I still use DDG as my “daily driver” (I know there are better options for privacy and avoiding big tech, but I haven’t yet found anything independent that is good enough for me to switch to full time yet). I bookmarked Stract a while back, and it proved useful a few months back when Microsoft had an outage that took down Bing and by extension, Duck Duck Go. I do like Stract, their index seems to be enough larger than MoJeek (another independent search with their own index) that it gives me better results.

Stract might not be as open as I’d like, but it’s nice to have as an option, and I’m never going to complain about having more search providers with independent indexes.

He’ll get two miles of underground sidewalks put in during four of those two years.

I kinda want a Grandpa Joe movie starring David Spade. There’s a bit of a physical resemblance these days, and there’s so much weird stuff going on with Grandpa Joe in the movie that you could have a pretty full movie without Charlie, Wonka, or the chocolate factory.

So more like Judas and Goliath then?

Not sure what I expected them to cost, but $5.70 is somehow less than I expected.

I had a nicer Acer monitor that I replaced with a similar Samsung model about a year ago. I still kinda miss the Acer. Both were 32" curved LCD and 1440p. The Acer had a much more uniform curve to it, and the Samsung has a bunch of firmware issues that sometimes can only be worked around by unplugging it and power cycling it that way. The only reason I “upgraded” was the Samsung had better support for PS5 and scaling 4K inputs down to the native 1440p without artifacts.

No way that’s the real reason, the real reason is taxes. So many California millionaires move to Texas for the low tax, only to realize once they’re there that it’s a shitty state with a barely-functioning power grid. Unfortunately it never seems to click for most of them that the low taxes is a big part of why they don’t have a competent state government.

Yeah, I know a lot of the smaller, independent search engines are lacking, but the people using the “udm=14” trick to remove Google’s AI results now, as if that won’t be removed as soon as Google needs to show investors the AI is more profitable.

To add to this, Scarlett Johansson took on Disney and they settled. And Disney is like the final boss of litigious companies (either them or Nintendo). If she has the same legal team for this, and they think she has a case against OpenAI, this could open the door for OpenAI to get rightfully clobbered for their tech-bro ignoring of copyright laws.

You could play for 15 minutes and feel like you were speedrunning carpal tunnel and arthritis.

I remember seeing an interview with the model, who at the time of the interview was in her 70s or 80s, she apparently wasn’t enthusiastic about having become a common test image. But since she had technically consented to be in Playboy (which was only a magazine at the time), there wasn’t anything she could do to stop it. I think in this case it’s probably best to stop using her image specifically, as it does kinda get into a weird messy situation of consent, and how her consent to be in a magazine morphed through technology into something more “permanent” than she originally realized. There are plenty of other models who would absolutely be down for that, and given enough time, knowing how nerds are, there will be other test images of women. But I think it’s probably for the best that this one gets retired from this use.

And yes, there are people who have tried to use this instance as a “there shouldn’t be images of attractive/implied nude women a standard test images, because it can cause body image issues for women who go into that field.” Which on one hand, I can see where they’re coming from, but also people take pictures of people, and some people do look better than most of us, having more diverse test images would be a good thing, because we don’t all look like that. But some do, and they’re probably going to get more pictures taken of them than the rest if us.

Yeah, Gates bought QDOS (aka 86-DOS), to license it to IBM as MS DOS after his mom did the ground work of marketing him to the right people at IBM. And somehow people still respect him, as if he wasn’t the proto-Elon.