ShittyBeatlesFCPres

I’d be able to slam dunk on anyone who guarded me. People would be like, “Won’t this guy stop dunking on people?” Can’t. I wished on a monkey paw.

NBA 2K26 would have to rewrite the game engine like when EA had to introduce “vision cones” to Madden so Michael Vick wasn’t better than Payton Manning.

Don’t be a dick to service workers. Your entire life will be better.

The only reason I wouldn’t go with Postgres is if I planned to do other things on the same machine. MariaDB/MySQL has been around forever. You may find something that requires it — Wordpress^1^, for example, requires MariaDB (or MySQL but use MariaDB) and doesn’t support Postgres.

Also, there’s solutions like Docker containers if you are running multiple things on the same server. But if you’re just learning and putting one thing on a Raspberry Pi as a project or whatever, you don’t need to learn Docker yet.

^1^ I’m not recommending Wordpress. It’s ancient and has security issues all the time. But over 40% of sites on the Net still use it in some form. (I mean Wordpress.org, the open source project. The Wordpress company seems to be having some “crazy CEO” drama at the moment.)

I mean, SSL certs are free now:

https://letsencrypt.org/

https://certbot.eff.org/

Maybe not worth $50 a year to change your setup but there’s no reason to pay for them anymore.

I wonder if this is a sign of Chinese sophistication or the fact that cars — especially electric cars — are essentially commodities now. Kind of like when IBM sold its consumer hardware business to Lenovo because laptops just became commodities with lots of competition and tight profit margins.

I mean, it’s a rare thing that doesn’t eventually become a commodity. England used to dominate the textile industry because of superior technology — until American spy Francis Cabot Lowell stole their power loom tech by having a photographic memory.

I’d like to think so because I’m generally ethical and don’t really care about money (except in the sense that we all have to). I certainly don’t think rich people are smarter or more capable than poor people.

That being said, based on all the billionaires in the world, it seems that once you hit a certain level of wealth, you become an insecure twat and start acting like a victim and posting rot on the internet. So, maybe I’d just become a bozo clown who thinks being an investor is the same as being an inventor.

In the case of Texas and places like that, age verification laws are about being able to call anything they want (like LGBT+ content) “pornographic.” Texas doesn’t care if it works.

Interestingly, Pornhub actually stayed in my state, Louisiana, because — according to their Supreme Court lawyers, yesterday — we have digital IDs and it was apparently trivial to do the checks via some sort of API. Texans would have to upload a photo of their driver’s license or something and there’s major privacy issues.

Also, Louisiana’s law didn’t work. Pornhub, which wants to be mainstream, does ID checks but sketchier sites in other countries don’t. It probably just caused more teens to get malware or be exposed to truly objectionable content (like CSAM).

I wouldn’t overthink it. It’s just a youthful rebellion/protest thing. Old people banned an app young people like and young people were like, “Ok, fine. We’ll use a different app, assholes.” And they found one even more Chinese just to be obnoxious.

But to answer your primary question, Instagram is a bloated app with a terrible algorithm made by a garbage company owned by a garbage person. But just as important, Instagram is also where TikTok users’ parents are. Youths don’t want to hang out with friends where their parents are watching. Hell, I’m middle-aged and I was annoyed when my mom followed me on Instagram. Like, “Stay on Facebook, mom. That’s the boomer app.”

I’m sure almost every TikTok user is a YouTube user too. But YouTube Shorts isn’t the same as TikTok. Shorts are basically a way for established creators who make longer, professional videos to make little casual ones between their main video releases. It’s not a drop-in replacement for TikTok. The vibe is different. (If Shorts had been released as a totally separate app with a separate algorithm, it’d be a drop-in replacement for TikTok but they just duct taped it onto YouTube proper.)

Plus, the data and national security excuses were always horseshit. Congress was trying to protect American dominance in social media and during the debate, members of Congress said their issue with TikTok was that it didn’t have an Israel boner. https://forward.com/culture/688840/tiktok-ban-gaza-palestine-israel-antisemitism/

Forward is a publication aimed at a Jewish audience, for the record, so that’s not some antisemitic conspiracy theory.

Bacon, lettuce, tomato, and guacamole

The ID checks will only make things worse. Like 4 free “tube” sites based in America and that are trying to be mainstream and ad-supported (Pornhub and ????) comply with Louisiana’s current ID check law while the 5,000 sites based anywhere else on Earth don’t give a shit. Most probably don’t even filter for CSAM.

Half the internet is porn. Reddit has porn. There’s a Lemmy instance for NSFW stuff. To imagine they’re going to stop teens from finding smut because the “reputable” site checks ID is just willful naivety.

Also, I realize the goal of the Texas law is to label anything GLBT+ as “porn.” I’m not the naive one in this case. But the arguments in the case aren’t about the hidden agenda of conservatives.

It’s vice signaling. There’s nothing virtuous about Meta or Zuckerberg. Let’s not forget his first try was a hot or not clone with pictures of women he used without consent.

And that new perm he got definitely isn’t virtuous.

Wait until they find out the SNAP program (aka food stamps) is run by the Department of Agriculture because it’s about increasing demand for agricultural products, not helping the poor. For comparison, TANF (aka welfare) is under the Department of Health and Human Services.