Not particularly proud of all this, but as an autistic millenial kid who had access to the internet in the late '90s early 2000s I’ve got a relevant story.

If you wanted to look at boobs on the internet in the era of waiting a minute for images to load, Playboy was an easy way to avoid some of the more hardcore and kink porn on the internet. You could be pretty sure that regardless of what site you were on, Playboy content would actually contain boobs, and you wouldn’t waste 2 minutes slowly loading a picure of a dude in a gimp mask getting pegged through the bars of a pet cage (not trying to yuck anyone’s yum, but when you’re a dumb teen with absent parents looking for boobs, it wasn’t what I was after). Eventually Playboy content started to be considered “too vanilla” by the majority of porn users at the time, but I still liked vanilla and kinda let my Autism go crazy on occasion over the years to download and organize offline copies of a bunch of photosets.

Time passes, I get a bit older and become a young adult, the internet gets faster, at some point I revisit the porn archival hyperfixation, and foolishly write a script to scrape and download photosets straight from Playboy’s paid member-only site.

Obviously one of their web admins notices that my account is a huge chunk of their monthly traffic, and I get an email from their customer service basically saying their admins noticed unusual activity on my account, and to explain myself or face a ban. I made up some excuse that worked on the customer service agent and they let me off with a warning.

But the next day I got an email from the admin that said he knew what I had done, and that the answer I gave the customer service rep was a lie, and if he ever caught me again he’d send the police after me for possession of CSAM. I replied that the only images I had were from their site, how is that CSAM, and if there is CSAM they would be in more trouble for distributing/selling access to it. He wrote back and said yeah, we’re a company, the rules don’t apply the same as individuals, and that if I kept arguing with him he’d ban me anyway.

So, yeah, I deleted everything I had downloaded and decided that hyperfixation wasn’t worth it.

While I agree with you, I’m not sure Chromebooks should count as “using tech” for the sake of learning. If you really want to give a younger generation experience with technology there are far better systems for them to learn on.

Just a minor bit of pedantry, but Social Security Numbers are generally abbreviated as SSN, SSID usually refers to a “Service Set Identifier” aka WiFi network name.

I dislike civil asset forfeiture as it’s generally used, but there’s nothing really stopping us from using the government to just nationalize those companies/means of production. Obviously we’ll have to get the Epstein class out of government first, but I truly believe this should be a part of the Epstein class’s punishment for their part in everything (in addition to more traditional punishments like prison, etc).

Distance running has been scientifically linked to an increase in colon cancer rates, and CrossFit could easily be similarly unhealthy as far as inducing extra stress on the intestine by being an activity that can lead to dehydration while violently shaking things around in there more than what could be considered “normal.”

Haven’t had a chance to really look into it, but there’s also spacebar chat which is an open source selfhosted reimplementation of the discord backend that can be used with existing discord clients and bots and stuff. Which depending on how solid the rest of if is, could really help existing discord people move with less effort.

As someone who was a “store manager” at a franchise with only 2 employees (including myself) this is kinda real. I left in 2012 because even in my early 20s I could see the direction things were going because of corporate mismanagement.

Renee Good’s murderer recorded the incident on his own phone, which was then released as if it was somehow evidence of his innocence.

One big downside to ham radio (as someone with my license) is that you can’t use encryption. Which is fine for some use cases, but does limit the usefulness in the “government shut down the internet” kind of scenario.

Which, I suppose if you’re already using back-channels to circumvent some broader government censorship, maybe abiding by FCC rules isn’t a priority anymore, but IMO this is an area where large mesh networks of “consumer” devices with encryption very much still has value.

Andy Serkis? George Takei?

… oh nevermind, found the one you’re talking about.

Something I was taught in film school 15 years ago was that communication happens when a message is perceived. Whether the message was intended or not is irrelevant. And yet here we are, “communicating” with a slightly advanced autocomplete algorithm and calling it intelligent.

He blew a microphone on stage when it stopped working in the lead up to the 2024 election. He’s got some instincts from somewhere.

Yeah, but honestly getting rid of coins is an admission that inflation is high relative to 40-50 years ago. When pretty much every government wants to keep that fact out of the public consciousness. Especially the current US government who wants to both claim we don’t have inflation at all, and are the ones getting rid of the penny.

I’ve been saying we should drop the penny for almost 2 decades, but I still kind of look at getting rid of the penny as a sign of our current government’s abysmal handling of inflation.

Marry a database. These losers falling in love with AI don’t know how to be a real technophile.

Squatters rights?

They’re just applying their business tactics to Christianity now. They realized that religion wasn’t going away as fast as they hoped, and have fallen back on the old embrace, extend, extinguish playbook. I doubt they’ve realized the power of religion to drive them certifiably insane during the “embrace” phase.

Depending on how much you have set aside it can work, if you don’t have anything set aside and break a leg in a freak accident you can get stuck making massive payments on $20,000+ of medical debt and set yourself back several years. I’m sure it’s gotten more expensive now too, that was 6 years ago, and while I don’t have the debt any more, I also have complications from the surgery that still bother me that I feel like I can’t afford to get fixed.

That said, a high deductible plan can also leave you screwed, and doesn’t save you as much money as they act like it does. The pricing is different for insured vs uninsured patients, and your insurance company has basically negotiated the rates higher so you think they’re more useful than they actually are.

Also, when donating to local food pantries, remember that donations of money go farther and feed more than donations of food. Food pantries have access to economies of scale and can buy food cheaper than an individual can. So you’ll increase your impact if you just donate your cash straight to the food pantry, rather than going to the grocery store to buy food to donate. In addition, the food pantry will be able to more accurately supply what people actually need and stock what they are short on, rather than you just guessing.

Started moving to Element/Matrix this weekend when I attended a protest and wanted to have some kind of communication, but also wanted to leave my primary phone at home. I was using a de-googled android fork and an e-sim, but being a data-only e-sim, I couldn’t use Signal due to the phone number requirement.

Annoying to have try to get contacts to get another app, but at least it’s decentralized and comes with the option of being self-hosted once I’m ready to tackle that.

This has been a Microsoft wishlist feature since the 90s. I remember being a kid and reading articles in my dad’s copies of PC Magazine that Bill Gates wanted a computer without a keyboard that you could just talk to and tell it what to do.

So yeah, C-level intelligence is exactly right.