You can give your info to the registrar and then make it anonymous to whois domain.tld searches so it’s not public. Cloudflare is the registrar I use these days because it’s a one-stop shop and used the company address but, at least in the U.S., they need your info for both credit/debit card processing. (Processing fees are cheaper the more info they provide but usually any address with the same zip code is enough.)

If you have nefarious plans, I don’t have a good recommendation. But if it’s just about privacy, I don’t know if it’s really possible to be completely anonymous anyway. I guess you could use a gift card or something but at least in the U.S., if you own or buy a house, your address is public info already anyway. Shit, city hall will probably give you blueprints of any house.

I don’t want age verification for social media — I’d rather parents, who in 2025 probably grew up with connected devices, be responsible for it — but if they do force this, it should be part of the operating system. Sort of like Apple Pay and Google Pay where sites and apps can essentially put some boilerplate code in that’s easy to implement and all the sites/apps get back is a yes/no answer. Users only have to go through the process once. It protects privacy way more than giving your info to every “social media” site that comes along.

It’s not ideal but it’d be way more workable than having to provide ID to every site that has social media functions. I mean, you could classify any random forum or site with a comment section as “social media” if the definition is too broad. Things like Fediverse instances wouldn’t have to each write their own implementation. (Eventually, there would be trusted, mature libraries, obviously, but that could take awhile and presumably would need to be part of every browser/app language but also at least some code for every back-end language to store the data.)

Super Soakers were invented there.

The Blackberry era was my favorite. You could do all the important stuff and even check sports scores or breaking news or whatever. You couldn’t really doomscroll because no one had done that yet. Even Facebook — which was just for college students at that point and was legit useful. You could find people in a class you were taking and lived in your dorm and get notes from them if you missed class. And you could just download any song you wanted on Kazaa or whatever. No one’s boss emailed them outside of work hours and expected a response.

Probably 2003ish? I don’t know what year it all went to shit. But the Internet seemed like a world of possibilities then.

I’d have also advocated to heavily restrict tlds. Like .org only for real, recognized non-profit organizations.

Even while embracing cryptocurrencies?

The sterilization part is what I was concerned about. People who make jam the first time don’t necessarily know how critical that is. You really cannot take shortcuts and be like, “I just washed it. It’s fine.”

I like it but I’ve always been a very restless sleeper so I’m ultimately happier if I don’t. Like, I put my glass of water far enough from the bed that I’d have to sleepwalk to knock it over. It’s obviously nice to fall asleep cuddling but I (apparently) roll around and throw my arms around. And getting into a (very minor) argument about something you literally can’t consciously control is not fun.

So, I’d rather cuddle (or “cuddle”) and then go somewhere I can fling my arms and roll around randomly.

You can just freeze them for smoothies. Everyone is saying jam and that’s a good idea but it’s a whole process and has to be sanitary. It’s not super hard, obviously, and it’s worth learning how to do but the first time can be a bit daunting and you really have to follow every step. A smoothie is easy.

Another pretty easy thing is to make ice cream and freeze it. A restaurant I cooked at had fig trees that would go nuts once a year and we’d have buckets of figs. We basically made vanilla ice cream and added figs. That was delicious and ice cream obviously freezes well.

On the one hand, I’m against censorship. But on the other, every bit of content on Facebook and X should be removed and all their hardware run through industrial shredders. It’s quite the conundrum.

Every spy in my vicinity is going to be dancing to The Meters - Cissy Strut.

I know there’s rights issues and all but if they made a real BBC streaming service with their back catalog and every David Attenborough special in 4K, it’d be one thing but Americans are inundated with news and streaming services. I pay for my local newspaper’s digital site — mostly because if I don’t, who will? But even The NY Times has to have recipes and word games to keep people subscribed. Why would anyone pay more than a dollar a month or something for BBC News?

The U.S. seems like an odd place to trial this. It’s the most competitive media market in the world and we’re all already sick of being asked to pay for 40 different services. In conclusion:🏴‍☠️

It would harm the A.I. industry if Anthropic loses the next part of the trial on whether they pirated books — from what I’ve read, Anthropic and Meta are suspected of getting a lot off torrent sites and the like.

It’s possible they all did some piracy in their mad dash to find training material but Amazon and Google have bookstores and Google even has a book text search engine, Google Scholar, and probably everything else already in its data centers. So, not sure why they’d have to resort to piracy.

Boiled crawfish and a cold beer. Or maybe turtle soup au sherry and a sazerac. Depends on the season.

Of course. It’s not the path you want to take. But I’m old enough to remember similar times and the future isn’t written yet.

Somehow, the most reasonable account on Vichy Twitter is Grok because it’s hard to train an LLM using only data dumbasses wrote.

“The Cheapest Motel in Amarillo” will be the name of my next album. It’ll be out once I learn to play an instrument or sing or whatever releasing an album involves.

I stayed at a random roadside motel in Amarillo, Texas recently that was not nice but it was $30 a night and I was driving to Santa Fe so I was just glad to be past Dallas and all the traffic. There were no bugs, I’ll give it that. But there were no amenities.

So, I don’t know how to rate it. It had a bed and bathroom and was $30. But it wasn’t like they had an ice machine or breakfast or coffee or anything like that. You got a bed, shower, and toilet though. Can’t be too picky with roadside motels.

They have to fight this battle. Traffic was probably down 80% due to one cabinet member not knowing VPNs exist.

I guess he is actually back in charge of his companies.

I’ve always wondered if the world’s major governments all have their own secret, bespoke operating systems for highly sensitive situations. Like, not Windows, Linux, macOS, BSD, or anything even remotely known to the public. But then you see high-ranking admin officials using bootleg Signal on an off-the-shelf phone or whatever.

I’d assume the actual intelligence agencies are more sophisticated. I doubt they’re running some “hardened” version of Windows or Android or whatever. But maybe I’m being naive and they all are just working with vendors.