We MUST be able to inspect and age verify every AI slop porn image to protect the fictional children!

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I'm convinced that's a big part ofthe reason for our curent descent into fascism. I'm part of the younger cohort of Gen-X. My grandparents' generation were the original Antifa. Only they didn't pussyfoot around like the current iteration does. They way THEIR generation delt with poeple like richard spencer, stephen miller, stormtrooper barbie, their brown-shirted henchmen in ICE CBP and DHS, and the rest of their kind, was to drop high explosives on them by the tonne from B-17s and Lancasters; of, if it was for some reason necessary to get up close and personal, to cut out their living goddamned guts and use them to grease the treads of their tanks.

But most of them are dead now and cannot tell their stories. My cohort of my generation are the youngest people now who were old enough to grow up with, and have adult conversations with, the World War 2 generation. I grew up with my grandparents and their buddies in the Masonic Lodge telling stories about island hopping in the Pacific as SeaBees, landing their crippled B-17 in the English Channel after not bailing out because he couldn't swim and setpping from the plane onto the rescue boat hever having even gotten a foot wet, hauling ass through the deserts of North Africa in dune buggies while machine-gunning nazi airplanes. And when I got into my late teens and 20s, one past-Master of the lodge told us about what he saw when his unit got to the camps.

I will never forget what those men told me. Because of what those men told me I will never, EVER, support, aid, or have even the smallest or empathy for any fascists in any form, or their enablers or symphasizers. Because of what those men told me I will forever support Antifa in any form. In fact, I wish it really WERE an actual organization that I coule offer more support than moral. I will forever honor their legacy and what they did directly for this country and the world and indirectly for me when they were too goddamned young to be asked to bear the responsibility they were given. I will forever be greatful to the greatest generation.

But they were also people I knew persionaly. I grew up with them. I was even part of a Masonic youth group named after a Templar for which Master Masons were the advisors; so, for a kid, I was at the lodge a lot. I loved some of them as family and others as may-as-well-be-family. To me they are real. Their lives are real. Their stories are real. Their history is real. To the younger generations though? They did not grow up with those people and their lives and stories. To people who did not grow up around WW2 vets, that's just all trivia for the history test before they move on to the latest tweet or tiktok. I really do think that a lot of people have missed out on a LOT... particularly the perspectives that came from fighting... REALLY fighting... to destroy fascists. And I would bet good money that if that generation were still around; we would not be where we are in this country today.

Maybe they can start putting USB sticks on magazines like they used to do with 3.5" floppies back in the day? That would... well... it might at least increase the demand for the brand name.

It's 2025. We've known for a couple of decades that Win32/Win64 and Windows and its main ecosystem only work because various hacks into the kernel to make it all run more smoothly. Even the video driver architecture basically has built in restarts when buffers blow up.

It's a shitty proprietary operating system which somehow, every time they try to clean it up, it gets worse under and on top of the hood. I stopped using Windows for my own personal devices four years ago, and will not go back. Ubuntu, Debian and MacOS offer cleaner UIs, and even if the software libraries are a bit smaller, at least I'm not a prisoner to endless ads.

Christ I had to set up a Win11 laptop yesterday, and between setting up the OS and Edge I had to turn down "offers" and additional tracking functionality around seven or eight times. Actually more, because then I set up a non-privileged user profile, and had to do it all again. And that was Win11 Pro. I can only imagine how much worse the Home editions are.

There's no speculation that increases CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere lead to the more heat being trapped. We've known that since the late 19th century.

Texas is slowly moving in the right direction. Imagine how much farther it could have moved if conservatives didn't have a jihad against reality.

It just goes to show you, there's none more gullible than the paranoid.

Right, but as I just said obeying a disallow directive isn't legally mandatory, so it doesn't mean much.

In the 90s I inherited a make/awk monstrosity where top-level make created a top-level awk script, which ran and created Makefiles in each subdirectory and ran make in each one, which generated awk scripts in each directory, which then ran each awk script, and each result was gathered by the top awk script.. I dealt with it for a year until it was fully in my control, when I quickly replaced it with a single perl script which mere humans could understand. (Generating DNS files for named, if anyone cares, one domain per subdir),

Oh, very nice. I'm surprised (but happily so) that anyone was that structured in the 80s, though if anyone was, the military seems likely. But anyone that structured probably already replaced most/all of their COBOL with something newer, so the remaining COBOL systems are the OTHER sort...

The difference depends on context, of course.

Generally speaking there are several cases to consider:

(1) Site requires agreeing on terms of service before browser can access content. In this case, scraping is a clear violation.

(2) Site terms of service forbid scraping content, but human visitors can view content and ...
(2a) site takes technical measures to exclude bots. In this case scraping is a no-no, but for a different reason: it violates the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
(2b) site takes no technical measures to exclude bots. In this case, the answer is unclear, and may depend on the specific jurisdiction (e.g. circuit court).

(3) Site has a robots.txt file and ...
(3a) robots.txt allows scraping. In this case, even if the terms of service forbid scraping, the permission given here helps the scraper's defense.
(3b) robots.txt forbids scraping. In this case obeying robots.txt isn't in itself legally mandatory, but it may affect your case if the site takes other anti-scraping measures.

Not *explicitly*. Offering such a database would be an invitation for people to look at the whole data broker industry. So what you, as a databroker who tracks and piegeonholes every human being who uses the Internet to a fare-the-well, do to tap into the market for lists of gullible yokels? You offer your customer, literally anyone with money, the ability to zero in on the gullible by choosing appropriate proxies.

For example, you can get a list of everyone who has searched for "purchasing real estate with no money down". Sad people who buy colloidal silver and herbal male enhancement products. People who buy terrible crypto assets like NFTs and memecoins. Nutters who spend a lot of time on conspiracy theory sites.

It's kind of like doxxing someone. You might not be able to find out directly that John Doe lives on Maple St and works for ACME services, but you can piece it together by the traces he leaves online. Only you do it to populations wholesale.

it's not financially viable (and probably logically impossible) to write fantastic software. But coding theory has advanced enough that "well designed code" is not much more expensive than "fuck it, we'll ship it and pray" and it's far cheaper if you assume the company will still exist in five years.

Note that we don't assume we know what we are doing nowadays either. But the intelligent among us know that we are idiots, so we add structure and unit tests such that in 50 years, those new young idiots will have some breadcrumb trails and unit tests to make their life less terrible.

If problems occur, it's hard to follow the logic since modern systems try to encapsulate business logic in different classes than message passing and database validation.

If you want to add functionality, you have too many options (all with unknown side effects), rather than one class with defined sided effects.

If you need to change one specific rule, you don't have the unit tests to (hopefully) prove that you didn't break ten things while fixing two.

So it is perfectly stable as long as the underlying system, inputs, business environment, and logic never changes. So, if we assume a spherical cow...