It’d be nice to be able to walk down a street without making other people uncomfortable because men in general are less assholish than bears.

A part of it is large numbers bias. Very few people encounter bears, so very few people experience bear attacks. Even if every bear was predisposed to attacking people, there would still be very few bear attacks. But virtually everyone encounters men on a near daily basis. So even if the likelihood of an attack is extremely low on a case-by-case basis, the overall number of incidents is much higher simply because there are more cases of people encountering men.

That’s why the go-to response to “it’s not every man” essentially boils down to “sure, it’s not every man. But it’s enough of them…”

We’ve lived through an entire internet without age checks, why is it different now? There aren’t more creeps

I think the big difference is ease of access. For millennials growing up, accessing the internet basically required being at the family desktop in the middle of the living room. Phones weren’t connected to the internet, and cell phones weren’t even common yet.

And kids still got groomed, even when their only access to the internet was in a shared family space. And that began to get more prevalent as devices became smarter and more portable. Now, any 8 year old can get groomed in their own bedroom, while simply playing a video game.

I actually disagree, because hardware-level verification is basically the most privacy-conscious method of accurately verifying a user’s age. Rather than fighting age verification entirely, I think it’s more productive to start assuming users are under 18 until proven otherwise… Age verification is inevitable, (if you don’t like it, tor is always an option), so we should at least figure out secure and private ways of doing so. Rather than resisting it outright, present them with secure and safe ways to do it. The internet is a dark place full of a lot of creeps, and services like Roblox have proven that they will enthusiastically become nesting grounds for predators unless they’re forced to add safeguards.

Sure, it’s easy to say “just monitor your kids” but no parent can be present 24/7. And in fact, oftentimes parents end up using screen time so they can do other things like chores, without needing to watch their kid. So the “just watch your kids” argument is diametrically opposed to the reality of why parents tend to rely on screens. Sometimes you just need 15 minutes to wash the dishes, without a kid demanding your constant attention. Even I, a child-free person, can understand that. And it becomes increasingly difficult to monitor them as they grow into teens and (reasonably) start expecting their own privacy.

I’ve been saying for a while now that we need to shift to hardware verification. Your device (or for shared devices like desktops, your user account) verifies your age once. And then it doesn’t need to do so again. All of the various sites and apps can simply ask your device “hey, is this user over {age}?” And the device responds with a simple true/false. You’re not needing to give your PII to every single site you visit, and the device isn’t needing to report back to the government every time an age verification check happens. It’s all done locally. The handshake could even be cryptographically secured, to prevent tech-savvy kids from MITM’ing the age check. And then protecting kids online is as simple as not age-verifying their device (and protecting your own password on shared devices). Hell, devices like cell phones could even have the age bracket set by the parent directly, since the phone would be on the parent’s phone bill. Similarly, parents could create child accounts on their shared devices, so kids can access age-appropriate content. It won’t stop kids from getting a prepaid phone, but it’ll at least prevent them from easily verifying that phone.

And it’s also the most elegant for the user experience. As far as the adult user is concerned, they never even see an “are you over 18” verification when they visit a porn site. They simply get access to the site. And kids simply get redirected back to Google’s home page (or more realistically, a page on the porn site saying “hey you failed the age check. If you’re over 18, be sure you do that with your device before trying again, because this is the only page you’ll be able to access until then. Or if you’re under 18, click here to return to where you were before” explanation) as soon as the age check fails.

Hardware age verification is basically the best of every world. You don’t rely on a third-party service to verify your PII (which will inevitably leak it, like Discord did). You don’t need to verify with every single individual site and service. The government doesn’t get a record of every site that asks for verification. And kids are automatically prevented from stumbling across adult content.

I agree that Colorado democrats are typically the “if we cozy up to the right they might stop being mean to us” candidates. I think this bill is a poor implementation, but it’s at least done under the right premise. If we could force hardware manufacturers and/or OSes to support native age verification, it would solve a lot of the current issues that we have.

Yeah, Tailscale’s “zero-config” idea is great as long as things actually work correctly… But you immediately run into issues when you need to configure things, because Tailscale locks you out of lots of important settings that would otherwise be accessible.

For instance, the WiFi at my job blocks all outbound WireGuard connections. Meaning I can’t connect to my tailnet when I’m at work, unless I hop off the WiFi and tether to my personal cell phone (which has a monthly data cap). Tailscale is built on WireGuard, and WireGuard only. If I could swap it to use OpenVPN or IKEv2 instead, I could bypass the problem entirely. But instead, I’m forced to just run an OpenVPN server at home, and connect using that instead of using Tailscale.

Yeah, this is my preferred way of doing it. That way I always have a nice compiled list of IP addresses, and if I ever need to change any of them, I have them all in a single menu instead of needing to access each device individually. Just let the server use DHCP, then assign it a static IP in your DHCP server.

Appeals aren’t an infinite thing. Each appeal goes to a higher court, and eventually will reach the SCOTUS. And at any point, the respective appellate court can refuse to accept the appeal, essentially saying that they agree with the lower court’s ruling and leaving it in effect.

Each step of the appeals process basically asks if the lower court applied the corresponding laws correctly. And if they did, the appellate court looks at whether or not that law is constitutional. If both are true, (the law is constitutional and was applied correctly) then the appeal fails. Appeals are actually fairly hard to win, especially for laws that have lots of precedent. If a law already has lots of precedent and the lower court was simply applying the law the same way that other cases did, the appeal will almost certainly be shot down.

That’s why lots of the big landmark “court strikes down law as unconstitutional” cases are from laws that were recently passed. There is no long-standing precedent for the recently passed law, so the lower courts have to set the precedent, and the appeal is actually what is deciding whether or not the law is constitutional.

Yup. My local shooting range doesn’t need RAM. The archery target in my back yard doesn’t need RAM. The park where I go jogging doesn’t need RAM. My local food bank always needs volunteers, and they’re not handing out RAM to hungry people. My local theater always needs volunteer ushers, and you get to see a show for free.

Yes and no. The hardware companies have already said that they’re not interested in expanding production. They know it’s a bubble, and don’t want expanded production now to cause a glut in the future when the inevitable pop happens. So prices may not actually drop, (even after the pop), because the companies still won’t be producing more hardware than they currently are.

My best guess is that we’ll have some dark data centers sitting around collecting dust, but the hardware they bought won’t actually flood the market and crash prices. If anything, since the US dollar’s value is essentially tied to Nvidia and OpenAI’s market share, a pop will only make the dollar less powerful and will counteract any potential drops in prices that may have otherwise happened. The companies will get a trillion dollar bailout when the pop happens, (because they’re too big to fail) then nothing will change about the current hardware prices.

Yup, they’re 100% trying to shift towards cloud computing. It has already been happening with gaming, and many players have decided that they’re okay with a slightly worse experience if it means they can run their games on a potato PC. Tech companies see the blood in the water, and know that there is money to be made in cloud computing. Everything is shifting to SAAS, so it only makes sense that hardware will be a subscription next.

That’s how you charge the Apple Mouse. They intentionally designed it so you couldn’t use it while it was charging, because Steve Jobs demanded a cord-free desk. He hated the cords leading to his mouse and keyboard, and didn’t think devices should stay plugged in all the time. So he forced the engineers to design a mouse that couldn’t stay plugged in.

It really is the epitome of Apple’s “I know better than you” design philosophy

For some of us, that’s not a bad thing. I tend to burn my account and make a new one every year or two, just to minimize the accumulation of potential doxxing material.

I also tend to swap things like my specific location when I talk about where I live. Pretty sure on just this one account I have comments saying I live in Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico. I’ll even change how I talk about my job. I work in live entertainment, but that’s a very broad category. I change details like how many seats my venue has, what my specific job is, (for instance, on this account I’m an audio technician), what my work history is like, what kinds of shows I tend to work, etc… All of them have grains of truth, (for instance, I have worked as an audio technician in the past, so I know what the job entails), but none are truly correct and all are red herrings in some way.

I highly suspect that they’re the sole user on their instance. That’s fairly common for people who just want to avoid the headache of dealing with rogue admins. Just spin up an instance, and then your server only federates with the instances and communities that you directly interact with. No need to worry about the “things you would want removed ASAP” unless you’re the one seeking out those things.

I’ve been saying this for literal years now. They should release a publicly searchable database of every single SSN, name, and DOB. Force organizations to stop using those as a form of ID, because they’re not secure and never have been.

Give it like a year of lead time. Like announce “March 1 2027, we’ll post the database” and then that gives institutions a full year to figure something new out.

In late 2025 and 2026 there is a huge surge in demand for hardware. There’s a shortage of hardware, and factories don’t get built out overnight. So prices skyrocket, pricing out many users to the point where demand at the new price point matches the available supply. But as production capacity increases, that will also ease.

And this is where your entire idea falls apart… The manufacturers have openly stated that they have zero interest in expanding production. They’re trying to avoid a supply surplus after the boom ends, and they know that expanding production now means crashed prices later. Why expand production, when you can simply not spend that money and charge higher prices anyways?

Honestly, quit as soon as you can. After the two week mark, you’ll start smelling things again. At the one month mark, you’ll notice that you’re not constantly out of breath. Cravings still occasionally happen, but it shifts from “god damn it I need a donut right now” to “hmm a donut sounds good right now… But I don’t wanna bother with going to the donut shop.” The cravings never fully vanish, but they definitely change and become easier to dismiss as a passing whim.

For IEMs, the price difference typically goes towards comfort rather than sound quality. As a professional audio technician, a custom-molded IEM will be infinitely more comfortable than a cheap set. But not everyone can justify spending $2000 for custom molds, because they don’t use them for work every day.

The given reason is that people are innocent until proven guilty, and the DOJ doesn’t want to create witch-hunts just because someone was mentioned in passing. For instance, Robin Williams is mentioned in an email chain, but only because he refused to visit the island. But if you only hear the first part of that statement, you may be inclined to start a witch-hunt against Robin Williams.

But the most straightforward reason is a coverup. That’s pretty much the only way to actually justify the massive amounts of redactions. As time has gone on and more evidence has mounted, it has become increasingly clear that the given reason is bogus.

If something smells like a duck, it could be a duck, but it could also be a goose, or a chicken, or a swan, or any other number of things that smell like ducks… But if it looks like a duck, smells like a duck, has feathers like a duck, has flippers like a duck, has a flat bill like a duck, and quacks like a duck? We can only reasonably conclude that it’s a duck.

I think we’re essentially saying the same thing in different ways. Yes, I 100% agree that forums should be separate from whatever the new Discord replacement ends up being.

I was more arguing that we can’t only use forums to replace Discord, because the realtime communication aspect would be a different use case. I’ve seen lots of “lol just use forums” types of posts, which completely ignore the realtime side of things. There would still need to be some service to replace the realtime aspects that Discord does serve.

Here’s a reminder that packing the 5th circuit court of appeals with batshit conservative judges was a key step in the Southern Strategy. There’s also a county in Texas that only has enough of a population for two judges, and they made sure both of those are also batshit conservative. So any time they want to get a batshit conservative ruling, they just file it in that one specific county in Texas. And then Texas appeals go to the 5th circuit. And any circuit rulings are applied nationally (due to lower courts using precedent to set cases) unless it goes all the way to the SCOTUS. And with the current SCOTUS, they can simply refuse to see the case, and the 5th circuit ruling will stand.

Lots of times, the court cases are obviously staged. There have been cases where a plaintiff didn’t even realize they were named in a case that ruled for/against them, because the PAC that actually filed the case simply used their name to be able to file it in that county.

Yeah, self-hosting it can be a bear, especially since you need to deal with the whole “bots trying to kill it will regularly post CSAM in random channels, and if any of your users are in that channel it will federate to your own server and now you have CSAM saved on your server’s cache” stuff. It’s the same problem that Lemmy was dealing with during Reddit’s APIcolypse. You can always choose not to federate, but that largely defeats the point of the protocol existing in the first place.

You also need to set up TURN servers to get functional voice/video calls. WebRTC (like voice/video calling) tends to throw a fit without some sort of TURN functionality. That’s something the average Joe won’t know how to do, and is typically going to require a paid tier from some external host like Cloudflare.

Edit: I looked it up. Cloudflare offers TURN servers, with the first 1000GB for free each month, but then it charges for use after that. But that does mean a server that gets used for video calls more than a few hours per month could end up incurring costs. Because that TURN server would be handling all of the video streaming data, so it will quickly eat that 1000GB limit. It also means true self-hosting is prohibitively difficult, as you’d be tying yourself to an external provider unless you go out of your way to host your own TURN server.