Radiohead’s “Let Down” Charts on Billboard Hot 100 After Going Viral on TikTok
“Let Down,” a song from their seminal 1997 LP OK Computer, has charted on the Billboard Hot 100 at #91 after recently going viral on TikTok.
I love how 90s Gen Z is. They’re wearing baggy clothes and listening to the stuff us millennials and Gen Xers grew up on.
I think I’m beginning to understand how my dad felt when I started wearing tight jeans and a black t-shirt, and listening to Pink Floyd back in high school.
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine calls for ban of kratom:
In a press release on Monday, DeWine called kratom an “imminent public health risk,” citing more than 200 overdose deaths in the state since 2019 where kratom was identified as a contributing factor.
The only people this will help are real drug dealers, not the people who overdosed after relapsing onto real drugs and just so happened to have a bag of kratom in the room when they were found.
I recently wrote about how SSRIs saved my life. Well, kratom was the other half of that story. Without it, I highly doubt I would’ve gotten clean so fast, or possibly at all. It’s not a party drug. It’s a plant that happens to work on opiate receptors in a very mild way compared to actual opiates, so it’s a godsend if you want to get clean without taking more dangerous shit like Suboxone or methadone.
It definitely has some potential for abuse, but it’s not even remotely as harmful as the real thing. This is like outlawing nicotine gum and recommending 30 cigars a day for harm reduction.
YouTube’s Secret AI Video Enhancements Ignite Creator Backlash:
Critics argue that such alterations erode trust, especially in an era where authenticity is paramount.
I can see a silver lining in some of this. If AI keeps getting force-integrated into everything we do on these big platforms, it’s gotta cause some kind of exodus. YouTube blew up over the years because it was a place people could upload real DIY videos of their life, or things they’re interested in.
That’s the stuff I want to see. That’s why I used to prefer YouTube over watching something on cable TV. That’s why I love the indie web: it feels like one of the few places you can still get that raw authenticity in a world where everything is becoming more phony.
Perplexity’s Comet browser naively processed pages with evil instructions
Asked to summarize the page, Comet ingested the text on the page, saw the instructions, and then exfiltrated a one-time password granting access to the user’s Perplexity account.
I can think of exactly zero reasons I’d need or want a browser with built-in AI. Bums me out that even Firefox is starting to go down this bumpy road. I’m not a doomer, I just don’t want AI everything all the time.
Google’s fight against ad blockers on YouTube enters another round:
YouTube users from all over the world are starting to see new anti-ad-blocking prompts, when they try to watch YouTube videos with enabled content blocker. This looks like an exact copy of the March 2025 attempt to get ad blocking users to disable their content blockers or subscribe to YouTube Premium.
I’m a YouTube Premium subscriber, and lately I’ve noticed the page load time has slowed down significantly. Our internet plan is 1gb/s and YouTube consistently takes a solid 10+ seconds to load. I wonder if they’re throttling because I use uBlock Origin on Firefox ESR? There’s still plenty of tracking garbage it blocks, even without the ads.
Trump has no business taking a stake in Intel
How are voters raised on the glories of “manufacturing jobs” going to feel when the government has a stake in a CEO who is firing thousands of workers?
That’s what makes me cringe the most—they’ll just rationalize it and redirect to some arbitrary figures Trump makes up. It doesn’t matter what he does. These people are in a cult, and he is their beloved leader.
Real Footage Combined With AI Slop About DC Is Creating a Disinformation Mess on TikTok
In these videos, it’s only totally clear to me that the content is fake because I found the original sources. Lots of this footage is obviously fake if you’re familiar with the actual situation in DC or familiar with the geography and streets in DC. But most people are not.
TikTok is already one of the worst places for AI-generated misinformation. It started getting flooded almost immediately after Google Veo came out. It’s like a trial run for how bad the rest of the web is about to get. 😬
Still, considering that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the anti-vaxxer in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services that oversees the FDA, once ate so much tuna and perch fish that it gave him mercury poisoning, it seems unlikely that the agency is going to put that much effort into warning people not to consume potentially radioactive shrimp.
Just be sure to take your iodine tablets and you can have a little radioactive shrimp, as a treat.
UK commissioner suggests govt stops kids from using VPNs
But the banhammer has also driven a surge in VPN use, giving children and adults alike a way around the new digital fences. That puts VPNs firmly in the commissioner’s sights.
This just keeps getting worse. I feel like that’s the ultimate goal though; to outlaw anything that could possibly give people any kind of privacy online. How do you even enforce this? Make people submit their photo ID to a service that literally exists to preserve anonymity?
Meet the First Nicotine Energy Drink
In what can only be described as a prophetic vision, more than 15 years, Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! featured a skit called Cigarette Juice, about a nicotine energy drink in 2009, at a time where cigarettes were getting their taboo treatment, and as with everything in 2025, parody became reality.
One of my favorite Tim & Eric sketches. Of course absurdist comedy is becoming reality in 2025.
Ohioans will need to submit their photo ID to watch pornography online starting this fall
Moving forward in some ways and going back to the dark ages in others. Good news for VPN companies I guess.
Found this while browsing Ye Olde Blogroll.
The Wild Wild Web: another StumbleUpon clone like Cloudhiker. No account required; just click the button and surf the web like it’s 2009.
No means no, even for Perplexity · Victor Wynne
When a website puts up a robots.txt file, it’s basically putting up a “No Solicitors” sign on their digital front door. It doesn’t matter if you’re selling Girl Scout cookies, collecting for charity, or claim you’re there to help the homeowner. The sign says no, and that should mean no. Period.
I like this analogy. People argue that robots.txt doesn’t necessarily have to be respected. So technically you can ignore it all you want, but it kinda makes you an asshole and a parasite to the open web if you choose to go that route.
Ohio legal weed sales reach $702.5M in first year
Wild that it’s already been one year! I honestly can’t believe I used to meet some sketchy guy in a parking lot, get in his crusty 4runner and hand him cash for some random strain with a made up name.
We are truly living in the space age now 🥲
Trump Is Launching an AI Search Engine Powered by Perplexity
I recently gave Perplexity another try, but after hearing the recent news about how they’ve been circumventing no-crawl directives, and now this? I’m good.
Cannabis Is Being Grown Like It’s Bitcoin: That’s A Problem
According to Mills, the sector now burns through 595 petajoules of energy annually, costing roughly $11 billion. That’s on par with all other U.S. crop production combined, and more than the energy consumed by the entire pharmaceutical or beverage industries, and it doubles the amount of greenhouse emissions produced by cryptocurrency mining.
The weed is smoking us, man!
I feel like I’m always yammering about Metroidvanias. I was just scrolling my RSS feed and came across a link to a new (to me) site: MetroidVania.GG
It’s exactly what it sounds like; a curated list of games from the genre across every current gen platform.
Med Student Horrified to Learn How Much His Zoomer Patient Was Actually Vaping
…a “zoomer patient” of his, who was struggling with “fairly serious alcohol dependency/withdrawal and risk of seizures,” had been going through an entire disposable vape cartridge from the brand, Geek Bar, every two days…“That’s like nicotine equivalent of 30ish packs of cigs EVERY DAY.”
Who needs crack when you can just get a Geek Bar? 😬
Reddit considers iris-scanning Orb developed by a Sam Altman startup
In one scenario, there are far more AI “agents” operating on the internet than humans. Humans will have to have some way to differentiate themselves and quickly present credentials for various tasks.
I don’t think the solution is to let bots run wild and leave the burden on humans to prove they’re human. Why not focus on a way to identify AI agents instead?
I’m sure that’s a complicated thing to figure out, but it’s pretty fucking dystopian to force people to hand over biometric data to prove they aren’t a computer.
uBlock Origin Lite is officially on the App Store!
I’ve been using uBlock Origin and Firefox everywhere else as long as I can remember. When I switched to iPhone, I had to settle for a paid subscription to Adblock Pro — which works great. But this feels more like home.
BREAKING NEWS when you live in Ohio.
‘Hibernation genes’ help control metabolism and feeding — and could hold untapped benefit for humans
Hibernation offers “a whole bunch of different biometrically important superpowers,” senior study author Christopher Gregg, a human genetics professor at the University of Utah, told Live Science.
Say no more. I’m omw to find a nice cozy cave somewhere 🥱
High Noon issues recall after vodka seltzer cans mislabeled as Celsius
The affected packs may contain 12-ounce cans of High Noon vodka seltzer mislabeled as Celsius Astro Vibe Energy Drink, Sparkling Blue Razz Edition with a silver top.
That might affect your morning commute a bit 😬
Ninja Gaiden Ragebound Review: Thrilling, Fast-Paced 2D Revival
This looks SO SICK! Same studio that made my favorite modern Metroidvania, Blasphemous. Yet another Switch game I feel obligated to buy right at launch — tomorrow, July 31st.
Mario Paint Has Been Added To Switch Online, With Mouse Control
I’m not planning on getting a Switch 2 any time soon, but I’m definitely feeling the nostalgic pull of playing Mario Paint on official hardware again!
AI summaries cause ‘devastating’ drop in audiences:
AI summaries can give users all the information they seek without ever clicking through to the original source of the content. Meanwhile, search result links are pushed further down the page, lowering the number of users that find them.
If I’m searching something on Google, I’m probably looking for a quick answer. That usually means landing on a site covered in ads, which I block anyway. So I’m not sure my lack of traffic is hurting a whole lot. Honestly, I think the cracks started showing long before AI. People were already gaming SEO to climb the pagerank ladder; SEO slop was here long before AI slop.
That said, if AI is profiting off your work you deserve to be compensated. That part does bother me. But I also don’t want to see LLMs turn into the next digital ad silo.
I will say, AI aside, one thing that always keeps me coming back to Google (over Kagi or DuckDuckGo) is pretty simple, and it keeps me from visiting web pages too. It’s the way they list business information like store hours, how busy they are right now vs their normal traffic, and their phone number. On Kagi, I have to go to the website, usually get redirected to some random location 500 miles away because I use iCloud Private Relay, change “my store”, and then go digging through their menus to find my way back to their store information. All while dodging javascript popups for promotions and email capture.
I guess my point is this: I’ve never found a site I loved through Google. The stuff I care about — blogs, indie sites, weird corners of the web, etc. I’ve found through online communities. If I like a commercial site (404 Media, for example), I subscribe. I visit their site directly. Google isn’t part of that relationship at all.
At the end of the day, I think the economics of the web are just shifting. What they’re shifting to, I have no idea. I think the web will survive though.
Hollow Knight Silksong Actually Exists, Will Be Playable For The Public At Gamescom:
With how much I love Metroidvanias, you’d think I’d have played Hollow Knight. I’ve not. I started the first one years ago, but never finished or revisited it. I’ll probably play this one first and then go back to the roots. I blame Star Wars for teaching me things can start at an arbitrary point in the story and backtrack to the beginning.
Altman told Bowman that his firm had nothing to do with the “impending fraud crisis,” claiming that OpenAI wasn’t working on impersonation tools. However, as CNN points out, the billionaire does back a tool called The Orb, which is working on a controversial biometric authentication method. And its video generator Sora could conceivably be used for exactly the types he’s talking about as well.
He has the problem and the creepy, centralized solution.
Scientist Suggests Tests to See if Large Object Headed Toward Earth Could Be an Alien Spacecraft
I’m obnoxiously skeptical about aliens, but I can’t help secretly hoping a fleet of hyper advanced lifeforms will land on the White House lawn and deliver a bare-assed spanking to Donald Trump on live TV, crushing what’s left of his self esteem and ending his reign of terror once and for all.
Conspiracy theorists don’t realize they’re on the fringe
It’s not that believers in conspiracy theories are massively overconfident; there is no data on that, because the studies didn’t set out to quantify the degree of overconfidence, per Pennycook. Rather, “They’re overconfident, and they massively overestimate how much people agree with them,” he said.
I wonder how much of that false confidence comes from people smiling and nodding because they just want the conspiracy theorist to shut the fuck up already 🙃