Reminds me of the American town that asked the Soviets for funding during the Cold War. There was a town that was essentially cut off without a bridge, and the local American government was dragging their feet with funding the construction. The town sent a letter to the USSR asking for humanitarian aid, who happily agreed to fund the bridge as a giant “fuck you” to the Americans. Suddenly, the American government was more than happy to fund the bridge as soon as the “USSR sending money to the US because America can’t afford to build their own bridges” news headlines broke and they had egg on their face.

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. But that began to shift 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.

Beans (and rice, lentils, breadcrumbs, etc) are banned from chili competitions, because they’re considered filler. So no, it’s not a legit part of a chili recipe. If you have beans in it, as far as a chili competition is concerned, you just made some really thick bean soup.

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.

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.

Sure, for printing. But printing isn’t the only form of subtractive color. Plenty of natural pigments exist. Those can be quantified with CMY or RGB values and then reproduced elsewhere, even though the natural pigment itself isn’t directly targeting those three wavelengths.

I mean, you’re almost there, but then you lost the plot. I’m a professional lighting technician, and also happen to have a little bit of experience with paint.

Light is additive color, and RGB is commonly used because your eyes have three different cones that detect colors. You have a red cone, a green cone, and a blue cone. So lights will tend to use the RGB color space because it allows the light to directly stimulate those three cones. If I shine RGB light at a white object, it will combine to reflect as white (meaning the object appears to be white) because the full spectrum is being reflected off of the object.

But the actual colors used don’t really matter, as long as they add up to the full spectrum of light. I could use CMY light instead, and achieve the same basic effect. Again, if the full spectrum is hitting the object, the full spectrum has the potential to be reflected. And that potential is additive color… We add color to the system to achieve the color we want.

Pigment (or really anything that absorbs/blocks light) is subtractive color. CMY(K) is commonly used in printing, but you could just as easily use RGB pigments instead. All that matters is that they’re selectively absorbing light, instead of reflecting it. If a pigment selectively reflects cyan light, (and absorbs all other wavelengths), it will appear as cyan when you hit it with white light. That absorption/blocking is subtractive color. We start with the full spectrum, and remove wavelengths to achieve the desired color.

But the absorption isn’t actually what matters. What matters is that the light is selectively being reflected off of the object. Let’s say I have a pane of glass, which is coated with a special reflective material. This material will allow cyan light to pass through, while all other light gets reflected off.

Now two things will happen if I shine white light at this glass: First, the glass itself will appear to shine red. That’s because when you selectively remove cyan light from the spectrum, it tints red. Since the cyan light is passing through the glass (instead of being reflected) we are effectively subtracting it from the glass’ reflection. So the glass appears red due to the subtractive color.

Second, the light on the other side of the glass will appear to be cyan. Because the cyan light is selectively allowed to pass through that filter. This cyan light could be used for additive color mixing, and could be combined with beams of other spectrums (like magenta and yellow) to form white light.

Now with this above system, we have the potential for both additive and subtractive color mixing, purely due to the properties of how the light interacts with the reflective material. Again, the specific color space isn’t what determines additive or subtractive, it is how the light is interacting in the system. And nearly every natural system will be using both. You’ll have additive color illuminating the room you’re in, then subtractive color selectively absorbing wavelengths to make different objects appear different colors.

Probably worth noting that FlareSolverr hasn’t actually worked to bypass Cloudflare in a while. They got noticed by CF, and CF started actively preventing their solvers from working. However, several trackers still require FlareSolverr to run before they’ll even try to connect.

In some cases, you can visit the site directly, and then manually solve the CF captcha. That will usually allow it to work, even when Solverr is broken.

Yeah, it feels like a “loose lips sink ships” situation… But on the other side of the same coin, there’s no way the TV providers were ignorant of this. They undoubtedly already knew, so it’s not like this article is going to bring anything new to light. If anything, it may put a target on the backs of some of the people who were quoted in the article for litigation, but that’s not going to actually stop the boxes from being sold in the long term.

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?

Yeah, the disgraced prince is still living a life of luxury, in a massive 50 bedroom estate. The dude will want for nothing.

I mean yeah, but that’s a little like saying “computers all have WiFi capabilities these days, as long as you only buy motherboards with built in WiFi.” It’s a pretty large limitation to place on the user’s choice. Especially when Linux users like to meme about certain distros being better or worse.