Google: Muahaha, we train our AI with the data from the publishers’ sites while indexing them. Then we summarize their site so the user never leaves our site and all the ad revenue is ours, brilliant!

Publishers: People aren’t coming to our site from Google search because it just summarizes our site for them. So we lose no traffic by completely blocking Google from crawling us.

Google: *Surprised Pikachu face*

Nice of him to wear that convenient throwing handle.

You know we’ve gone full 1984 dystopia when the fucking Senate Majority Leader stands there with a straight face and claims he had a conversation with McConnell about national security of all things (as if you’d really expect them to discuss that), and all the reporters just parrot what he said as unquestioned fact. And no one will bat an eye or ever mention his blatant lying, when it comes out that McConnell was dead the whole time.

I always heard the saying as, “A stopped clock is right twice a day.”

oh no anyway

I’d say the downfall first started around the time 24-hour cable news came along (starting in 1980 but it didn’t happen right away) along with things like the abolishing of the fairness doctrine (1987). That and the need to fill 24 hours with “news” led to the shift to more op-ed content than news. More and more of these opinion news cable channels followed.

Then the deterioration really began to snowball with the internet and proliferation of “news” outlets tailored for specific audiences, culminating with the rise of social media (I mean, what hasn’t been negatively affected by the rise of social media/oligarch-owned web 2.0) and the purchasing of all media outlets, including newspapers, by corporations and later by the rising oligarchs.

All this meant the “news” became just another type of profit-driven enterprise, with a need to compete for ratings, that shifted it from hard news to entertainment and nothing more than parroting of press releases with no independent investigation. Ultimately leading to the demise of the last bastion of independence, print journalism.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t still some journalists doing good investigative work, just that they are pretty much on their own now. I don’t know much about Meidas Touch, but if they’re actually out there asking questions and reporting, instead of just sitting around spouting opinions and outrage like most political podcasts, that’s a good thing.

If we had a free independent press any more, all reputable news outlets would be writing about this every single day to apply pressure for proof of consciousness, so they can’t drag this out until the deadline.

They would demand that his office, which released a statement saying "The Senator continues to improve, and is working closely with his staff on Kentucky and Senate matters while the Senate is out of session”, prove that they weren’t outright LYING.

They would go around asking his spokespeople to answer questions on camera and hound them, “is McConnell conscious?”, “Will you release a photo of him with his eyes open?”, “Why did his wife go to Beijing?” etc etc.

But they won’t. Because we don’t have a free independent press any more. A few journalists will speculate. None will keep demanding answers until they get them. Just the talking heads speculating.

Should have thought of that back when Platner’s giant red flags were first flown, i.e. from the beginning of his run, when there was still plenty of time to find a better candidate. But no, he had the charisma to suck everyone in, so it was deny, delay, and defend, up to now at the last minute when the evidence has, as it obviously and inevitably would, piled up to undeniable level and everyone is screwed again. smh. He can’t win now no matter what.

Aaaaaaaand … Trump just dumped on the whole tournament and put the US team in a worse position than they already were with the bad red card call. If they win now, the win is tainted by controversy and the corrupt stain of Shitfinger. The only way for the team to save face would be to keep him off the field for the game anyway, which would also piss people off. It’s a lose-lose situation and will probably impact the team’s play as well.

That’s why I use the Atkinson Hyperlegible font. Everything is very clearly distinct. lI1, O0, etc. It’s amazing how hard it is to find a good font for this purpose!

On Thursday, McConnell’s office told Newsweek via email, “Senator McConnell appreciates the outpouring of support he’s receiving while he continues his recovery in the hospital. The Senator continues to improve, and is working closely with his staff on Kentucky and Senate matters while the Senate is out of session.”

Translation:

On Thursday, McConnell’s office told Newsweek via email, “[We believe that] Senator McConnell [would, if he were conscious and aware,] appreciate the outpouring of support he’s receiving while he continues his recovery in the hospital. The Senator continues to improve [not be dead, technically], and is working closely with his [ICU medical] staff on Kentucky and Senate [respiration] matters while the Senate [brain] is out of session.”

Because of her ingrained belief system, brainwashed into her mind since childhood, she absolutely cannot face the fact/admit to herself that she actually had an abortion. Yes, it was objectively and truly an actual abortion.

Assuming that like most evangelicals her belief is that life begins at conception, to admit that she had an abortion would be to admit that she herself is what she accuses other women who have abortions to be: immoral sluts who murder children as their birth control method of choice. She would also have to acknowledge that by her actions she has caused immense pain and suffering, even death in some cases, to other women.

Neocities and such are still non-fediverse platforms, and the users would still have to know how to do html and set up a website.

The idea was that since Mastodon already has the ability to store your micro-blog posts, as well as images and clips (and has a media button to view the posts that contain them), that it would be convenient for users to also be able to store a few articles or documents as well.

I suppose to make it simpler, these other types of files could also just be attachments to posts the way media files are, and there could be a button to view the posts containing them as well. That would be a lot simpler to implement than my idea, but it would be harder for others to find them and for the user to organize and present them.

Something like a Mastodon+ where besides hosting just our microblog posts, each account would also have a modest amount of storage (maybe just 1 GB or even less) for a personal mini-website as part of our profile, where we could have other content in a more stable place for people to access-- for example essays, tutorials, reference info, fiction/poetry, pdfs for download, whatever someone might want to make available that isn’t just a temporary toot that quickly scrolls away into the sunset.

The account profile would have a link that opens to a personal “home page” which is just a list of links to the various files (with room for description text for each link).

For the user there could be a settings page with a template to enter “Description: link” lines for each piece of content, and buttons to upload/manage the content files. Preferably the content pages would be in markdown format and would be rendered for the browser like the way github does with readme files. That way users wouldn’t have to know how to do HTML.

This idea is because getting a domain, learning html, and creating a website is just not something most people can or want to deal with, but would still like to be able to have a place to put some of their stuff online. Another possible option might be ability to specify whether the personal mini-website is available to public, instance members, followers only, or mutuals only.

I was really impressed by how Pritzker handled trump’s ice goon invasion of Chicago, he stood up and got trump to back off.

edit: OTOH, let’s keep watching and see what he will do about this: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/06/eff-gov-pritzker-veto-illinois-hb-5511

Why not both? Yikes.

Sounds more like she thinks the person her preferred candidate lost to is a scumbag and she wants to make sure he doesn’t win, so will vote for his opponent. Not an uncommon way that people decide who to vote for, but as you say, not a sign of an ideological shift.

I remember back in the early web days I was trying to make a post on a forum with something about Dick Van Dyke, getting a double-whammy name block. He already unfamiliar to the younger people even back then, so none of my attempts to explain who I was talking about worked. I couldn’t even say what show he starred in for them to look up, since it was also called The Dick van Dyke Show.

Oh I see, thanks. I didn’t understand what OP meant by Wi-fi Direct, I was thinking it just meant going over the LAN via the router. So I guess this means a device making itself into a wi-fi hotspot with is own local IP address that can be connected to directly, right?

Try KDEConnect (or GSConnect for gnome). Clients for Linux, BSD, Android, Sailfish, iOS, macOS and Windows.

Another option (maybe better, depending on your distro) is Warpinator. Linux, Windows, and Android.