All my chronically-online peeps know that being on X in 2025 is as cringe as being on 4chan in in 2014. Yes, a lot of rotten things grew mostly unchecked over there, but it didn’t get have the oxygen or reach into the mainstream that Twitter/X does. It’s going to be harder to starve them of oxygen this time, but trying to argue with them doesn’t work, and only intrenches them further. Banning links at the very least, seems like a good start.

Absolutely.

To add to that, even though Trump complains about how the “mainstream media” treats him, in reality he has the actual mainstream media on his side (Joe Rogan, etc). Saw someone bring up a statistic the other day that pointed out that as far as audience reach: Kamala Harris would have had to appear on CNN, Fox, and MSNBC for 3 hours every night for two weeks, during prime time, to have the same reach Trump got from going on Joe Rogan.

Obviously that comparison is to cable channels rather than the broadcast channels the FCC has more authority to “investigate,” but the allegations of “unfairness” are entirely out of touch with modern reality.

Yeah, you can supposedly make a new account through a browser and using an email (or an international phone # if you have one). But I’ve heard from someone living in Korea, who no longer have a US phone # on their account who is now unable to access their account, because at one time it was associated with a US phone number.

There is a plan going around over on TikTok that everyone should delete their Meta accounts on the 19th (when the TikTok ban goes into effect). We’ll see how many actually do it, but so far it’s fascinating to watch.

It’s just all tied up in AI and crypto right now. Because everyone wants to get in on the next get-rich-quick scheme. Coked-up investors don’t have the patience to stick it out and wait for a return, they’ve moved on to shiny new toys (that have very little chance of real growth or market viability) and are gutting and cutting the games industry to pay for it.

You’d also need to repeat the experiment as a control (ideally still doing as much of the same things to account for other variables). For best accuracy you’d need the same group returning another day, going through the same boarding process without takeoff, and tracking the exact time between wanks.

I still use DDG as my “daily driver” (I know there are better options for privacy and avoiding big tech, but I haven’t yet found anything independent that is good enough for me to switch to full time yet). I bookmarked Stract a while back, and it proved useful a few months back when Microsoft had an outage that took down Bing and by extension, Duck Duck Go. I do like Stract, their index seems to be enough larger than MoJeek (another independent search with their own index) that it gives me better results.

Stract might not be as open as I’d like, but it’s nice to have as an option, and I’m never going to complain about having more search providers with independent indexes.

I’ve been using Syncthing-Fork (on F-Droid) for the extra features it has. I wonder if that developer will be able to continue.

I have had someone tell me that they’d rather live in an economic system “like we have in America” where people have a chance at rags to riches, than a system “like Germany, where the social safety net means the average person doesn’t have a chance at making it big.”

If anyone ever tells you wealthy people are intelligent, don’t believe them.

So more like Judas and Goliath then?

I had a nicer Acer monitor that I replaced with a similar Samsung model about a year ago. I still kinda miss the Acer. Both were 32" curved LCD and 1440p. The Acer had a much more uniform curve to it, and the Samsung has a bunch of firmware issues that sometimes can only be worked around by unplugging it and power cycling it that way. The only reason I “upgraded” was the Samsung had better support for PS5 and scaling 4K inputs down to the native 1440p without artifacts.

No way that’s the real reason, the real reason is taxes. So many California millionaires move to Texas for the low tax, only to realize once they’re there that it’s a shitty state with a barely-functioning power grid. Unfortunately it never seems to click for most of them that the low taxes is a big part of why they don’t have a competent state government.

Just so you’re aware, Match owns OkCupid now, as well as Tinder, Hinge, Plenty of Fish and a bunch of other smaller dating sites. I don’t think they’ve all been ruined as much as Match yet, but it’s probably only a matter of time.

Yeah, I know a lot of the smaller, independent search engines are lacking, but the people using the “udm=14” trick to remove Google’s AI results now, as if that won’t be removed as soon as Google needs to show investors the AI is more profitable.

To add to this, Scarlett Johansson took on Disney and they settled. And Disney is like the final boss of litigious companies (either them or Nintendo). If she has the same legal team for this, and they think she has a case against OpenAI, this could open the door for OpenAI to get rightfully clobbered for their tech-bro ignoring of copyright laws.

Just to add a bit of clarification, the image wasn’t just a headshot, yes that’s the part that was originally scanned and used, but it’s a cropped in section of the centerfold, a 3-page fold-out image in the magazine. If I remember the story correctly, they needed a large image to scan, and several people brought in images to scan in, and one guy brought a Playboy.

I remember seeing an interview with the model, who at the time of the interview was in her 70s or 80s, she apparently wasn’t enthusiastic about having become a common test image. But since she had technically consented to be in Playboy (which was only a magazine at the time), there wasn’t anything she could do to stop it. I think in this case it’s probably best to stop using her image specifically, as it does kinda get into a weird messy situation of consent, and how her consent to be in a magazine morphed through technology into something more “permanent” than she originally realized. There are plenty of other models who would absolutely be down for that, and given enough time, knowing how nerds are, there will be other test images of women. But I think it’s probably for the best that this one gets retired from this use.

And yes, there are people who have tried to use this instance as a “there shouldn’t be images of attractive/implied nude women a standard test images, because it can cause body image issues for women who go into that field.” Which on one hand, I can see where they’re coming from, but also people take pictures of people, and some people do look better than most of us, having more diverse test images would be a good thing, because we don’t all look like that. But some do, and they’re probably going to get more pictures taken of them than the rest if us.

Not sure exactly how good this would work for your use case of all traffic, but I use autossh and ssh reverse tunneling to forward a few local ports/services from my local machine to my VPS, where I can then proxy those ports in nginx or apache on the VPS. It might take a bit of extra configuration to go this route, but it’s been reliable for years for me. Wireguard is probably the “newer, right way” to do what I’m doing, but personally I find using ssh tunnels a bit simpler to wrap my head around and manage.

Technically wireguard would have a touch less latency, but most of the latency will be due to the round trip distance between you and your VPS and the difference in protocols is comparatively negligible.

I figured you were being genuine, but there’s usually a few people who point at Microsoft’s “embracing” of Linux as the first step in the “embrace, extend, extinguish” trope, and see any involvement by Microsoft as nefarious. When the reality is just that Microsoft’s Azure cloud services are a much larger share of their annual revenue than Windows, and Linux is a major part of their cloud offerings.

If you browse the LKML (Linux Kernel Mailing List) for 5 minutes, you’ll probably see a bunch of microsoft.com email addresses, and it’s been that way for years. I understand why it bothers some people, but also Linus (and a couple others) approve everything that actually gets merged, whether it’s from a microsoft employee, or a redhat employee, or anyone else. Even if microsoft wanted to pay employees to submit patches that would hurt the kernel, the chance that they’d actually be approved is so low it wouldn’t be worth their time.