Enter your birth date and place to discover what the weather was like when you were born!
This is neat. It was rainy with a high of 85.8°F when I was born
U.S. Court Orders LibGen to Pay $30m to Publishers
…LibGen is one of the longest-running shadow libraries online.
In recent years, rightsholders have made several attempts to shut the site down. Court orders have led to LibGen being blocked in several countries, but completely eliminating the threat has been extremely difficult. This is partly because the identities of those running it remains unknown.
While this is a win on paper, it’s unlikely that the publishers will get paid by the LibGen operators, who remain anonymous.
The check is in the mail, I’m sure
Okay I'm finally using Bear
Not Bear Blog, but the markdown app. I used Obsidian for a while and I really liked it, but it felt like overkill so I switched to Drafts. I kinda liked that too but it also felt a little bloated after a while, mostly because it integrates with so many other services. Literally the only feature I used was automatically sending the draft to Micro.blog’s editor, saving me a whopping .5 seconds over copying and pasting it.
A rant about Facebook
You know what I hate about Facebook? It’s the only social network where literally everyone you know has an account. It’s one of those things that’s become a simple fact of life and no one ever questions it. If you take a step back it’s pretty crazy though right? We preach about the importance of decentralization but then the most popular… software… thing is the most centralized of them all.
Google’s AI Mushrooms Could Have ‘Devastating Consequences’
Google is serving AI-generated images of mushrooms when users search for some species, a risky and potentially fatal error for foragers who are trying to figure out what mushrooms are safe to eat.
I would trust a dusty old field guide from the 1800s before I trusted Google for foraging tips
I was always more of a Courtney Love fan. She gets blamed for Kurt’s death with no tangible evidence but Dave Grohl and the AIDS denialist garbage he pushes is directly responsible for thousands of deaths
WP Engine sends cease and desist to Automattic
The plot thickens 👀
I’ve always been one of those people who use ‘lol’ too much but I’m also one of those people who laugh too much in real life. My awkward and excessive laughing falls somewhere between Kitty Forman and Kamala Harris, I think.
Start auditing and controlling the AI models accessing your content
I don’t use Cloudflare anymore but I think this is pretty cool. They have a new thing where you can filter and block AI crawlers and even, somehow… charge them for the data you allow them to use?
Site owners will have the ability to set a price for their site, or sections of their site, and to then charge model providers based on their scans and the price you have set.
Half of it kinda sounds too good to be true and the other half just sounds like an ad for a new Cloudflare product but I’m intrigued 🤔
Caffeinated ramen in a squeeze tube…
Boost Noodle is a new kind of ramen for players who “want to eat easily with one hand while playing games,““not get their expensive and important gaming equipment dirty,” and “want to eat something closer to a meal rather than a jelly drink or beverage.”
We are living in the dumbest possible timeline. Or the smartest. I’m not sure anymore 🤷
A Bay Area boy was kidnapped from a park in 1951. He’s just been found alive.
Whoa. You always hear about cold cases like this but never ones where they actually find them
Researcher reveals ‘catastrophic’ security flaw in the Arc browser
Arc has a feature called Boosts that allows you to customize any website with custom CSS and Javascript.
Unfortunately our Firebase ACLs were misconfigured…This allowed any Boost to be assigned to any user (provided you had their userID), and thus activate it for them, leading to custom CSS or JS running on the website the boost was active on.
This kinda stuff is why I stick with Safari and Firefox
Squid Game Season 2’s First Clip Brings Bullets, Fire, and Fresh Meat
Netflix has shared a tantalizingly brief look at what to expect when the smash hit series returns in December.
Don’t even care about the trailer tbh. Just stoked to hear it’s finally coming back in December!
Documentary about the largest cave system in the world, Son Doong in Vietnam. I’ve gotta find a way to watch this! There’s live showings at a few theaters but streaming is only in the UK right now
Watching Star Trek: The Original Series for the first time ever. Will update in a couple weeks lol 🖖
YouTube confirms your pause screen is now fair game for ads
YouTube claims that the pause ads are actually designed to let the company offer you a “less interruptive” experience, but it didn’t tell us that its normal ads will appear any less frequently as a result.
I watch YouTube more than any other streaming service but it’s unusable if you don’t pay for Premium. Or have uBlock Origin. Premium is worth it to me though. I wanna support the creators in some way but definitely not through being spammed with ads every five minutes
The “Third State” That Lies Beyond The Boundaries Of Life And Death
“Life and death are traditionally viewed as opposites,” Noble told IFLScience. “However, the emergence of new multicellular lifeforms from the cells of a dead organism introduces a ‘third state’ that lies beyond the conventional boundaries of life and death.”
There’s always a secret third option
Void Text Editor: Open-Source Alternative to Cursor
VS Code is to modern text editors what Chromium is to browsers: a fork magnet. A slew of niche spins have emerged, each putting their own spin on Microsoft’s massively popular original.The latest to join the fray is Void.
Void is positioning itself as a free, open-source rival to Cursor, albeit with notable differences.While Void is AI-centric it’s not chained to a specific set of cloud-based, proprietary LLMs like Cursor it. It aims to work just as well with locally hosted LLMs through Ollama.
[Void] 👀
Mozilla is shutting down its Mastodon instance
We’ve made the hard decision to end our experiment with Mozilla.social and will shut down the Mastodon instance on December 17, 2024. Thank you for being part of the Mozilla.social community and providing feedback during our closed beta.
They’re awfully wishy washy these days