Notes for August 2, 2026

The glorious burden of stockpiling little glass jars

Who DOESN'T have a few dozen of these lying around?

I ♥ RSS

Originally posted to Hacker News and linked to by the guy who invented RSS before coming across my dash: I ❤️ RSS:

Put the badge on your homepage and submit your URL. Once we’ve checked the link back and found your feed, you’re on the list — and in an OPML subscription list any reader can subscribe to in one action.

It's a blog directory like ooh.directory or blogroll.org kinda. But with an emphasis on RSS feeds, and making it easy to subscribe to the firehose through OPML.

MySpace for iPhone in 2010

Some nostalgia from the liminal space between when the internet was a place you only accessed through a beige tower and the beginning of smartphones.

Jacques Vallée Spent 70 Years Investigating UFOs. His Final Journal Says the Mystery Is Bigger Than Aliens.

This is a really interesting read if you're into the search for ET. But like everything else in that area of interest, we're just left wondering. But that's kinda his point; it's a highly speculative field with little evidence and lots of personal testimony.

His final journal does not solve the UFO mystery. It shows why the mystery has survived every effort to solve it: weak evidence mixed with strong experience, secrecy mixed with ignorance, physical anomalies mixed with human meaning, authentic witnesses mixed with opportunists and a culture that demands certainty before the facts can support it.

we don't shame smart glasses wearers enough

Three are two main things here that are terrifying:

These glasses are also vulnerable to attacks, and I'm sure if nudifier apps are already a thing now, it won't take long for live nudification on the glasses. Them wearing smart glasses is in solidarity with the panopticon we are in, with all the pranksters, pickup artist, street interviewers and other online scum who embarrass, scare and harass strangers (especially women) to generate views on social media, and all the disgusting people who generate nudes of people non-consensually via AI.

[...]

Smart glasses wearers can tell people all they want that they are not like that, but no one should believe that. They rely on people not being able to spot the glasses, not knowing what the consequences are, or not knowing what the recording light is for, and their reassurances are worthless as other wearers modify their glasses so the recording light is always off.

[...]

You have to understand that the wearers are playing a significant part in not only gathering faces in motion (for companies like Clearview.AI), but also training spatial data for AI to act in three-dimensional space - eye, head and body movements, hand-eye-coordination and more. This, undoubtedly, will not only be used in autonomous AI weapons, but any context where bots are supposed to replace humans negatively.

Nudify everyone in Costco while providing training data to kill people with the bravery of being out of range. Got it. You're a fucking Stephen Miller tier creep if you own a pair of these.

America's Kinkiest States [Say It With A Condom]

From NYPost.com:

The new study conducted by Say It With A Condom ranked every state by quantifying everything from how many times residents get it on each week to searches for sexy online content and visits to adult-only stores.

In Ohio, we do it missionary style no more than once every two months, with the lights off. The only states that ranked less kinky than us at #45 were Mississippi, Georgia, Tennessee, Florida and Texas.