Justyn

Still sucks to see them try and lean further into the rampant plagiarism of the authors and writers that they are, supposedly, meant to be bettering. I always felt it was a data farm, and I have long refused to put my writing into it. (2/2)

I've run into headaches with clients over the years trying to force me to use Grammarly. Time and time again, I have refused it. It hallucinated (and still does) issues and errors even before the LLMs were a thing. (1/2)

Verge headline: ‘Age Verification’ could force trans people to out themselves to use the internet by Janus Rose Photo illustration depicts a distorted Kansas drivers license

After Kansas suddenly invalidated hundreds of trans peoples' licenses, experts warn the discrimination will extend to online spaces.

Read more from @janus.bsky.social: www.theverge.com/policy/89207...

Before Signal, there was Denny's. A bastion of privacy. Nobody wants to acknowledge your existence there. The water-damaged dining room of my local Denny's has never suffered a data breach, that's for sure.

You're not going to make any money doing this and no one is going to read it, so you must hope for a secret third thing to happen

looking at saunas in the area and there's this infrared place that doesn't even give you a shower to use after, claiming "the sweat is different and not stinky"

what

Chess Analysis Board and PGN Editor Analyze games with the strongest chess engine in the world: Stockfish. Improve your game with the help of personalized insights from Game Review.

Take back to when I ran a puzzle-based D&D dungeon that featured a game of blindfolded chess. It was against a player who was a novice.

I was only 1100-1200 elo then, so I felt good about my performance here, even if it became too much for me to keep track of

www.chess.com/analysis/col...

Just started it myself!

👀 Would love something like this. The Jelly Star is great, but it would be nice to have a pocketable phone with a nice keyboard. The regular titan is sick, but it's huge. Eager to see the price for it.

A purple haired elf knight wails on her guitar,, I hope you’re ready to be destroyed 🎸🎸🎸 Prepare yourself for more of my bard warriors 😁💕

Bard Knight 01 🛡️
Dost thou shred? 🎸

VPN Users: Activate This Critical Safety Feature Before It's Too Late Picture your computer as a node receiving the internet from a router in the form of a data stream. That data stream then flows out an exit gate and is sent into the sea of data at large, to the servers for the sites you visit and the applications you use. I go over how a VPN connection works in detail here, but, in short, connecting to a VPN replaces your data stream’s regular exit gate with an extra security checkpoint where your data is scrambled and anonymized through a process called encryption.

Picture your computer as a node receiving the internet from a router in the form of a data stream.

My well loved paperback copies of the Hyperion cantos

Incredibly sad to hear about Dan Simmon's passing today. But he certainly left his literary mark and inspired generations of writers to come.

If you haven't experienced the Hyperion cantos before, then I highly recommend it. It's excellent.

HUDs tracking nearby enemies. Give it a GPS overlay and we'll have minimaps in real life.

With it looking clearer and clearer that the fascist oligarchy is trying to consolidate all social media beneath a swastika flag, I can think of only one bastion where we can be safe.

Time and time again, we see these companies can't even store data properly. Even if you're fine with yet another big company having access to your personal information, are you okay with everyone else having it when the inevitable leak happens?

It's just another feel-good measure to say "Hey! We did something, see?" to make advertisers and investors happy. Anyone tech savvy enough to be in a bunch of Discord servers is more than capable of bypassing these trivial restrictions.

Yet another erosion of privacy. The thin veil of "protecting children" doesn't stand up to scrutiny. There's absolutely a conversation to be had about what children face online and what we can do to prevent it. BUT this does nothing to really protect kids and comes at the cost of our privacy.

looking forward to the next discord update where you can just @ your friends by their SSNs

My cat neo with her paw on the back side of a Yugioh card

oh no

It was fun to go hands-on with the #FlipperZero! I'd been wanting to talk about these for ages. Check out my coverage of it!

I also did a more general rundown of it that you can read here: www.pcmag.com/opinions/is-...

Sloppy Mech

Your VPN Could Be Lying About Privacy. Here's How to Know for Sure A VPN audit assesses how well a company adheres to privacy standards, manages its security infrastructure, and ensures it keeps the promises it makes to the public. I review VPNs for a living, and audits are one of the factors I take into consideration when making my assessments. Here's why you should, too.

A VPN audit assesses how well a company adheres to privacy standards, manages its security infrastructure, and ensures it keeps the promises it makes to the public.

The guy who owns Amazon shutting down the books section of the Washington Post is beyond parody

It would definitely be nice to see. As someone in the media space, I'd love to see a greater focus on literature as a whole. There's so much to talk about!

But maybe I should just well and do it myself, huh. I used to do book reviews on my blog, so maybe this is a good impetus to revive that.

I am hoping other media outlets will step up and create book review sections. Frankly, doing book reviews never paid that well, so it feels like the cash outlay is fairly low and the intellectual and knowledge benefits high.

I need to write something up about it (and perhaps re-house my blog on a more polished platform sometime soon), but N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth series is superb.

I've had some gripes with fantasy in recent years, and her work breathes life into the genre for me. It feels like what's been missing

I feel like I have learned so much about nothing at all while reading it, and I don't know if sheer determination is enough to carry me through the latter half or so. The premise is interesting, and it has moments. But you have to work through so much babble to get there.

It's this sort of experimental approach to fiction. I appreciate that. I enjoy a lot of out-there work that plays with themes, structure, etc. But, this, I'm just struggling to find it worth the investment of my time when it seems like there's nothing to hold onto at all.

I thought its denseness was due to the complexity of it and that there was something to unravel that would make the journey one worth taking; however, the more I read the more I think it unfurls upon itself into further levels of meta-commentary. And, to a degree, I get it.

"beyond regular narrative limits," as one reviewer I found said. But it is literally becoming, to me, strings of text that mean next to nothing and take dozens of massive blocks before a somewhat poignant line or message comes up. BUT said lines really aren't intertwined into a narrative force.