIs for fun and is a holder of an MA in Visual Effects specializing in procedural design, who has worked on algorithmic video game development, what AIs are or are going to be capable of in procedural/generative/algorithmic game design “because he has played a lot of games” and argued for days with me, cherry-picking everything I wrote attempting to use my words refuting him to support his arguments.

Just… Infuriating.

Really? I haven’t done the ChatGPT thing, but I know I have spent days searching for solutions to some of the more esoteric problems I run into. I can’t imagine that asking an AI then debugging the return would be any more intensive as long as the AI solution functioned enough to be a starting point.

If I am going to poke small holes in the argument, the exact same thing happens every day when coders google a problem and find a solution on Stack Exchange or the like and copy/paste it into the code without understanding what it does. Yes, it was written initially by someone who understood it, but the end result is the exact same. Code that was implemented without understanding the inner workings.

I think my favorite allegory is the “We’ll See Farmer”.

Once upon a time, there was an old farmer who had worked his crops for many years. One day his horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit. “Such bad luck,” they said sympathetically, “you must be so sad.” “We’ll see,” the farmer replied. The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it two other wild horses. “How wonderful,” the neighbors exclaimed. “Not only did your horse return, but you received two more. What great fortune you have!” “We’ll see,” answered the farmer. The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. The neighbors again came to offer their sympathy on his misfortune. “Now your son cannot help you with your farming,” they said. “What terrible luck you have!” “We’ll see,” replied the old farmer. The following week, military officials came to the village to conscript young men into the army. Seeing that the son’s leg was broken, they passed him by. The neighbors congratulated the farmer on how well things had turned out. “Such great news. You must be so happy!” The man smiled to himself and said once again. “We’ll see.”

Only time can yield the ramifications of an event. There is no luck, good or bad. Things happen. On balance, they are neither good nor bad, just events to be dealt with. Be patient and continue doing the best you are able to with any given circumstances. I have always tried to keep a goal in mind and move through life’s circumstances in the vague direction of those goals. Things have happened that have ended up having positive impacts, and things have had negative. None of them were clear at the time and only in hindsight can I see which were which.

Omg! I just had one of these earlier this week. Dumbass with a confirmation bias needs the size of Texas and a case of Dunning-Kruger that would make that one guy auditing a intro to “insert technical field” course that always knows the answer jealous. I am a degree holder in multiple integral fields to the topic, work adjacent to it and am a weekend researcher in the field and he was seriously trying to tell me that he didn’t need to understand anything to tell me that his opinions were empirical fact that didn’t need support. I tried to educate initially, but it became clear that all he was going to do was cherry-pick details out of context to support his opinion. I spent way too long. I just hope some other readers found the educational bits informational.

Yup. I love that I got my math degree, but it does give me an understanding of things like this that are usually miles ahead of my cohorts. It makes my skin crawl to see the kinds of things that these companies harvest. You mention restaurant QR codes. I’m sure not all of them are, but it is so easy to build harvesting APIs into websites that host those menus. I do the Analytics work for my company and the things that even just the basic analytics tag harvests, let alone setting up specialized eventing or more invasive APIs.

Touché

It is even worse than that. Given the list of data you have provided it is actually possible to discern general activity. You can determine if you are playing video games, working out, watching TV, out on a date, hanging with friends. As long as your phone is in your possession, the patterns for every behavior have a distinct fingerprint for each person. With enough collection, they can be filtered and categorized.

Source: I am an analytical statistician.

What’s bad is that modern spam detection can employ semantic algorithms so it would still catch all of them as the I’m as message. The use of synonyms in the optionals is a huge vulnerability in the scam.

Post-scarcity is a theoretical economic situation in > which most goods can be produced in great abundance with minimal human labor needed, so that they become available to all very cheaply or even freely.[1][2]

Post-scarcity does not mean that scarcity has been eliminated for all goods and services but that all people can easily have their basic survival needs met along with some significant proportion of their desires for goods and services.[3] Writers on the topic often emphasize that some commodities will remain scarce in a post-scarcity society.[4][5][6][7]

It can mean that if you cherry-pick your clauses, but if you actually take the entire text into account, you are absolutely wrong. Tell me what “basic needs” are met cheaply or freely to the general population of the planet? And I mean all of us. From the children in Beverly Hills to the grandparents in Mozambique. Food, shelter, water. At a bare minimum, those three are available cheaply to everyone on the planet on a post-scarcity planet. We absolutely do not live on one of those at this point.

Just gonna point out that by definition, a world that is post-scarcity is post-scarcity for all of its inhabitants. Your assertion that there are “less developed” nations that “don’t get basic resources” means we are not post-scarcity.

Does “whatever is on the Hamburger Helper box” count?