So we write a JS library that you can pull in with your favorite client-side JS package manager that pretends to do ID and face scanning, but just green-lights everything. It tells the user “ok, look at your screen and 3… 2… 1… ok, we got your face scan now hold your ID up to the screen and 3… 2… 1… yup, you’re 100% over 18 all right, yessirree.” And we only admit it’s not actually doing shit in the fine fine print. And anyone can lock their content behind that and if the state of Mississippi or whoever comes after the website admin, the website has plausible deniability. “It’s whaaaaaat? I was scammed? Really? It doesn’t actually verify? Oh, well, I’m so very sorry Mr. state prosecutor sir, I never realized. I’ll get that fixed right up. Wouldn’t want innocent seventeen-and-a-half-year-olds exposed to any mention of… whispers: nudity.”

So put an SQLite database on a Luks-encrypted partition or a Luks-encrypted filesystem in a file.

Lay still in bed with the lights off and my eyes closed. If the reason why I can’t sleep is noise, I’ll put in an ear plug. (Only one, because my other ear is on the pillow and blocks everything out.) Otherwise, I just… you know… try to sleep?

Staaaaaaahp

Just imagine. Apple could make it a microtransaction bidding war. If you hit the “end” button it says “override caller’s preference not to let you hang up for only 75¢.” And then it puts on the caller’s screen “Tommy has initiated a bid to control hanging up privileges. The current bid is 75¢.”

Say what you will about Roblox, but I have to respect, if nothing else, the fact that they’re kindof an intellectual-property-optional zone. It’s unlikely you can think of a video game that there isn’t a super-shitty rip off of on Roblox.

I mean, what do you think of Steve Martin? I don’t know about you, but I think he’s one wild and crazy guy.

Yeah, ok. I’ll concede Betterhelp too.

Exactly. Day 2. ;)

Firefox, Plex, and VPNs I can understand being surprised about. But the rest of them… I mean of course they were going to milk you for money. Was there ever a time when any of those didn’t?

Hold my beer.

Maybe they matched the donut placement to the sign. Did you ever think of that?

Yes. If there’s any one thing that pisses me off about the latest “AI” bubble, it may be that… AI has been around for decades, and has been useful for decades while this “GenAI” scam BS is taking center stage.

I took a course in college named “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” in like 2005. In that course, I learned about the A* algorithm which is used among other purposes by games to let NPC’s navigate from point A to point B potentially around obstacles or over terrain of different passability. That shit is genuinely useful and bears no resemblence to LLMs or Stable Diffusion. And yet it was called “AI” back in… like the 1960s and was still called “AI” in 2005. Probably still is in college courses around the world.

Now, I haven’t read the article, but I’d have to hope nobody put too much blind faith in the AI’s output here. But the right tools in the hands of sufficiently well-educated scientists, be they called “AI” or not, can certainly assist in things like drug development.

Oh, also, you can call just about anything that’s done with code “AI” even if it really has nothing to do with artificial intelligence. My employer was fairly recently sold an automated customer service tool by a big, well-known software vendor that another team I work distantly with had to configure/program, every step from soup to nuts. (There was absolutely no machine learning involved or anything like that. This other team had to decide all the flows the customers could go through.) But you can bet your ass you couldn’t read any three consecutive words in any of their marketing materials about it without at least one of the three being “AI”.

I’m sure there are microwave ovens no more sophisticated than the one I have (spoiler: it’s the dumbest microwave oven I could find) that are being marketed with the term “AI”.

…

maybe…

Campaign 4 when?

And I’m really curious whether they’ll go with Daggerheart rather than 5e for campaign 4.

Also, I do hope they fix the Daggerheart license.

So, the DOJ released a memo saying basically that there isn’t a list and Epstein killed himself. Why are the MAGAts changing their tune now? Is it because if the DOJ said it and Trump is currently at the helm, then (by their logic) Trump must approve of downplaying the whole “Epstein list” thing?

You’re not wrong.

Definitely one of the scarier creatures in D&D, at least accounting for hit dice.

I kinda want to put it in a D&D campaign. Maybe an evil druid makes a magical device that births an army of evil treants or redcaps or something.

Can you define your terms a bit? What do you mean by “range” and “angle-range?” Also, if you’re taking about angles, angles relative to what in particular? (Maybe relative to the line segment connecting the centers of the two circles? Relative to a tangent of one of the circles at the point of intersection?) Are you looking to solve this only for the case where the two circles have equal radii, or for the more general case where their radii may be unequal?

Also, I’ll assume Euclidian space here. Non-Euclidian isn’t my forte. I guess, though, to say I know nothing about it would be a bit hyperbolic.

Why isn’t that common to cover with a blanket other parts of our body when we feel cold, like the belly or lower back?

It… is?