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.

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.”

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

They’re cable, the FCC has no authority over cable. Fair point on the lawsuit front though.

Not even in the Apocrypha, in Acts 12 they voted to replace Judas with Matthias. And then later in 1st Corinthians 15, Paul claimed to be an apostle. So, not even counting the apocrypha, at best Kirk would be the 15th.

My personal scores have increased by about 100 points in the last 6 months (I started getting worried about interest rates getting even worse and consolidated my credit cards under a personal loan with a definite payoff date).

At this point I really don’t care what my credit score is, but this feels like a bad time to have debt, and for once in my life I feel lucky that I’m able to be paying off debt faster than I can take on more - which really hasn’t been the case since I went to university in 2007 (and never finished for financial reasons).

Without hardware decoding, it will take more compute to decompress, but sites usually wait to fully roll out new codecs until hardware decoding is more ubiquitous, because of how many people use low-powered streaming sticks and Smart TVs.

It’s not for the end user at this point, it’s for YouTube/streaming companies to spend less on bandwidth at existing resolutions. Even a 5% decrease in size for similar quality could save millions in bandwidth costs over a year for YouTube or Netflix.

I think the real reason they were hired was to give them something to do other than ask for the Epstein files all day on their podcasts. Kash Patel and Dan Bongino were both very outspoken about wanting the Epstein files released before they were given jobs leading the FBI. Honestly letting themselves show their incompetence to the world with this case may have been part of the plan all along. Make them look like the fools they are, and people will stop believing them when they inevitably decide they want to talk about Epstein again.

Most of us that are younger than the Boomers or maybe Gen X don’t want to count on Social Security because we’ve been hearing our whole lives that Social Security is on the chopping block because the government is in so much debt. And at this point we kinda just expect that ladder to be pulled up behind the Boomers before we get anything, because that’s already happened in so many other areas like home ownership.

I also think people need to remember that Social Security is their own money that they paid in over their lives, and they are owed it back.

And also that even though the US government has a large amount of debt, we’ve also spent the last 50 years giving tax cuts to the rich, we’d probably be just fine if we went back to a 90% marginal tax rate on the top earners like we had in the “good old days” of the 1950s.

Grew up in the great plains/midwest around the dairy industry. Had extended family who owned a smaller dairy farm. This all sounds pretty standard. Not saying it’s right, but none of it sounds new to me.

I would imagine there were plenty of people who bought modern marketing that was designed to cruelty-wash the dairy industry. The reality is there’s no way to insert yourself between an udder and a calf without cruelty, and that’s the only way to get cow’s milk. Unless we can figure out how to get milk from lab-grown organs, which probably comes with it’s own ethical issues.

I hate to say it, but if that’s what it takes to get Nettanyahu and his Zionist cronies turned into red mist, it might be worth it. But also in 2025 I’m not entirely sure anything would happen outside of some “condemnation.”

Unless the Vatican decides to reboot the Crusades, which also sounds about right for this Indiana Jones timeline we’re all living in.

Based on the attempts we’ve seen at censoring AI output so far, there doesn’t seem to me to be a way to actually do this without building a new model with pre-censored training data.

Sure they can tune models, but even “MechaHitler” Grok was still giving some “woke” answers on occasion. I don’t see how this doesn’t either destroy AI’s “usefulness” (not that there’s any usefulness there to begin with) or cost so much to implement that investors pull out because none of the AI companies are profitable, and throwing billions more to sift through and filter the training data pushes profitability even further away (if censoring all the training data is even possible at all).

It’ll just be old Playboy magazines and the copy of Forbes magazine with his face on the cover that he had Stormy spank him with.