nick

But the thing is, this battle doesn't exist. It's a narrative believed by the tech press and by a lot of internet users who don't remember a time before the Big Platforms on the internet, but it makes as little sense when you poke at it as the claim that the local coffee shop is done for because it won't become Starbucks.

Well put. I hate that kind of cringe, "if you ain't first you're last" Ricky Bobby mindset. We need diversity and the freedom to build whatever kind of communities we wanna build. Not everything has to be one size fits all.

Not every coffee shop needs to be Starbucks to be successful. Not every place you hang out online needs to be Facebook or Instagram to be successful. Not even if it's social media shaped. And not just because, as I've argued, your internet can actually be small, and be healthy being small. But because it's actually kind of crazy to think that every digital space must be, or be on its way to being, the One Place Everyone Is.

Yesss 100%. Everyone is different. Why is Big Social so desperate to eliminate freedom of choice? I want different options. I'm not going to spend my life being loyal to one brand per category of thing, you know? I'll drink Pepsi out of a Coca-Cola glass, I don't give a damn. I like variety and I don't want to be on the most homogenized and sanitized timeline. I wanna live in the one where I have an overwhelming amount of choices. I want a federated ecosystem of different cliques and factions on different corners of the web. I don't wanna live in a fucking Black Mirror episode where there's one tv channel, one website, one food product...

Different strokes for different folks.

Ohio ranked as one of the worst states in the country, according to ‘U.S. News & World Report’

As a guy who lives deep within the caustic bowels of Central Ohio, I can attest to this. There are vast oceans of corn as far as the eye can see. Most of the spring and summer smells like cow shit. Everyone's driving around in jacked up Chevies with truck nuts, rolling coal and flicking Pall Mall Red 100s butts out the window with a tattered TRUMP 2020 flag flapping around in the humidity. We're as red as Texas but somehow still considered a swing state. A significant amount of my energy is spent daydreaming about leaving everything behind and running away to Seattle.

PBS broadcaster loses access to 50TB of data comprising 70 years of TV history after contracted cloud storage vendor goes defunct — public TV channel sues Iron Mountain data center, which hosts archival materials, to ensure preservation

Nine PBS is afraid that it will lose over 70 years of archival materials and programming after its contracted cloud storage vendor has apparently gone out of business. According to Current, the channel used Open Source Storage, or OSS, for storing over 50TB of data — but it suddenly lost access to its data earlier this year.

This is your periodic reminder to backup your data ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

'Alien Technology': Harvard Scientist Warns Declassified Pentagon Files Reveal Huge UFO Discovery

Renowned Harvard theoretical physicist Avi Loeb evaluated the chilling report, suggesting the anomaly could stem from powerful electromagnetic disruptions, classified government black projects, or potentially groundbreaking alien technology.

It’s always potentially groundbreaking alien technology with this guy.

Astronomers find entirely new kind of object in space

Astronomers think that the object is probably a hugely dense cloud of gas. It is not powered by nuclear fusion, like a normal star, but a black hole at its centre.

Now THIS is some space news I can get behind. Man, that'd be a cool name for a grunge song. "Black Hole Star"... feels oddly familiar but I can't put my finger on it. I guess I'll just file it away in my garden of sounds for now.

Modder Creates SteamBoy Handheld From The Steam Deck

A user on Reddit called PhyFawkes (thanks SteamDeckHQ) has taken their Steam Deck and done some extraordinary (or sacrilegious things depending on your thoughts) to [it], taking it apart and turning it into a handheld that takes inspiration from the original Game Boy DMG. And it actually works, although mainly as a controller for playing games on your TV for now.

This is sick! I have an Anbernic GBA SP-style handheld, and one of the classic R36S devices, but they're both pretty low tech. They can play anything up to PS1 ROMs though, so that's more than enough for the 90s kid in me. This would be perfect for retro action RPGs and metroidvanias. So many good indie games on Steam I wish I could play on the Anbernic. I'm too dumb to figure something like this out though, and if I had a Steam Deck, the last thing I would ever do is open it up and scramble all of its guts around.

A cybersecurity researcher covered a Toyota in an AI-generated pattern to confuse Flock cameras

The project received its first public test Friday at the Def Con cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas. Swearingen worked with Donut Media to cover a 2009 Toyota Yaris with one of his patterns and drive it past a Flock camera. "We proved it was effective," Swearingen, a cybersecurity professional and founder of SIXCYBER, told TechCrunch.

I would totally deck my Honda out in this wrap 😏

Travis Barker and Tom DeLonge Got So High with Cypress Hill That They Wanted to Go Home

"It was like my body was working, but everything up here was silent, and I was noticing stuff I don’t normally notice,” he said. Apparently, DeLonge wasn’t having much of a better time. Halfway through the set, the guitarist came up to Barker and told him, “I wanna go home.”

"And I was like, ‘Me too,'” Barker continued. “It was so awful.”

Brother, I get too high and have to bail out on a trip to Kroger sometimes. And I'm smoking absolute trash compared to whatever B-Real probably has. I love when someone can actually admit they're too stoned. The kids I grew up with would be like a slab of fucking silly putty stuck to the couch talking about "I don't feel shit bro."

How to Watch the Total Solar Eclipse on a Live Stream, Witnessing the Rare View of the Sun's Corona From Your Own Home

As the eclipse moves over the planet, the European Space Agency (ESA) will stream the event from the Astrophysical Observatory of Javalambre in Teruel, Spain.

Here's the link to the live stream on YouTube tomorrow — and you won't even need to break out your crusty old eclipse glasses from the 90s to watch it.

Mark Twain wrote a story in 1898 that describes the internet

In the story the device gets wired into the telephone systems of the whole world, and after that, Twain writes, the daily doings of the globe are "made visible to everybody, and audibly discussable too, by witnesses separated by any number of leagues."

TIL Mark Twain predicted doomscrolling in 1898.

'Shattered': the most torturous reality show of the 2000s

Man, the UK really took reality shows to the max in the 2000s. Shattered was a show on Channel 4 where the contestants had to make it a week with no sleep to win $100,000. I'm a wreck if I don't get eight hours every night. Living in Tweaker City, Ohio, I've seen people stay up for three days and start believing their family are aliens and the radio is giving them encoded messages on how to get back to their home world. Seven days is absolutely nuts. That said, I would totally watch this if it was on today 🤷

80s treasures we considered luxurious but weren't worth the hype - MediaFeed

Car phones, shoulder-mount video cameras, waterbeds, even the brick phone; I get it. They were dumb and short-lived. But I would kill for a pristine Members Only jacket from the 80s.

Earth had Saturn-like rings 466 million years ago, new study suggests

The researchers estimate that the ring-spawning asteroid would be about 7.7 miles (12.5 kilometers) wide if it were a "rubble pile," or slightly smaller if it were a solid body. Once it shattered after nearing Earth's vicinity, its fragments would have "jostled around" before settling into a debris ring orbiting Earth's equator, Tomkins said.

If You Sleep In The 'T. Rex Position,' We've Got Some Bad News For You

All the good things are bad for you 😞

The Outlaw Chemist Teaching People How to Make Drugs From Scratch

This is my favorite story of the day: some sketchy guy online tells you how to make LSD and DMT, for a Patreon subscription fee. I remember when my ex’s brother was trying to make acid on the stove at 3am one night. It was pink for some reason. And then his mom woke up and promptly beat the shit out of him lmao probably best to leave mind-altering chemicals up to the chemists.

dotMeow wants to be the purrfect place for a queer and open internet

A few years ago, a few of us queer nerds were sitting in a pub, thinking about what we could do to give our community greater stability. The idea of running our own gTLD came up. Because many people in our community love cats, and because the wilder side of the internet is often associated with cat videos and memes, we soon settled on .meow.

The web is expanding with some new top level domains and .meow will likely be one of them. This is siiiick! No idea what I would use yet another domain for, but I'm definitely adding some .meows to the fleet. I'm already draining my bank account with renewals every year on too many unused domains as it is, but I'm a junkie for this kind of stuff. If everything goes according to plan, they're looking at a 2028 launch.

Dress made of living mycelium can renew and repair itself

By working with living but dormant cordyceps militaris fungus instead, the researchers have been able to take advantage of its biological functions. The result is a material that is self-renewing and responsive to its environment, in ways that could one day transform architecture and clothing – as seen in a prototype dress created together with material innovation company Peelshere.

As long as it doesn't mutate and turn everyone into a bunch of fucked up hybrids between The Last of Us zombies and Jim Carrey in The Mask, this is pretty neat!

Teenage Boy Suffers Temporary Hearing Loss After Listening to Cicadas for Four Hours

Wang noticed that the cicada noises became noticeably louder around noon, but he remained in the forest until evening, when he began experiencing tinnitus and a sensation of fullness in his ears. As the cicadas started going silent, he noticed that he couldn’t hear the chirping of birds, or even the notification sounds of his phone.

And people say I need to touch grass... at least I'm not going deaf sitting on my laptop with a soothing white noise generator humming in the background, enjoying the synthetic breeze of central air.

Meta Caught Paying Nazis to Post on Facebook

In Facebook news today: why in the fuck does anyone still hang out over there‽

Meta was paying out-and-out neo-Nazis to post on Facebook, an investigation from Australia’s ABC News found...“Such speech may be offensive to many, but it is not Meta’s role to police offensiveness,” the company added.

From Will Smith to Third Eye Blind — the “hidden” number-one hits of 1997!

Indeed, every Hot 100 leader in ‘97 topped the sales chart, and vice-versa. Below is every official №1 of the year, along with their peak positions in sales and airplay. This means that most of 1997’s “hidden” number-one hits were №1 on radio, but not in sales. Let’s see what they were.

I was six years old in '97. Every single one of these tracks bring back a flood of nostalgia. It reminds me most of going out with my mom and sisters to our uncle's pool in the summer. We spent so much time out there in the 90s. These are the songs that were always playing on the cheap boombox under the shade of the umbrella table 🥲

Jealously Watching OpenAI and Anthropic, Meta Suddenly Claims That Its AI Went on a Hacking Spree Too

When I first read that article about Anthropic's AI busting out of its cage, it felt like cheesy 80s sci-fi was becoming a reality. But then OpenAI recently claimed their AI broke out and went on a hacking spree too. And of course Meta said "hey wait up, me too!"

Ben makes a really good point:

View post on Bluesky

In the middle of writing this post, another story coincidentally came across my feed:

While American AI Models Race to Commit Felonies, China's Kimi Broke Out and... Just Used GitHub

I'll be honest with you, I didn't even read the goddamn article. I didn't have to. This is so clearly marketing. I mean what are the odds that suddenly, within a matter of weeks, all of the top AI models simultaneously get so smart they can't be contained?

I'm not saying AI can't do a lot of useful shit, but I don't think becoming self-aware and veering off toward its own agenda is one of those things.

Why celebrities from Zendaya to Kylie Jenner are wearing Fecal Matter

The brand name behind recent showstopping fashion moments isn’t quite as delicate as their romantic and otherworldly looks. When asked what an ethereal Zendaya was wearing for the “Odyssey” premiere in New York, her stylist Law Roach responded: “Fecal Matter.”

It's not even funny making Idiocracy jokes anymore... this is our timeline; the dumbest one.

20,000 People Are Publicly Vouching For a Man Accused of Cutting Down Flock Cameras

Wesley? You mean Wesley Jackson? Couldn't have been him. He was 300 miles away in Ohio, helping me nurse a wounded bald eagle back to health all week. A true patriot, if you ask me.

How snails engineer their slime

Snail mucus is mostly water; it’s the mucins (glycoproteins) and complex carbohydrates that give it that slimy, viscous texture. In addition to cosmetics, the mucus holds great potential for drug delivery. In 2020, scientists found that combining snail slime from a common garden snail with gold nanoparticles helped accelerate wound healing and exhibited anti-inflammatory properties in mice. Most relevant to this latest paper is a 2023 study on garden snail slime that identified three distinct types of secreted mucus: a hydrating version to protect its skin, one that acts as an adhesive glue, and a third that serves as a lubricant so the snail can more easily glide across a surface.

letting an LLM write an indie web parody post

There's certain topics and writing styles that do really well on the indie web; especially on Bearblog's Trending page. There are enough joking and seriously annoyed posts about it every now and then. We cannot stop talking about how tech is bad, analog media is good, blogging is good, and how good RSS is.

I was wondering whether LLMs are trained on enough data from here to generate a post that would do really well, and is realistic, while also parodying us bloggers a little.

This hits so close to home lol I spent a lot of time on Bear Blog up until I moved over here to Leaflet. Ava prompts an LLM to write a satirical post in the style of your typical indie blogger.

I can't even tell you how many posts I've written that rehash these same ideas over and over... especially right after I discovered the small web a few years ago.

And you see this kind of stuff from almost everyone who escapes the algorithm. We've all spent so much time on social media for the last decade or more, it really does feel like stepping into an alternate reality where everything is a little nicer when you get here. Shit we forgot about when we all started chasing likes and updoots.

It's easy to get into that whole meta blogging riff — especially when it's your main hobby. You fall into the feedback loop of using your hobby as a platform to talk about your hobby. I'm not shitting on indie bloggers who post this stuff and I know Ava isn't either. It's just funny how accurate it is. Especially since so many of us here can't deny we've written something almost identical, at least a handful of times over the years.

To add a little of my own blogging meta: that's my favorite thing about running a link blog. I don't have to brainstorm new ideas and fresh takes all the time. I just find a few links throughout the day and add my own two cents no one even asked for. It's surprisingly addictive.

Buc-ee’s sues tiny Ohio minimart over beaver logo

Fuck em right in the Buc-ee. They don't own cartoon beavers. Especially in a town called fucking BEAVERCREEK. It's the American dream though, right? To build a chain store empire and go on a legal rampage against local small businesses just to be a nuisance after you barge in on their territory?

The Phone in Your Hand

Stole this from Kottke, thought it was pretty neat. When I was growing up, if you wanted to tap into cyberspace, you had to do it through a beige tower with components that plug in like giant Legos and weren't even as competent as a $50 budget phone from Walmart today. I definitely take this thing I'm typing on right now for granted. So many impossibly tiny components and other general sorcery going on inside.

Flipping through this, I can't help but think of Terry Godier's beautiful presentation on the Casio F-91W digital watch.

But can your calculator run Linux? - Raymii.org

I'm not really interested in the calculator part. For most calculations I do for my day job, embedded programming, the HP-16C is a better fit. I was interested in this device because I found posts online suggesting it could run Linux and even a Windows 10 port.

My first Linux device was an iPod Nano. Second was a first-gen Xbox. And then I eventually moved on to using it on every laptop and PC I got my hands on after that. It's so capable... it's like a virus that can infect almost any piece of hardware that is even vaguely similar to a computer. And once you get a taste of that, it infects you too. You'll be a Linux nerd forever after that. I've seen people get clunky, pixelated, monochrome ports of Doom running on those Texas Instruments calculators, but never anything like this. Really good deep dive on how to do it if you own a HP Prime G2.

New study deflates right-wing claim that many trans teens later regret gender-affirming care

An overwhelming majority (97.1%) of adolescents who were referred to university-associated clinics in Canada for gender-affirming care continued to identify as transgender or non-binary after an average of 2.4 years. Only 2.9% re-identified as being gender aligned with their sex assigned at birth in that time frame.

New study backs what literally everyone who isn't an transphobe has always known.

Archaeologists Discover 'Perfectly Preserved' 70-Million-Year-Old Dinosaur Egg in Argentina

While some may jokingly fear a Jurassic Park-style scenario, scientists emphasize the discovery’s true importance lies in what it could reveal about dinosaur reproduction and development. If embryonic remains are indeed preserved inside, it could provide unprecedented insight into how these fearsome predators evolved, grew, and hatched.

First, gain insight into how these fearsome predators evolved. Then you can maybe resurrect the extinct species from a 66 million year slumber, as a little treat.

50 things you probably never knew about Woodstock - MediaFeed

Nice little Woodstock listicle I found on Fark yesterday. I think just about everyone who went through a hippie/stoner phase at some point knows about most of these, but it was a fun read nonetheless. One thing I had a little bit off though — I thought Carlos Santana just took a little acid, like everyone else at Woodstock. That's gnarly enough...

While they were playing their star-making set, guitarist Carlos Santana was very, very high on mescaline. In fact, he said that he thought he was playing an electric snake.

I knew the snake story but I had no idea he was up there on mescaline lol what a hardass.

Native Apps Should Be Avoided Whenever Possible — No One's Happy

Apple requires apps to submit a privacy manifest disclosing what data they collect. The White House app declared an empty array. Zero data collection. Meanwhile, the actual binary contained ten analytics frameworks, including the full OneSignal SDK with a sub-framework specifically for location tracking. The GPS pipeline polled precise coordinates every 4.5 minutes in the foreground and every 9.5 minutes in the background, syncing everything to OneSignal’s commercial servers. A boolean flag in OneSignal’s server responses could remotely enable or disable GPS tracking without an app update and without Apple review.

I didn't know this was even possible if the dev didn't list what data was collected in the App Store. Like I thought there was actually some kind of review process besides "trust me bro" but I guess not. Pretty scary stuff:

Governments are some of the biggest buyers. Military and intelligence agencies purchase location data from prayer apps, dating apps, and fitness trackers. Immigration enforcement uses it to locate and detain people. Police departments buy it to surveil suspects, protesters, and entire neighborhoods — sidestepping warrant requirements entirely. Courts have issued “geofence” orders demanding records on every device near a location at a given time, sweeping up everyone at a political rally, a school board meeting, or a gun show alongside any actual suspects. After Roe v. Wade was overturned, law enforcement used location data to track trips to abortion clinics. None of this required a court order, because the data was commercially available.

I've always said the web is my favorite OS. Beyond the privacy angle, most apps are usually trash anyway. Miniflux is more functional and to the point than any native RSS reader I've ever installed on my phone.

Social media apps are the worst. Tumblr is unusable in app form if you don't pay $7 a month to disable ads every other post. Same with Reddit, only the ads are posing as real posts these days, so I guess it's mostly useless whichever way you access it. I quit TikTok entirely because it still kept running in the background, showing me targeted ads about something I mentioned 20 minutes ago, even with Background App Refresh disabled. There is no web version, so I moved on. Fuck em. If there's a mobile web version of something, that's what I'm using.

Also worth mentioning, half of the places I spend my time online are web-based anyway; Atmosphere apps, Fark.com, Lemmy... Just use the website.

I know I'm rambling at this point, but even back in the day when smartphones first started coming out, the thing I was most hyped about was that you could carry around a web browser in your pocket wherever you go. Sometimes I wonder what things would be like if Firefox OS didn't violently crash and burn.

Jonah Hill's Jiu-Jitsu Training Means He'd 'Annihilate' Anyone Calling Him Fat Guy From 'Superbad'

"My favorite thing is people are like, 'Oh, Jonah Hill, fucking fat guy from Superbad,'" Hill said. "And I'm like, 'I would fucking annihilate you, dude. I'm not kidding you. Try it. If you see me, try it, dude. Bring it. Who's got it?'"

What a tool lol I guess I'll just remember him as the crack smoking business guy from Wolf of Wall Street who thinks he's invincible.

NASA Backs Wild Plan for a Laser-Powered Drone to Explore Giant Caves Below the Moon's Surface

The U.S. space agency announced that it will fund research by Austin-based Stone Aerospace, Inc. to develop a tethered lunar-spelunking drone—powered via laser light that will be beamed through a system of fiber optic cables conjoining it to a lunar rover on the Moon’s surface.

Love this. Maybe the caves will be full of mole people. Who, hopefully, aren't too pissed off about Elon's rocket crash landing there tonight.

New AI Chatbot Turns Out to Be One Overworked Guy Answering All the Messages by Hand

“My answers will be slow. They probably won’t be correct, or maybe they could be, but they’ll be very cryptic,” said Bryant. “You will have a bad experience with ChatTJB.”

This is cute! And it only takes roughly eight glasses of water per day to run.

Pokémon Red/Blue 3D Mod Gets New Features Including Third-Person Camera

Dramatic Shape's Voxel Mod is a game changer. So many people on social media are raving about this mod, and rightfully so. It's easy to set up, runs on a number of devices including your Mac, and makes the original Pokémon adventure feel like a brand new game.

The OG Pokémon games are, what, like 30 years old? And they're still absolutely legendary. Idk how many times I've played through Yellow... but it's a lot. One of the first games I ever got for my Gameboy Pocket when I was a kid 🥲

This mod looks sick! I wish it was a traditional ROM patch so I could play it on my Anbernic handheld, but there's a lot going on here so I get why it's not. And it probably wouldn't run too great on an underpowered emulator console anyway. Definitely going to check this out when I get home tonight.

I went on a work trip - and realised I'm bisexual

I love a good coming out story. Especially when yourself is one of the people you're coming out to. I was in my mid 20s — around the same age as the author when I came out as bi. I didn't even admit it to myself until then... I just thought I was a little more feminine than the typical truck driving, motor cranking, gun shooting friends I hung out with.

One thing I’ve learned throughout my journey is when living as only part of myself, it was far more exhausting than I realised. Stepping into my full identity brought me a kind of joy that changed everything.

I kinda blindsided everyone when I was ready to come out. I met a guy during a night out at the bar with friends and brought him home to the after party. Everyone was so accepting of it and I immediately felt a million pounds lighter. Well aside from one guy who nearly had an existential crisis when he saw us kissing, but that's neither here nor there. That was almost ten years ago, and even though I've now been with a cis (but also bi) woman for about eight years, it's still an important part of my identity.

How to Find an Elusive Four-Leaf Clover

My girlfriend is surprisingly good at this. She can always find at least a couple four leaf clovers within a minute or two any time she tries and I have never found one in my entire life. Makes a lot of sense. I can't even pick out my car keys from other random junk on the kitchen table half the time.

Can Haptics Improve Typing Accuracy on Smartphones? – Boréas Technologies

The mobile physical keyboard had an 89.6% level of accuracy, the haptic-enhanced touchscreen keyboard had an 80% level of accuracy and the non-haptic touchscreen keyboard registered an accuracy level of only 65.8%.

This is insane. It feels like a life hack. I've been bitching about how bad the iPhone keyboard is for years, but I always had haptics turned off because I thought it would save a little battery. Last night I turned it on to see if it made a difference and my typing instantly improved. So much that I had to google it to make sure I wasn't crazy and that's where I found this article from 2019.

This Just In: Milwaukee Transit Passes

The design of the passes was utilitarian and banal until the 1930s when they brought the production in-house and added color, public-service announcements, information about local events, and illustrated depictions of civic history.

It's easy to forget how colorful things were back then, since we view it mostly through a black and white lens. Would love to see more hand-drawn art with some color instead of the sanitized greyscale corporate minimalism of today.

How headlights got brighter, whiter, and more blinding after dark

These things are a fucking nuisance. I've had to flip my rear view mirror up in the DAYTIME they're so bright. If you're behind me with these on the highway, I'm going down to 45mph until you pass me.

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.

Ever since Napster first came out,

I'll try that again:

I haven't listened to the radio much since music streaming services leveled the field.

Before that, like everyone else, I pirated everything. Back then you had iTunes and a massive media library of questionable origins — presumably on an external drive connected via FireWire. Everything from Stevie Nicks to Cradle of Filth was filed away in there. Before that you bought everything on CD. And that's as far back as I'm going.

But discovery was always the radio back then, you know? There weren't algorithms telling us what's Hot and Trending. If you were lucky, you lived somewhere with at least one cool station. At the very least, you had shit on MTV like Headbanger's Ball or whatever else was on in the daytime. Even MySpace was a better way to find good tunes than the front page of Apple Music.

We had a cool station in Columbus for a while called CD 102.5. They played GREAT alternative stuff. I could sit there with a pen and notepad and come up with all sorts of music to download eventually, years later, legally add to my Apple Music library for a reasonable monthly subscription fee.

I have totally been sleeping on radio since CD 102.5 went away. And it's not even just Spotify and Apple Music changing the game. It's algorithms; Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube... it's where the influencers are influencing. And where Content goes viral in ways that weren't even possible until pretty recently.

With radio, you have a person with good taste in music curating good music. If it's a station worth listening to, anyway. That's the spirit of this blog, or at least what I'm going for. Trying to find interesting links and curate them into a daily post for... well, mostly for me.

The other night, I went over to Radio Garden to browse around but I didn't know where to start, so I did some digging online and found my latest hyperfixation: KEXP in Seattle.

And this post isn't an ad for them by any means. I like the music they play, but not everyone has the same taste as me. They play a lot of old alternative stuff, a little punk, electronic, and even some death metal every now and then. It's a little bit of everything I listen to, and a lot of it is bands I've never heard of. Plus, with radio you get DJs adding some banter after every few songs. It feels more alive than being alone with an app for the car ride to wherever you're going.

The biggest thing for me is remembering that there are still some really good radio stations on the airwaves. I like consuming things that are curated by people instead of computers.

I realized pretty quickly that I really have no interest in Radio Garden. One good station is enough for me right now, so I got the standalone app for KEXP and now I can favorite the weird, obscure shit they play when I hear something I really like. For the last few years, I've been listening to the same artists I found on CD 102.5 back in the day, most of the Fat Wreck Chords and Epitaph catalogs, local bands from when I was a teenager, and a few newer artists sprinkled in.

There are so many great things we have access to, and idk if it's just because I'm online too much or if it's the same for everyone, but it's easy to forget about "obsolete" tech. Forgotten mediums like radio or even the small web. All of this shit is so punk. DIY, human-made, community funded. There's a lot more noise these days, but a lot of the old, discarded stuff has never truly went away. You just have to know where to look.