Biden moves to crack down on Shein and Temu, slow shipments into US
“over the last 10 years, the number of shipments entering the United States claiming the de minimis exemption has increased significantly, from approximately 140 million a year to over 1 billion a year.” And the “majority of shipments entering the United States claiming the de minimis exemption originate from several China-founded e-commerce platforms,” Biden said.
Any time I hear “Temu” I think of that South Park episode where all the grandparents are compulsively buying cheap junk from the Home Shopping Network
I try to share cool links every day but sometimes I have to remind myself that some days are uneventful. The news has been so consistently crazy for the last few years its easy to forget that.
Achieving optical transparency in live animals with absorbing molecules
…an aqueous solution of a common food color approved by the US Food and Drug Administration, tartrazine, has the effect of reversibly making the skin, muscle, and connective tissues transparent in live rodents.
The food coloring used in Doritos and Mountain Dew can make mouse skin transparent in high concentrations. I originally saw an article about this on The Onion and thought it was a joke, but it’s legit!
Woke up to a dead mouse on the floor next to my side of the bed. One of the perks of having a cat door to the back yard 🥴
Why do I blog?
Lately I’ve put a lot of thought into why I blog. A few months ago, it was because I had so many ideas to get out of my head I just had to do it. I came up with post after post about my different experiences and the things I’ve learned and developed opinions on over the years. For a while, I didn’t even know what writer’s block felt like.
Boar’s Head Shuts Down Virginia Meat Plant After 9 Deaths Linked to Listeria
I’m sure they’ll do all they can to ensure the other facilities are up to code but it makes ya wonder how it got so bad in the first place. Shit happens but I don’t think I’ll be eating Boar’s Head any time soon 🤢
Flappy Bird announces its return, but with a… twist
So, who is the Flappy Bird Foundation? Well, get ready for a big ol' bummer. When you dig deeper, you realize the foundation specializes in the selling of everyone’s favorite Ts, NFTs.
Yes, unfortunately, the company behind the game’s return snagged the copyright after inactivity and is using it to sling crypto. Dong himself is not directly involved here.
I was so excited for Flappy Bird to come back but not like this 🙃
Music industry’s 1990s hard drives, like all HDDs, are dying
You cannot trust any medium, so you copy important things over and over, into fresh storage. “Optical media rots, magnetic media rots and loses magnetic charge, bearings seize, flash storage loses charge, etc.,” writes user abracadaniel. “Entropy wins, sometimes much faster than you’d expect.”
Backups are important
One of my favorite things about Linux is feeling like I got a whole new computer every few months when I get bored and try a new distro
Switched over to Vanilla OS after running KDE Neon for the last ~3 years. I missed GNOME! It took a minute to figure out fractional scaling from dconf editor, I was used to Plasma where it was just a default setting. Feels nice doing a hard reset every once in a while
OpenAI releases o1, its first model with ‘reasoning’ abilities
The training behind o1 is fundamentally different from its predecessors, OpenAI’s research lead, Jerry Tworek, tells me, though the company is being vague about the exact details.
With o1, it trained the model to solve problems on its own using a technique known as reinforcement learning, which teaches the system through rewards and penalties.
Most 78s were 10-inches and held about three-and-a-half minutes of music. They were primarily made of shellac, which, believe it or not, is a resin secreted by lac bugs in the forests of Thailand and India.
TIL old records are an insect product 🤯🎵
Ohio’s oldest continuously operating inn appears to be for sale
At 212 years old, the Buxton Inn is billed as “Ohio’s oldest continuously operating inn,” and has even housed multiple celebrity guests throughout its tenure, including Cameron Diaz, Jennifer Garner, Henry Ford, and Yo-Yo Ma.
This place is a few miles down the road from us. It’s always been touted as one of the most haunted places in Ohio. It’ll be interesting to see what the new owners do with it when it sells! Hopefully they keep it operational. Ghosts or not, it’s a cool piece of history.
Ford Seeks Patent for Software That Records Your Conversations to Serve You Ads
If this kind of thing catches on I’m trading in my car for a Huffy. My phone already knows enough about me.
Instead of mindlessly scrolling “for you” feeds, I now spend that time reading posts from other bloggers I follow via RSS. It’s been a wonderful experience.
There’s great content out there, but you must curate it yourself. An RSS reader is a great way to do that.
I’ve been doing the same thing for a while now too. I blogged about quitting social media and shifting over to Micro.blog recently. I don’t think that would’ve been possible without a well curated RSS feed to fill the void!
I waited for the public beta of iOS 18 before I installed it on my daily driver last night. An official Apple ROM is obviously a lot more stable and easier to install, but it felt a little like the good ol' days circa 2013 when I used to flash a new custom ROM on my Android phone every week or two 🥲
The old man down the road
I woke up to the doorbell ringing this morning. Who in the hell could be here this early?
So I got up and opened the front door. There was this little old man standing there in a brown Member’s Only jacket and some khakis.
“Hey, I’m your neighbor from two houses down,” he said. “You guys have a grey cat?”
