This was the very first thing I thought of when I saw the headline. I literally thought to myself “oh so she sounds like a pedophile.”

Yup, by step-dad is in the second group. It’s honestly wild what kinds of mental gymnastics he has gone through to justify his vote. We had a surprisingly calm discussion about it the other day, and he genuinely doesn’t believe Trump was involved in any of it.

He thinks Trump was, at worst, just running in some tangential social circles. He believes a lot of the revelatory stuff (like in this post) has been faked from other heads of state to try and discredit him. Like all of the “yeah the DOJ confirmed this is real. The FBI has been sitting on this for literal years or even decades now, as part of their international child trafficking investigations. Multiple news sources have also independently confirmed the validity of the sources” stuff doesn’t matter to him, because he simply chooses not to believe any of it.

God Himself could descend from the heavens with a choir of angels, bust through my parents’ living room window, and slap my step-dad around while screaming that Trump is a pedophile who raped children on Epstein’s island. And my step-dad would defiantly look God in the eyes and tell Him that He’s wrong. There is no threshold that will make the proof believable for him. The goalposts will always be moved to require some new criteria before proof can be valid. And anything that does manage to meet the strict criteria for proof is too perfect, and obviously had to be manufactured in some grand worldwide conspiracy to discredit Trump. As Orwell wrote, “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

But what if bias was not the reason? What if your face gave genuinely useful clues about your probable performance we just agreed to redefine “bias” as something else, despite this fitting the definition of the word perfectly, just so I can claim this isn’t biased?

Cool. Literal Nazi shit, still powered by IBM.

Yeah, the malicious compliance was what should have been regulated instead. Ban the annoying cookie popup and require sites to make it opt-in by default. At most, sites should be allowed to have an option in a burger menu to allow cookies, and clicking that button would open the popup to specify which cookies you wanted to allow.

I used to date a fairly popular camgirl. Like “she made more money in a 4 hour stream than I made in a month” popular. She eventually grew to hate the work, but the money was too good for her to pass up.

The “it’s not dating if you’re paying her” jokes got old pretty quick.

Yeah, the prosthetics have always been campy, but the miniature models are gorgeous even by today’s standards.

Yeah, the behind the scenes stuff for that movie is wild.

They had to keep reshooting the fire swamp scene, because Cary Elwes (Westley/Dread Pirate Roberts) kept panicking every time Robin Wright (Princess Buttercup) got lit on fire.

The R.O.U.S. scene had to be delayed, because they had to go bail the dude in the rat suit out of jail. He had apparently gotten too drunk the night before, and was in the drunk tank on the morning that they were supposed to shoot the R.O.U.S. scene.

Yup, it was lauded for its amazing CGI when it came out, but the vast majority of the movie was shot with puppets and practical effects. It’s also a great example of “less is more” in the sense that the movie is over two hours long, but only has like 15 minutes of actual dinosaur footage. That meant they were able to focus their time and resources effectively, to make the few bits of CGI as good as they could be.

Hell, one of the first things you can look into hosting is Obsidian, (or maybe AnyType? I have seen some people recommend it for better sync integration, but I haven’t personally used it), with SyncThing to keep your notes synced across devices.

Yeah, the first movie pretty clearly lays out why he didn’t want to call the cops. Also, IIRC, the snow storm knocked out the phone lines. His parents mention that they can’t get ahold of him because the lines are down. So he couldn’t have called them even if he tried.

The second movie though? He was a predator stalking his prey. He wasn’t just a victim of a break-in. He actively lured them to his twisted funhouse, and didn’t call the cops until the very end when he wanted them to get caught red-handed.

Welp…

Yeah, this article was really poorly timed. They posted this just before it was announced that those 8 would vote to end the shutdown.

No, those are the eight scapegoats who have a full four years before they have to run for re-election, meaning they can wait for this to blow over. The party leadership wanted this, but they didn’t want to be seen voting for it because they know it’s wildly unpopular. There’s a reason those 8 were the ones who voted yes; None of them are up for reelection any time soon. They had a back room meeting and were promised some future concession in return for taking the fall for this. No more, no less.

I don’t have issues with local AIs, for things like searching your local immich instance, or controlling your local Home Assistant devices. That photo of a bird you took 3’ish years ago? Yeah, you can find it in like three seconds with a local AI search. Want to turn the lights on with a voice request? AI is one of the easiest ways for a layman to handle the language processing side of things. All of that is a drop in the ocean.

But corporations have been trying to cram it into everything, even when it’s not a good fit for what they want to do. And so far, their solution to making it fit hasn’t been to rethink their usage and consider whether or not it will actually improve a product. Instead, their approach has simply been to build more and bigger data centers, to throw increasing amounts of processing power at the problem.

The technology itself isn’t inherently harmful on the small scale. But it has followed the same pattern as climate change. Individual consumers are blamed for climate change, and are consistently urged to change their consumption habits… When it’s actually a handful of corporations producing the vast majority of greenhouse emissions. Even if every single person drastically changed their emission habits, it would barely make a dent in the overall production. It was all because of massive astroturfed PR campaigns to shift the blame away from those companies and onto individuals. And we’ve seen that same thing happen with AI, where individual users have been blamed for using AI, instead of the massive corporations.

So there’s a pizza place nearby that has something called a “Russian roulette pizza”. One slice is made with Carolina Reaper sauce, while the rest are normal pizza sauce. My buddy brought one to work, and told us what it was. We all laughed, gathered around, and took a bite at the same time.

The sly motherfucker had them make the entire pizza with the reaper sauce. We all spent the next 15 minutes fighting over the single lukewarm water fountain like we were running out of air and it was an oxygen hose.

That’s whataboutism though. If we’re discussing the topic of the post, Apple actually has a great track record.

My bet is that he was an active supplier. We already know that Virginia Giuffre landed in Epstein’s clutches via Trump; She was “recruited” by Maxwell for a “massage” gig while working on one of Trump’s properties. My bet is that Trump and Epstein had a running deal where Trump would use his properties to give girls a taste of how the wealthy lived, then call Maxwell in to snag them.

Cat owners should learn the Feline Grimace Scale. It’s a way for vets to get a rough measure of how much pain a cat is in:

I mention this because the kitten on the right would probably score a 3 or a 4, which is right on the threshold for when a vet would consider administering painkillers and/or looking into the causes more closely. Certain shampoos can be extremely harmful to cats. Since cats lick themselves clean, they’ll ingest anything you put on their fur. Including shampoos or hair products. And there are countless examples of cats going into organ failure, seizing, vomiting/shitting all over the house, etc after being bathed with harmful “pet safe” products… Just because the product is safe for their skin doesn’t mean it’s safe for them to ingest.

Also, oddly enough, this obviously AI article was one of the top results when I searched for shampoo toxicity in cats. I’m only linking it because the article is a fucking wild read, which only gets wilder as the AI hallucinates more and more.

AFAIK, the source maps are only actually requested/downloaded when the user opens the dev tools. There’s no reason to have them automatically download for every visitor. The enable/disable simply toggles whether or not the request is accepted when the user opens the dev tools.

So if my understanding is correct, keeping it enabled wouldn’t really impact server load, unless lots of users are constantly using the dev tools.