Adblockers are not that difficult to install, so I’d guess the slice of people who really resent ads enough to actually make purchasing decisions out of spite but also who still watch them isn’t that big.

Merz criticized defenders of online anonymity, saying they are “often people who, from the shadows of anonymity, demand the greatest possible transparency from others.”

Dude is non-comprehending and very offended to hear it

I used to before I got my ereader. IMO the way to do it somewhat comfortably is, get an app that lets you display epub files in dark mode (light text on black background), and turn the brightness down until the text is visible but doesn’t strain your eyes. Unfortunately PDFs do not play nice with any reader software so you’re going to want to look for other formats, or convert them and put up with conversion artifacts.

I like that they’re also banning anyone not doing a similar ban

Yeah, I took a class in highschool where they just had us play a typing game until we got good enough at it. It really helps to learn the correct form and be using the right fingers for the right keys, once you get it in your muscle memory you don’t have to really think about the individual letters anymore and the words just appear when you intend them to.

There are a bunch of music artists who used to use random images for youtube thumbnails who switched to AI images when it became viable, I assume because it’s more legal not to use copyrighted art without permission and because they could have more control over the image, so I think it would make sense to also look for some other indications the music itself was generated.

Would if I could but they banned me recently

I guess that could make sense if there is such a narrow range of possible outcomes and everyone has some clear objective idea of a baseline, but I’ve gotten freelance gigs where I would have been willing to do it for say $X, but was offered like $3X and was very happy to have kept my mouth shut and not talked numbers at all before that point. If I hadn’t I think I might not have gotten the job at all because the price being lower than the expectation would have made the client worried about the quality of the work, and even if I did get it that would have made them less satisfied with the deal.

As for your other comment, it’s not always true that combativeness will make people less satisfied with a transaction. I remember a particular situation where I was negotiating with another freelancer who was obviously also purposely avoiding saying a number, and I ended up caving when it got truly absurd and cited some past payments to use as a reference point. I was personally more satisfied with the deal because he did that, because it increased my respect for him; we were going to be working together and it was nice to feel that I could trust him to not be a pushover in general.

It’s a free way to get a reverse proxy for a self hosted website and not expose your home IP and avoid attacks, so kind of hard to pass up tbh.

Killed the most humans is a pretty strong qualifier

The whole idea of software services where the output is not a function of the input, but rather a function of the input plus all the data the service has been able to harvest about you has always been awful. It was awful when google started doing it years ago and it’s awful when LLM frontends do it now. You should be able to know that what you are seeing is what others would see, and have some assurance that you aren’t being manipulated on a personal level.

The truth is we don’t actually know because the zebras don’t want us to:

So, the question why zebras have stripes have proven very difficult and not without risks – Stephen Cobb has been bitten in the arm and admitted to hospital twice. Despite the extra vigour of recent work, the answer remains inconclusive.

Lots of people seemed to hate it and not play very far which is a shame. One of only a few games where I got emotional and cried at the ending.

I prefer to think of it like a competitive game; you’re trying to win and you aren’t going to go easy on anyone, but you still treat your adversaries with as much empathy and respect as that allows.

Characters don’t talk or hint about sex at all

This is sort of true and the relative lack of traditional fanservice type stuff is refreshing, but I don’t think it would be fair to say Dungeon Meshi isn’t horny, because a lot of its thematic focus is indirect, allegorical commentary on sexuality, even if it is generally very tasteful about it.

What do you use Paypal for?

A consumer incentive to use cash seems like a good thing. It’s not like there’s ever a scenario where credit card companies aren’t taking a fee to use their cards.

In a financial negotiation, avoid saying a number first, even if it seems like you’re being rude, just say stuff like “what’s your budget” instead. This trick sounds really stupid but somehow it is extremely effective.

Like, how does that even happen?

Poorly designed journalism-bot it sounds like. Ethics of not writing this yourself aside, it should be trivial to check that whatever is in quotes is at least a substring in the source text. If the LLM is the top layer, and any research it does is a tool call that is purely at its discretion, it’s going to end up failing silently like this.

The date on this blog post:

13 February 2026