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While watching a DVD from the library my TV popped up a message saying to press a button if I wanted to watch this from additional providers.

It's never done that before so I looked it up and turns out Roku TVs have added all sorts of creepy things in the privacy section since I last checked.

One of which being they take screenshots from what you're watching and send them to third parties to identify it.

Fucking hell! Remember when every fucking device in your life wasn't a spy implanted in your home and working against your interests to try and sell your data? Remember how nice that was??

Remember when the TV was just a tool that would play the things you plugged into it?

Why must the future suck SO much?

excusethequality

TVs collect a huge amount of data. Here's how to use privacy settings to limit the surveillance on TVs from LG, Samsung, TCL, and every othe

A good rundown on what each brand of TV is up to and which settings you should turn off.

therapatical

okay, I think it's time to start collecting responses for this

The queer community is far from immune to injustice, anti-Blackness, racism, fatphobia, ableism, sexism, intersexism, misogyny, etc. and tho

mapsontheweb

Maximum PDF document size supported by Adobe Acrobat.

15 million inches by 15 million inches, to be precise.

by Udzu

galaxywarp

Can’t stop thinking about this 236 mile long theoretical PDF. Talked about it on the phone with my friend earlier. PDF longer than the country of Belgium. Forbidden yet technically fully supported 236 mile long PDF. I’m obsessed.

unbossed-deactivated20251218

Wireless internet access is on the rise in both modern consumer societies and in the developing world. In rich countries, however, the focus is on always-on connectivity and ever higher access speeds. In poor countries, on the other hand, connectivity is achieved through much more low-tech, often asynchronous networks.

While the high-tech approach pushes the costs and energy use of the internet higher and higher, the low-tech alternatives result in much cheaper and very energy efficient networks that combine well with renewable power production and are resistant to disruptions.

If we want the internet to keep working in circumstances where access to energy is more limited, we can learn important lessons from alternative network technologies. Best of all, there’s no need to wait for governments or companies to facilitate: we can build our own resilient communication infrastructure if we cooperate with one another. This is demonstrated by several community networks in Europe, of which the largest has more than 35,000 users already.

byrdierose

Piermesh: Our Internet

Agie of @utopicwork is working on a LoRa mesh network that I’ve been keeping my eyes on for a while - similar concept.

She also needs monetary support to keep herself, her family and her projects alive. Pls check out Piermesh and consider sending her some cash if you can.

Support wizdev

indigosfindings

"i look forward to hearing back" implies a beautiful world that runs on sense-direction combinations. i smell sideways to tasting up. i palpate inwards to listening diagonal, so that i can hunger clockwise

kawuli

random PSA, I know a lot of people use duckduckgo as a Google alternative search engine, but it always kind of annoyed me when I was using it because it felt like No Name Brand Google

I have switched to using Startpage.com and vastly prefer it. for one thing, instead of displaying an "AI summary" at the top of the search results (unless you turn it off, yes I know), it displays the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article, with link, whenever it finds one that's relevant.

also a waaayyyyy better sense of design than duckduckgo

also private, European based, least annoying search I've used lately (RIP old "don't be evil" Google)

yomikoreadsbooks

Keeping a list of Google alternatives just in case…

saxifraga-x-urbium

i have one of those, scraped from multiple different rec posts:

Search Engines

Infinity Search is an alternative search engine with a special focus on privacy

DuckDuckGo is a popular search engine for those who value their privacy and are put off by the thought of their every query being tracked and logged. Uses bangs, ![site] for in-page search (sells your data to microsoft and draws from fucking bing)

WolframAlpha is a privately owned search engine that allows you to “compute expert-level answers using Wolfram’s breakthrough algorithms, knowledgebase, and AI technology.” A data search engine.

Boardreader is a search engine for forums and message boards. It allows you to search forums and then filter down results by date and language.

Based in France, Qwant is a privacy-based search engine that won’t record your searches or use your personal details for advertising. Uses “&” as a bang search.

Another privacy-based search engine is Search Encrypt, which uses local encryption to ensure that users’ identifiable information cannot be tracked. Metasearch across multiple engines.

Offering unbiased results from several sources, SearX is a metasearch engine that aims to present a free, decentralized view of the internet. Can be self-hosted.

Gibiru’s tagline is “Unfiltered private search” and that’s exactly what it offers. Requires AnonymoX Firefox add-on for privacy.

Disconnect allows you to conduct anonymous searches through a search engine of your choice.

Swisscows provides fully encrypted searches to protect your privacy and security. Built-in violence/porn filter cannot be overridden.

MetaGer offers “Privacy Protected Search & Find” through its anonymised search. A plugin will allow it to be made a default.

Gigablast is a private search engine that indexes millions of websites and servers real-time information without tracking your data, keeping you hidden from marketers and spammers. Variety of filtration and refinement options for searching.

Oscobo is a search engine that protects your privacy while you search the web. By not using any third-party tools or scripts, your data is protected from hacking and misuse. Has a Chrome extension to allow use in toolbar.

https://search.marginalia.nu/ an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed. Use old-school searching rather than query-based for the best results.

https://www.mojeek.com/

https://wiby.me/ - It’s goal is to index as many personalized websites as possible, and NOT commercial sites.

https://4get.ca/ it works a lot like SearX, but honestly better. It doesn’t have its own index, but pulls from many others. I think it’s the best for research, since it allows you to search for answers from different indexes, is easy to configure, add free, and avoids censorship as much as it can.

https://www.searchenginemap.com/ for more on how search engines relate to each other.

https://yep.com/ is a crawler

https://www.etools.ch/ retrieves from Google, Mojeek, Bing, and Yandex, like Searx

https://www.dogpile.com/

https://searxng.org/ (next gen Searx)

https://luxxle.com/ - possibly conservative?

https://presearch.com/ - good for academic?

https://kagi.com/smallweb - free/randomised Kagi.

Other Searchers

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free.https://cosine.club/ is an electronic music similarity search engine

saxifraga-x-urbium

Google Chrome is downloading a 4 GB Gemini Nano model onto users' machines without consent, with no opt-in, no opt-out short of enterprise t

saxifraga-x-urbium

prev there are very simple instructions! delete that one weights.bin file and go to chrome://flags/ in browser to set all 'optimization guide' features to 'disabled'. it takes like. 3 minutes and then you don't have to think about it any more. i know it's exhausting but your privacy is worth it!

culmaer

that does seem straightforward, thank you !

crimethinc

Learning and practicing proper security culture is essential to all kinds of organizing—especially today, when Donald Trump has pledged to focus federal agencies on attacking anti-fascists.

Print out this zine design of our guide to security culture and distribute them everywhere!

https://crimethinc.com/zines/what-is-security-culture

beguilingcorpse

i see a lot of criticism towards 17776 along the lines of “ugh if humanity actually stopped aging or dying and people really did just live forever they would not spend their time playing football… that is not what EYE would do with MY time…. this is so unrealistic….. clearly the author just wanted to write about sports 🙄😒” and like. yeah. yes. exactly. jon bois is a sports writer and sports analyst who wanted to examine why people love sports and why sports have cultural staying power and why he especially finds sports compelling and what sports have to say about the human condition and our ability to care. so he made up a fake scenario about humans being immortal and then he made it about sports. and he wrote about sports. the story is titled ‘what sports will look like in the future.’ if that isn’t something that you can vibe with then maybe the story simply is not for you

headspace-hotel

17776 asks you to be fascinated with football for a little while and if you don't take that invitation the story is much less powerful. The first time I read it I kind of skimmed through the parts talking about football because I thought, well, I'm not interested in sports.

The second time I read it I paid more attention to those parts and realized that they were an essential part of the story. This key component of fascination with a human pastime is the axis that the themes revolve around.

Fascination illuminates the world and reveals a lot of meaning in it. Much more can be understood through curious eyes.

aguywholikestanks

The key point is that 17776 and it's sequels are not about immortality, and it is not attempting to predict what would happen in this scenario. It is a study of the impact of sports(amongst other things) on people, using immortality as a narrative device to achieve this.

headspace-hotel

I think I got that in my first read, or at least I understood that the story was about play and the things that are intrinsically motivating to humans: what do we do when there are no stakes and there is no more "progress" to make?

Some of the segments are not really "about" sports, such as the destruction of the lightbulb, where the satellites mourn the "death" of an inanimate object that has meaning because it's been given meaning.

But, if you think you don't care about sports, and therefore don't pay much attention to the parts of the story that are digging deeply into the technicalities of the bizarro football games, you still miss a lot of the story's meaning, because the layers of depth and close examination and exploration show how love for something transforms it, making it endlessly fascinating and new.

I understood the theme of play as a counteracting force to our existential anxiety and feeling of need for "progress" and "meaning," but on my initial read I missed how the story is about love. Not love as an experience between people, but love as an orientation towards existence and your surroundings.

In my re-read it came through so clearly that WOW, this writer really, really loves football. And in the story, football is so inexhaustibly complicated and meaningful, to the point that it's impossible to ever fully appreciate, because people love it and they are always exploring new ways to play it.

It's interesting, because it's important to the story that the writer loves football, but it's equally important to the story that a lot of people don't love football, because these infinite wonders hidden in our existence externally appear so mundane. Football is just another boring, mundane thing that is transfigured by love. Our world is so worthy of being loved that we could never fully love it even if we were to live forever. That's what 17776 is about, to me.

blackleatherbag

maplesynth

so i spent far too long on this.

for those unaware, the spaghetti wall of letters and numbers is a base64-encoded JPEG image (and not a URL as some guessed). in certain cases when you tried to insert/paste an image into what’s ostensibly a text-only box, this could happen.

the thing that’s bugging me however is that there’s image data there. we have fairly a clear (albeit with JPEG artifacts) screenshot of text that, thanks to how Windows ClearType renders text, each character is identical to each other, that is to say, an uppercase Q will always look more or less pixel-perfect each time, meaning we don’t have to guess what a Q looks like, we simply have to pixel-accurate match it.

as an aside, this is why regular OCR struggles so much with this kind of data retrieval, such as code even when it’s clearer than a physical paper scan. ordinarily, OCR will try to best-guess every single letter because it expects each letter to be slightly different from each other (as would be the unpredictable nature in a scanned document), and on top of that most OCR today will try to autocorrect because it expects the scanned text to contain words in some human written language.

so, all we have to do is make a program to recognize each character and piece back together the whole base64 string, right? well…

first i stitched all 7 images back into a single block of text, observing the consistency of the line spacing. some of the screenshots have little bits of the previous one sticking out of it, which helps with alignment and to make sure they’re in the right order.

after that i had to sample every single letter off this file. this means going around the file and finding one example of each different character we’re trying to identify, saving it as its own separate file so that the program can load them as references to compare against in the full image. for base64, the alphabet consists of a-z, A-Z, 0-9, +, / and =. once i had the initial code in place…

…close! but oh so far. if any one single character in a base64 string is wrong or missing, the resulting decode will be wrong. the issues i was having were mostly with the lowercase r and j because of how the kerning affected the pixels around those letters. i was also getting false matches for r where there should be an m. what followed was grueling hours of tweaking the matching code and my known font set to better fit the original image and get as close as possible to a 100% match. here is the resulting code, maybe it’ll be useful for someone and this won’t have been a complete waste of time.

once i was confident through the verification image that i had all characters recognized, i put it through a base64 to JPEG decoder. i actually did this several times as i improved the recognition and what follows is the best result that came out of it yet. i suspect some of the data might be missing (perhaps a line or block of text got lost in between screenshots), or i have a wrong character somewhere resulting in a wrong value. this is the image extracted from OP’s base64 string:

we can finally know what they meant when they said “me in a relationship” and i can finally go the fuck to sleep.

maplesynth

update: i found that the string that i used to decode the image in the previous reblog actually had one letter wrong.

with this it still doesn’t parse as fully valid base64 in strict mode so i think there’s still another letter in there that’s wrong, but i couldn’t find it. however this gives us a better look:

and this is finally enough to do a reverse image search. i present to you, the HD version of our intrepid massive backpacker:

still have no idea what they mean by “me in a relationship” with that, though.

almost-correct-quotes

#they have baggage

invizigothx

first rule of Cite Club: tell everyone where you learned about Cite Club

playwrongs

invizigothx. (2026, January 30). first rule of Cite Club: tell everyone where you learned about Cite Club [Text post]. Tumblr. https://www.tumblr.com/invizigothx/807189844216446977/first-rule-of-cite-club-tell-everyone-where-you?source=share

chipjrwibignaturals

any computer people wanna explain how the hell this works

it wont let me do shit bc i apparently have 81 gigs of apps clogging my c drive, but my largest app is 0.4gb?????? its not system applications either because system is its own segment of storage. wadda hell are you talking about

chipjrwibignaturals

guys i installed a program to show me exactly where the data is hidden and i think i found it and youre never gonna believe it

todd howard im fucking coming for you

chipjrwibignaturals

"thank you random microsoft customer support agent" we all say in unison

hylandude

Here's your friendly neighborhood trans girl programer to tell you WinDirStat is a free open source alternative and you don't have to sign in to the annoying microsoft app store!

mellific

a bit of news!! some pals and i are opening a ZINE BOOKSTORE

seattle has a program that matches folks with empty storefronts and they gave us a sdlfsdkjl frankly absolutely enormous space that will be a popup shop between APRIL 15TH and SEPTEMBER 15* (*ish) !!!

we're looking to stock zines and indie published books from anyone and everyone... the app is NOT going to be rigorous at all so please send in your stuff and we'll send you money!! i can't emphasize enough how much space there is and we need fill it in One Month hahahaha

Paper Pushers is a 6-month pop-up bookstore, print shop and community space based in Seattle, WA. We are currently accepting consignment s

dduane

I might've asked this, but. Do you have any resources for undiscovered action/adventure writers who might someday want to make it their "day job"? Since Google is... not a god resource anymore and you can't search for what you don't know exists. Places to share work and get comments/responses, find editors, stuff like that? Stuff beyond "here's 'standard manuscript format' and pray"?

I had a bit of a look around (for such resources come and go), and while there are a number of them that are reliable for screenwriters—like IndieTalk and podcast-based sites like John August—I hadn't really previously looked into what might be available for prose writers.

That said, after glancing around a little, these two might benefit from further investigation:

A community for writers

A creative writing community forum for authors, poets and writers. Showcase your work, seek critique and beta readers. Learn from experience

...If anybody else has recs that would be helpful here, maybe you'd want to drop them into the comments to this post?

Thanks, folks!

starplanes

My book publishes today! It's got everything I know about making audio drama! I'm so proud to have it out in the world!

Get it at: https://talminear.com/#howtomakeaudiodrama

faetoof

i enter the web design class

h1 { font-family: “Comic Sans MS”; font-size: “50px”; font-color: “magenta”; }

catgirlnips

dduane

To everyone at Grammarly, I am writing a book right now, a really challenging endeavor that no doubt someone in Silicon Valley will think i

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