It's German, but shouldn't matter much in th days of AI.
ChatGPT anwsers to some questions brought up here based on the NZZ article:
1. The "Desert Kites" or stone structures were dated using two methods. The researchers used Carbon-14 (C14) dating on charcoal samples found near the structures. Carbon-14 dating can only be used on once-living material like wood or bone, hence its use on the charcoal. They also used a technique called Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL), which measures the last time sand grains were exposed to sunlight, based on the accumulation of electrons in their crystal structure. These two techniques revealed that the structures are between 7560 and 9000 years old.
2. Your instinct aligns with the interpretations of the researchers. The article suggests that the rock carvings depicting these structures may have been created after their construction rather than as blueprints. One reason for this is that the physical structures follow topography, incorporating or based on terrain features which are not reflected in the plans. The researchers propose that these drawings could have been used for hunting planning, demonstrating attributes of the structures that aren't noticeable from ground level. Also, they argue these drawings could serve as a demonstration of knowledge, the ability to depict spatial elements, and the act of transmitting this knowledge. The idea that these could be plans created before construction is less likely but not entirely dismissed.
Hetzner Ubuntu Server, a good firewall configuration and automated backups. I can't think of anything easier. I tried a lot of stuff, but this just works. For internal applications I basically block all traffic outside of our office network, activate auto updates for the OS and just stick to one version of the app for as long as I can.
Edit: and only one app per server. Also only the Hetzner Cloud offering with managed backups and managed firewall.
Why do you think you need to touch them after deployment? You just pay the monthly bill. The thing is you can't just deploy and rest usually as there are often security concerns, your provider could run out of service, various system failures which require a restore of an healthy state or similiar. Even if you serve just static files, there could be the need to adjust your DNS, because the provider changed after 5 years something, or some other provider-related configuration. You really want to care for all those things at your frist deploy if you don't want to care for them long-term. The Hetzner firewall makes frequent security app updates mostly unnecessary, Ubuntu auto updates care for the security of the OS, the backups make recovery easy, if Hetzner goes out of service, you can restore your system wherever you want as it is just an Ubuntu server, by keeping only one app per server you also reduce the complexity of the system, separate the systems, so that failure can't spread.
Managing a server is nowadays with offerings like Hetzner the easiest way to run apps which just need to work and don't need to scale to exponentially over time. Why add anything on top of it? It's done really within 5 minutes if you know what you do.
If you need something which scales and doesn't require file storage / databases, then I'd go for the provider-agnostic Serverless framework. If you need storage and/or databases then it really depends, as Serverless gets costly at these things and more complex and there are more provider-lock-ins. Containers may make mor sense in such cases.
At our company we use these two systems to reduce maintaining basically to zero.
- a Google account can have multiple Google Payment profiles and multiple Google Ads profiles
- every Google Ads profile has a Google Payments profile tied to it (if you finished setup and started displaying ads)
- once you started using a Google Ads profile, the link to the payment profile can't be changed anymore
In detail:
- we "transformed" a normal Google account to a Google Business account
- the business account got access to the Google Ads profile and payment profile of the normal account
- the old account stopped existing, you can't log in anymore or recover access somehow. It looks like the old account became the new one.
- the new account has no admin access to the Ads profile, and it doesn't have access to the payments profile linked to the ads profile
- the only admin is the old account, which should be the same as the new one, but it isn't somehow. So the old account is somewhat gone, but not completely, but enough gone, that you can't access it anyhow
- we used it likes this for some time, probably 2–3 years without realising that we have no admin access
- we contacted Google support about 2 years ago due to this, and they gave us admin rights over the ads account
- the payments profile linked to the ads account still can't be accessed, but we never used anything related to this, so we didn't notice
- then some or all (unclear) of our payment profiles got suspended. Google Ads continues to work for another 10 days.
- we immediately take action and fill out the form accordingly to the UI. Open Google Ads -> Your payments profile is suspended [...]. To solve this, click "Fix it". -> click Fix it -> a form opens -> fill out the form -> they say "Open this link and copy the payments ID you see" -> click the link -> copy the ID -> paste it -> send the form
- then the Google support staff starts going crazy, often no responses at all, nearly 2 weeks pending, then the ticket just disappears without further notice, false promises over and over (absolute hell, not the usual stuff, 10+ tickets)
- we learn that usually all payments profiles get blocked if one payment profile gets flagged, but also that usually all get unblocked if we successfully fill out the form. That's why they don't bother to tell you which ID to fill in, just copy any ID from the link, which leads to an ID of any payment profile
- then our payment profiles get unblocked, all, except the crucial one which is tied to the ads profile
- guess what, the payment profile tied to our ads account is somehow not really tied to us, but also isn't closed, it exists and works and Google lets you use it, but no original user can access it, so it doesn't get unblocked automatically with the other profiles, but somehow it got blocked because of the others (?), it looks like that it got blocked 10 days after the other payment profiles got blocked
- The UI at Google Payments tells us now, that all our payments profiles are ready to use, we test it, they work!
- The UI at Google Ads tells us that our payment profile is still suspended. Probably just a delay, right?
- Just in case, as the responsible business we are, we ask Google, they tell us, to fill out the form. We say we did, and it worked, so they say, again, fill out the form without further advice.
- Now, if you click the links send by the Google support or the "Fix it" link by Google Ads, you will end up at the same form which clearly says (with a hyperlink to the Google payments settings): "Enter the 12-digit payments profile ID shown in your Google payments settings." (https://support.google.com/payments/contact/account_verifica...)
- In the end, we filled out the form again with the ID from the Google Ads Settings and got unblocked. However, to realise that we need to do this took some time.
That's possible. Install Firefox Nightly, create a custom addon collection on the Firefox addon site, add an user agent switcher to the collection, add the collection to Firefox Nightly. You now owe me a parade.
It's German, but shouldn't matter much in th days of AI.
ChatGPT anwsers to some questions brought up here based on the NZZ article:
1. The "Desert Kites" or stone structures were dated using two methods. The researchers used Carbon-14 (C14) dating on charcoal samples found near the structures. Carbon-14 dating can only be used on once-living material like wood or bone, hence its use on the charcoal. They also used a technique called Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL), which measures the last time sand grains were exposed to sunlight, based on the accumulation of electrons in their crystal structure. These two techniques revealed that the structures are between 7560 and 9000 years old.
2. Your instinct aligns with the interpretations of the researchers. The article suggests that the rock carvings depicting these structures may have been created after their construction rather than as blueprints. One reason for this is that the physical structures follow topography, incorporating or based on terrain features which are not reflected in the plans. The researchers propose that these drawings could have been used for hunting planning, demonstrating attributes of the structures that aren't noticeable from ground level. Also, they argue these drawings could serve as a demonstration of knowledge, the ability to depict spatial elements, and the act of transmitting this knowledge. The idea that these could be plans created before construction is less likely but not entirely dismissed.