Today I learned about a particularly vile piece of shit corp, Bright Data. Web scraping as a service. They boast about having 150 million IP addresses from residential IPs and "real user devices" (I can't imagine that it's with the user's consent) and being able to scrape petabytes. They brag about their ability to defeat captchas, turning websites into AI data. Like every possible gross thing you can think of all wrapped up in a package with a shiny website bow.

I've got a few folks I know in Minneapolis. Cis het white guys but also super lefty. They look and are just wrecked from everything every time I talk to them. I don't know if they're doing any protesting - they probably wouldn't say if they were, but it is ROUGH to live there these days. Much respect to my pals up there having to live on the front lines of a one sided fascist takeover.

I can't believe I'm saying this, but can we just go back to the days of paying like $50-80/month and getting all the channels? I'm tired of having everything on different services.

Here's to all the open source developers who put hours and hours of their lives into a project they built, put it out into the world, and now it sits with approximately zero users. Thank you for putting labor into the world to try and help others, even if it's never been recognized. Brag about your project here if you'd like!

What's one of your weird video game habits? I'll start - in Stardew Valley, I can't let myself divorce anyone. I have to do a whole new playthrough if I want to see someone else's marriage events.

HAL 9000 was better than modern "AI". HAL at least didn't allow Dave to do the things he wasn't supposed to do. AI happily claims to do what you tell them to do, but then does them wrong 25% of the time.

Every Single Trans Person was once a trans kid. And I've yet to meet a single trans person who transitioned as an adult who doesn't wish that they were able to come out and be themselves as a kid. We're watching as one after another, politicians, hospitals and organizations and universities and schools are choosing to toss trans kids under the bus. They're. Sacrificing. Children. I will never forgive those who throw trans kids under the bus. Never.