I enjoyed https://asimov.fandom.com/wiki/Cal as a kid (beware of summary here covering the whole story to the end)

Ok, now put them in jail.

I wonder if there’s anything positive to be said about ISBNDB. On one hand, they’re supplying AI companies, yes, on the other hand, they seem to be digitalizing previously unavailable paper books, which is kinda useful for preservation? Except, I’m not entirely sure it’s possible to properly get this data out of them on consumer scale: they seem to sell API access, but it’s a big question of how usable and affordable it would be to retrieve a digital version of some rare ancient book that could just disappear into oblivion otherwise. Their cheapest subscription is 15$/month, but I have little idea of how what’s listed there translates into volumes of books you can retrieve during this month.

That’s why I’ve been arguing for a long time that using VPN for everything by default is just basic security.

Porn will not fry anyones brain, lol.

Even before internet we managed to find and pass around porn mags, so it’s as pointless as the war on drugs.

In practice it’s pointless, but in its reasoning it’s actively harmful because it’s an attack on healthy sex self-education.

Microsoft is losing Builders fast.

Good.

This is why Microsoft needs Windows Lite.

No, Windows needs to lose more users. Hope they never change.

Wdym? UK started all of this. They’ve had age verification working since summer 2025, then EU joined and got it implemented in autumn for many sites like X for example where any NSFW content requires age verification (for more than half a year now), and US only started coming up with similar stupid laws almost a year afterwards.

Scientists don’t work on mundane problems. AI need training to solve mundane tasks. Just take stackoverflow as the literal example. It’s not science. We might need a new profession to produce training material for arbitrary areas of expertise, not limited to research level topics. A job like this might be talking about such topics on a searchable forum, for example. Each post can be evaluated by a separate AI system to assign score points to it. I don’t know whether this sounds more dystopian or fun. It’s definitely not that far from social credit systems.

Just use it to replace stack overflow. That was never a good thing. ;)

It was and is a good thing. I think it’s a huge problem that when it fades away future next generations of AI will not be able to learn from it. And the culture at that point will be to depend on AI instead of having sites like those, so even getting it back isn’t going to work. Honestly I think maybe we need a new job: “experts” who just do some fun highly thematic stuff and post results online to train AI.