#Silicon Web Site

[amplexadversary]

I'm seeing a bunch of artists on here who don't realize there's an alt text feature and it's bugging me.

I'm wondering if maybe it would be better web design to re-use the ALT prompt we see in pictures with alt-text added as the prompt to add an image description in the post editor, instead of hiding it behind a meatball menu for no reason.

[photomatt]

you've probably have gotten this question a million times, but -- what about fundraising in the style of ao3 or even wikipedia? for all the thousands of fourteen year olds running around who don't understand how much it costs to run a website, there's another thousand of adults whom would love to keep using this site forever. it may not be a more-profits-every-quarter kind of situation, but then again, one is allowed to dream beyond the current silicon valley web 2.0 profit driven hellscape

That was the idea behind the Tumblr Supporter badge, a way for people who appreciate the site can chip in towards keeping it going. It hasn't been as successful as we hoped, only about 2,300 subscribers so far (out of 11.5M monthly active users) but over time maybe it could compound to be what drives the site.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The largest campaign finance violation in US history

I'm coming to DEFCON! On Aug 9, I'm emceeing the EFF POKER TOURNAMENT (noon at the Horseshoe Poker Room), and appearing on the BRICKED AND ABANDONED panel (5PM, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01). On Aug 10, I'm giving a keynote called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification" (noon, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01).

Earlier this month, some of the richest men in Silicon Valley, led by Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz (the billionaire VCs behind Andreesen-Horowitz) announced that they would be backing Trump with endorsements and millions of dollars:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2024/07/16/trump-lands-more-big-tech-backers-billionaire-venture-capitalist-andreessen-joins-wave-supporting-former-president/

Predictably, this drew a lot of ire, which Andreesen tried to diffuse by insisting that his support "doesn’t have anything to do with the big issues that people care about":

https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/24/24204706/marc-andreessen-ben-horowitz-a16z-trump-donations

In other words, the billionaires backing Trump weren't doing so because they supported the racism, the national abortion ban, the attacks on core human rights, etc. Those were merely tradeoffs that they were willing to make to get the parts of the Trump program they do support: more tax-cuts for the ultra-rich, and, of course, free rein to defraud normies with cryptocurrency Ponzi schemes.

Crypto isn't "money" – it is far too volatile to be a store of value, a unit of account, or a medium of exchange. You'd have to be nuts to get a crypto mortgage when all it takes is Elon Musk tweeting a couple emoji to make your monthly mortgage payment double.

A thing becomes moneylike when it can be used to pay off a bill for something you either must pay for, or strongly desire to pay for. The US dollar's moneylike property comes from the fact that hundreds of millions of people need dollars to pay off the IRS and their state tax bills, which means that they will trade labor and goods for dollars. Even people who don't pay US taxes will accept dollars, because they know they can use them to buy things from people who do have a nondiscretionary bill that can only be paid in dollars.

Dollars are also valuable because there are many important commodities that can only – or primarily – be purchased with them, like much of the world's oil supply. The fact that anyone who wants to buy oil has a strong need for dollars makes dollars valuable, because they will sell labor and goods to get dollars, not because they need dollars, but because they need oil.

There's almost nothing that can only be purchased with crypto. You can procure illegal goods and services in the mistaken belief that this transaction will be durably anonymous, and you can pay off ransomware creeps who have hijacked your personal files or all of your business's data:

https://locusmag.com/2022/09/cory-doctorow-moneylike/

Web3 was sold as a way to make the web more "decentralized," but it's best understood as an effort to make it impossible to use the web without paying crypto every time you click your mouse. If people need crypto to use the internet, then crypto whales will finally have a source of durable liquidity for the tokens they've hoarded:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/16/nondiscretionary-liabilities/#quatloos

The Web3 bubble was almost entirely down to the vast hype machine mobilized by Andreesen-Horowitz, who bet billions of dollars on the idea and almost single-handedly created the illusion of demand for crypto. For example, they arranged a $100m bribe to Kickstarter shareholders in exchange for Kickstarter pretending to integrate "blockchain" into its crowdfunding platform:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/untold-story-kickstarter-crypto-hail-120000205.html

Kickstarter never ended up using the blockchain technology, because it was useless. Their shareholders just pocketed the $100m while the company weathered the waves of scorn from savvy tech users who understood that this was all a shuck.

Look hard enough at any crypto "success" and you'll discover a comparable scam. Remember NFTs, and the eye-popping sums that seemingly "everyone" was willing to pay for ugly JPEGs? That whole market was shot through with "wash-trading" – where you sell your asset to yourself and pretend that it was bought by a third party. It's a cheap – and illegal – way to convince people that something worthless is actually very valuable:

https://mailchi.mp/brianlivingston.com/034-2#free1

Even the books about crypto are scams. Chris Dixon's "bestseller" about the power of crypto, Read Write Own, got on the bestseller list through the publishing equivalent of wash-trading, where VCs with large investments in crypto bought up thousands of copies and shoved them on indifferent employees or just warehoused them:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/15/your-new-first-name/#that-dagger-tho

The fact that crypto trades were mostly the same bunch of grifters buying shitcoins from each other, while spending big on Superbowl ads, bribes to Kickstarter shareholders, and bulk-buys of mediocre business-books was bound to come out someday. In the meantime, though, the system worked: it convinced normies to gamble their life's savings on crypto, which they promptly lost (if you can't spot the sucker at the table, you're the sucker).

There's a name for this: it's called a "bezzle." John Kenneth Galbraith defined a "bezzle" as "the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it." All bezzles collapse eventually, but until they do, everyone feels better off. You think you're rich because you just bought a bunch of shitcoins after Matt Damon told you that "fortune favors the brave." Damon feels rich because he got a ton of cash to rope you into the con. Crypto.com feels rich because you took a bunch of your perfectly cromulent "fiat money" that can be used to buy anything and traded it in for shitcoins that can be used to buy nothing:

https://theintercept.com/2022/10/26/matt-damon-crypto-commercial/

Andreesen-Horowitz were masters of the bezzle. For them, the Web3 bet on an internet that you'd have to buy their shitcoins to use was always Plan B. Plan A was much more straightforward: they would back crypto companies and take part of their equity in huge quantities of shitcoins that they could sell to "unqualified investors" (normies) in an "initial coin offering." Normally, this would be illegal: a company can't offer stock to the general public until it's been through an SEC vetting process and "gone public" through an IPO. But (Andreesen-Horowitz argued) their companies' "initial coin offerings" existed in an unregulated grey zone where they could be traded for the life's savings of mom-and-pop investors who thought crypto was real because they heard that Kickstarter had adopted it, and there was a bestselling book about it, and Larry David and Matt Damon and Spike Lee told them it was the next big thing.

Crypto isn't so much a financial innovation as it is a financial obfuscation. "Fintech" is just a cynical synonym for "unregulated bank." Cryptocurrency enjoys a "byzantine premium" – that is, it's so larded with baffling technical nonsense that no one understands how it works, and they assume that anything they don't understand is probably incredibly sophisticated and great ("a pile of shit this big must have pony under it somewhere"):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/13/the-byzantine-premium/

There are two threats to the crypto bezzle: the first is that normies will wise up to the scam, and the second is that the government will put a stop to it. These are correlated risks: if the government treats crypto as a security (or worse, a scam), that will put severe limits on how shitcoins can be marketed to normies, which will staunch the influx of real money, so the sole liquidity will come from ransomware payments and transactions with tragically overconfident hitmen and drug dealers who think the blockchain is anonymous.

To keep the bezzle going, crypto scammers have spent the past two election cycles flooding both parties with cash. In the 2022 midterms, crypto money bankrolled primary challenges to Democrats by absolute cranks, like the "effective altruist" Carrick Flynn ("effective altruism" is a crypto-affiliated cult closely associated with the infamous scam-artist Sam Bankman-Fried). Sam Bankman-Fried's super PAC, "Protect Our Future," spent $10m on attack-ads against Flynn's primary opponent, the incumbent Andrea Salinas. Salinas trounced Flynn – who was an objectively very bad candidate who stood no chance of winning the general election – but only at the expense of most of the funds she raised from her grassroots, small-dollar donors.

Fighting off SBF's joke candidate meant that Salinas went into the general election with nearly empty coffers, and she barely squeaked out a win against a GOP nightmare candidate Mike Erickson – a millionaire Oxy trafficker, drunk driver, and philanderer who tricked his then-girlfriend by driving her to a fake abortion clinic and telling her that it was a real one:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/14/competitors-critics-customers/#billionaire-dilletantes

SBF is in prison, but there's no shortage of crypto millions for this election cycle. According to Molly White's "Follow the Crypto" tracker, crypto-affiliated PACs have raised $185m to influence the 2024 election – more than the entire energy sector:

https://www.followthecrypto.org/

As with everything "crypto," the cryptocurrency election corruption slushfund is a bezzle. The "Stand With Crypto PAC" claims to have the backing of 1.3 million "crypto advocates," and Reuters claims they have 440,000 backers. But 99% of the money claimed by Stand With Crypto was actually donated to "Fairshake" – a different PAC – and 90% of Fairshake's money comes from a handful of corporate donors:

https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-62/

Stand With Crypto – minus the Fairshake money it falsely claimed – has raised $13,690 since April. That money came from just seven donors, four of whom are employed by Coinbase, for whom Stand With Crypto is a stalking horse. Stand With Crypto has an affiliated group (also called "Stand With Crypto" because that is an extremely normal and forthright way to run a nonprofit!), which has raised millions – $1.49m. Of that $1.49m, 90% came from just four donors: three cryptocurrency companies, and the CEO of Coinbase.

There are plenty of crypto dollars for politicians to fight over, but there are virtually no crypto voters. 69-75% of Americans "view crypto negatively or distrust it":

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/10/majority-of-americans-arent-confident-in-the-safety-and-reliability-of-cryptocurrency/

When Trump keynotes the Bitcoin 2024 conference and promises to use public funds to buy $1b worth of cryptocoins, he isn't wooing voters, he's wooing dollars:

https://www.wired.com/story/donald-trump-strategic-bitcoin-stockpile-bitcoin-2024/

Wooing dollars, not crypto. Politicians aren't raising funds in crypto, because you can't buy ads or pay campaign staff with shitcoins. Remember: unless Andreesen-Horowitz manages to install Web3 crypto tollbooths all over the internet, the industries that accept crypto are ransomware, and technologically overconfident hit-men and drug-dealers. To win elections, you need dollars, which crypto hustlers get by convincing normies to give them real money in exchange for shitcoins, and they are only funding politicians who will make it easier to do that.

As a political matter, "crypto" is a shorthand for "allowing scammers to steal from working people," which makes it a very Republican issue. As Hamilton Nolan writes, "If the Republicans want to position themselves as the Party of Crypto, let them. It is similar to how they position themselves as The Party of Racism and the Party of Religious Zealots and the Party of Telling Lies about Election Fraud. These things actually reflect poorly on them, the Republicans":

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/crypto-as-a-political-characteristic

But the Democrats – who are riding high on the news that Kamala Harris will be their candidate this fall – have decided that they want some of that crypto money, too. Even as crypto-skeptical Dems like Jamaal Bowman, Cori Bush, Sherrod Brown and Jon Tester see millions from crypto PACs flooding in to support their primary challengers and GOP opponents, a group of Dem politicians are promising to give the crypto industry whatever it wants, if they will only bribe Democratic candidates as well:

https://subscriber.politicopro.com/f/?id=00000190-f475-d94b-a79f-fc77c9400000

Kamala Harris – a genuinely popular candidate who has raised record-shattering sums from small-dollar donors representing millions of Americans – herself has called for a "reset" of the relationship between the crypto sector and the Dems:

https://archive.is/iYd1C

As Luke Goldstein writes in The American Prospect, sucking up to crypto scammers so they stop giving your opponents millions of dollars to run attack ads against you is a strategy with no end – you have to keep sucking up to the scam, otherwise the attack ads come out:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-07-31-crypto-cash-affecting-democratic-races/

There's a whole menagerie of crypto billionaires behind this year's attempt to buy the American government – Andreesen and Horowitz, of course, but also the Winklevoss twins, and this guy, who says we're in the midst of a "civil war" and "anyone that votes against Trump can die in a fucking fire":

https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF/status/1813952816840597712/photo/1

But the real whale that's backstopping the crypto campaign spending is Coinbase, through its Fairshake crypto PAC. Coinbase has donated $45,500,000 to Fairshake, which is a lot:

https://www.coinbase.com/blog/how-to-get-regulatory-clarity-for-crypto

But $45.5m isn't merely a large campaign contribution: it appears that $25m of that is the largest the largest illegal campaign contribution by a federal contractor in history, "by far," a fact that was sleuthed out by Molly White:

https://www.citationneeded.news/coinbase-campaign-finance-violation/

At issue is the fact that Coinbase is bidding to be a US federal contractor: specifically, they want to manage the crypto wallets that US federal cops keep seizing from crime kingpins. Once Coinbase threw its hat into the federal contracting ring, it disqualified itself from donating to politicians or funding PACs:

Campaign finance law prohibits federal government contractors from making contributions, or promising to make contributions, to political entities including super PACs like Fairshake.

https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/federal-government-contractors/

Previous to this, the largest ever illegal campaign contribution by a federal contractor appears to be Marathon Petroleum Company's 2022 bribe to GOP House and Senate super PACs, a mere $1m, only 4% of Coinbase's bribe.

I'm with Nolan on this one. Let the GOP chase millions from billionaires everyone hates who expect them to promote a scam that everyone mistrusts. The Dems have finally found a candidate that people are excited about, and they're awash in money thanks to small amounts contributed by everyday Americans. As AOC put it:

They've got money, but we've got people. Dollar bills don't vote. People vote.

https://www.popsugar.com/news/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-dnc-headquarters-climate-speech-47986992

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/31/greater-fools/#coinbased

[tecontos]

Santa, eu ? imagina!

By; Julia

Ola, me chamo Julia. Sou morena, cabelos pretos, sou relativamente alta, 1,72 m, seios pequenos, na época eu não havia colocado silicone, e tenho pernas e bunda bonitas.

Estava eu saindo de um relacionamento tóxico de 6 anos, quando descobri que me traia comecei a trair também, até com o instrutor de autoescola eu trai, mas havia conseguido me livrar deste relacionamento, e resolvi procurar pessoas diferentes, até de cidades diferentes, e entrei em um site de relacionamentos, bah, muito carinha me chamando, me marcando, dando match, e gostei de alguns, paguei para poder conversar até que um me chamou atenção.

Morava em Porto Alegre, olho claro, cabelo penteado para trás, mais de 1,80 e digamos que em forma, e iniciamos a conversar e para minha surpresa ela da minha cidade, vinhas as vezes, morava a uns 4 anos na capital, elogiou minhas fotos, se bem que todos elogiavam, mas este não era digamos que tão direto, e foi aí que passei meu skype, pois fiquei com medo de passar meu whats logo de cara sem ver se era mesmo a pessoa que se descrevia.

Na primeira chamada do Skype não ligou a web, perguntei pq e me disse que “estava muito a vontade, pediu mais fotos minhas, também pedi, e mandei uma bem bronzeada com um mínimo bikini preto, além de piscina em casa eu passava bronzeada, usava direto bronzeamento artificial, pensei: agora o cara me chama de gostosa, vai falar da minha raba, mas não, o safado só falou que eu tinha um “bonito corpo”, puxa esperava um: GOSTOSA! Me disse que precisava dormir, e me deixou com uma pulga atrás da orelha.

Na segunda chamada, no outro dia, pedi novamente para ligar a cam, eu vestia um short e uma camiseta de alças, sem sutiã, falou que estava a vontade devido ao calor, mas insisti e quando abriu a cam, e conversávamos praticamente todos os dias, as vezes muito, em outras não muito, perguntei sobre namoradas, me disse estar solteiro, e falávamos sempre sobre o dia a dia, Nossa cidade e apenas amenidades, eu louca para falar de sexo, subia pelas paredes me imaginado sendo devorada por ele, mas havia prometido me fazer de moça recatada, se não ia me comer e dar fuga.

Ficamos assim até me dizer que viria para a Nossa cidade, e ficamos de nos encontrar, viria no final de semana, e conversamos toda a semana sobre a melhor festa, da vontade de se ver e etc…

Chegou a sexta-feira tão esperada, fui a aula, pois sou estudante de farmácia, meio dia em casa, almoço, partiu depilação, eu havia prometido pra mim mesma, que não transaria com ele no primeiro encontro, me faria de um pouco difícil, mas me sentia mais confiante depiladinha, e assim fiz, deixei peludinha, ralinha, mas bem aparada. Combinamos de sair direto para a festa, e que me pegaria por volta das 23h.

23 horas e nada do carinha, eu já pronta, vestia uma minissaia plissada xadrez e camiseta branca curta que deixava meu piercing a mostra, sutiã branco de renda e calcinha atolada na minha bunda, e foi quando por volta das 23h30 chegou, buzinou conforme o combinado, quando cheguei a porta estava ao lado de fora do carro, nos cumprimentamos com beijo no rosto e um abraço “afetuoso”, estava de calça jeans clara e camisa polo pretinha, uma delícia. Abriu a porta do carro pra eu entrar, fez a volta, disse colocando a mão no meu joelho nu, que eu estava linda e que era mais bonita que nas fotos, falei que também estava muito bem e fomos em direção a festa.

Chegamos na festa, até aquele momento pouca fila, não demoramos mais que 10 minutos, me pegou pela mão e entramos, fomos direto ao bar, perguntou o que eu iria beber, falei angelicalmente que água, perguntou se eu não gostava de cerveja, ou se queria alguma coisa mais forte, mas água? Ok, disse que acompanhava na cerveja, o problema é que fico bem puta quando bebo, se eu já estava com tesão imagina bebendo , ficamos de pé, fizemos um brinde e já veio em direção da minha boca e trocamos um selinho e depois um gostoso beijo de língua, e já me segurou pela cintura, me pegando forte, e voltamos a beber.

A festa começou a encher e fomos em direção da pista de dança, ele já havia me dito que dançava pouco, mas mesmo assim fomos para a pista, eu louca para me acabar, estava me fazendo de recatada, até que fomos em direção ao bar pegar mais uma cerveja e acabamos ficando por ali, me puxou e me colocou na sua frente, senti o ferro duro a me cutucar, ele com a mão na minha barriga, me fazendo carinhos, eu rebolava encostada a ele, até que me virei e começamos a nos beijar, beijou gostoso e me levou até o fundo da pista, se encostou na parede e me puxou, trocávamos beijos quentes, me beijava o pescoço e já passava a mão na minha bunda, a mão nas minhas coxas, chegou pertinho da buceta, eu louca para pegar no pau, mas me mantinha rsrs, até que ele me convidou para irmos embora, eu relutei um pouco, mas topei.

Pagamos e saímos por uma porta lateral que dava acesso direto no estacionamento, o carro quase no fundo, em um canto, penso até hoje que ele colocou lá de propósito, quando abriu a porta, gentilmente, para eu entrar literalmente “me atacou”, me pegou de costas pra ele pela cintura impedindo que eu sentasse no carro, começou a beijar meu pescoço, a mão desceu até minha coxa, levantou a curta saia que eu vestia e literalmente meteu mão na minha buceta, apalpou, sentiu molhada a calcinha, e enfiou a mão por dentro, eu estava melada, babada, aquela pica por dentro da calça jeans me roçando a bunda, começou a me siriricar gostoso, eu pedia para parar, dizia que era a primeira vez que saíamos, mas não me ouvia.

Senti quando abriu o botão da calça e o zíper, e colocou o pau melado no meio das minhas coxas, e senti gostoso, me colocou de 4 no banco, baixou minha calcinha até os joelhos, abriu minha bunda, cuspiu no meu cú, lambeu com a pica meu rego, e encostou a cabeça na portinha da xana melada, colocou a cabeça, eu gemia, e insistia para parar, até que me socou fundo a pica e tirou, subiu minha calcinha, mas antes passou a pica melada no meu reguinho que me arrepiei, fechou a porta e entrou pela do motorista, nos beijamos e convidou para um motel, falei taxativamente que não, que já havíamos feito muito, que queria ir para casa, ele sorriu amarelo, e fomos trocando poucas palavras.

Chegamos em casa, morava com minha mãe, colocou o carro de ré em cima da rampa da garagem, eu cheia de tesão, mas não queria entregar a putinha que eu sou, e veio para cima cheio de vontades, cheio de mãos e dedos, eu adorando, mas não demostrava, por vezes mordia a boca, e enfiou a mão por baixo da saia enquanto beijávamos, arredou a calcinha para o lado, e me siriricou gostoso, pedia para eu pegar no pau, eu me fazendo, subiu a mão pela minha camisa curta, tirou um seio para fora, apertou o bico, isso tudo enquanto ainda me tocava e esfregava meu grelo, eu não aguentava mais ficar passivamente só beijando, que pedi que parasse, meio no susto por eu ter levantado a voz parou.

Então deu para mim, abri a porta do carro, o chamei, pedi que não ligasse o alarme, e entramos em casa pela garagem, e ali no escuro encostei-o contra a parede, abri a calça e saltou aquele caralho pulsante, agarrei com vontade, punhetei e cai literalmente de boca, me abaixei e mamei como a puta que sou, lambi as bolas, o saco, e peguei com vontade e chupei, lambi … que tesão, que vontade de caralho, ele só dizia que queria meter, que queria ver o meu rabão, e com medo que gozasse na minha boca, não que eu não goste, mas queria mais, peguei pela mão, levei até a cozinha, ofereci uma água esfriando a coisa toda.

Então em quanto tomava água, eu subi na bancada da cozinha e tirei a calcinha, abri bem as pernas, abri a bucetinha e perguntei se era o que ele queria, afirmou que sim, então abri a camisa, tirei o sutiã, fiz sinal com o dedo indicador para que se aproximasse.

Chegou me beijando a boca, depois chupou com gosto minha teta, eu fazendo carinhos em sua cabeça, abaixou e foi no sentido da minha buceta, pediu que ficasse na ponta da bancada e chupou com gosto, enfiou a língua lá dentro, brincou com os lábios vaginais, no meu grelo, levantou e abriu a calça e sem perguntar nada socou com vontade, todo o caralho de um golpe só, gemi baixinho, mas eu estava muito lubrificada e iniciou a meter e tirar, tirar e meter, eu esfregava meu grelo e disse que logo…logo iria gozar.

Foi quando parou de empurrar, me tirou com força de cima da bancada da cozinha, fez eu ficar de bunda pra ele apoiada na bancada, deixou cair minha minissaia, me deixando nua da cintura para baixo, pediu que eu abrisse bem minha bunda, eu abri com vontade expondo meu cuzinho, ele cuspiu no meu rabo, passou a cabeça do caralho melada no meu reguinho e socou a pica na xana melada e cuspia no meu rabo.

Até que tirou a pica da buceta e forçou meu cú, eu pedi que parasse, que tinha feito poucas vezes e que iria doer, pois a pica dele era muito grossa, então se agachou, mandou eu esperar naquela posição, cuspiu na pica, apontou para o meu rabo e a cabeça entrou( – desgraçado), e foi empurrando lentamente todo o caralho enquanto me me esfrega grelo, eu gemia baixinho, até que pedi para socar com força que eu queria gozar ,e socou forte mesmo, tirava e socava e siriricava meu grelo, e o gozo veio gemi alto, e orgasmei com gosto, e logo senti a porra inundar meu cú todinho, eu estava sem forças pela intensidade do gozo, a pica foi amolecendo e tirou, me virei e recebi um gostoso beijo na boca, perguntou se tinha um banheiro perto, mostrei o da área de serviço e se foi, eu coloquei minha saia, fechei a camisa sem sutiã e quando voltou falei que precisava ir embora, já estava tarde.

Fui levar ele pelo portão da garagem, mas antes de abrir ele me puxou, me deu um puta beijo, passou a mão na minha bunda e sentindo que eu estava sem calcinha pediu para eu chupar seu dedo, o que fiz com gosto, e logo depois enfiou, enterrou o dedo no meu rabo guloso, eu com o dedo no rabo tirei o pau já duro para fora da calça e comecei a punhetar, disse queria gozar, então me abaixei e chupei recebendo toda a porra na boquinha, o beijei a boca e mandei embora, acabei prometendo que iríamos a um lugar mais tranquilo!

Enviado ao Te Contos por Julia

[i-am-cesear]

Listen! You know I am a big Natsuhiko simp. It was normal for me to wonder about his necklace.

I think his necklace is REALLY important. What we know about Natsuhiko's necklace? It is a present from Sakura and it is germanium. He is just so casually says it in here.

I needed to check what is germanium and

1) Why did Sakura gave Natsu a germanium necklace?

Let's start with germanium itself. If I pass the more scientific stuff about germanium, this is what I get so far:

• It is a metalloid in the carbon group that is chemically similar to its group neighbors silicon and tin.

• Germanium is not thought to be an essential element for any living organism. Similar to silicon and aluminium, naturally-occurring germanium compounds tend to be insoluble in water and thus have little oral toxicity. However, synthetic soluble germanium salts are nephrotoxic, and synthetic chemically reactive germanium compounds with halogens and hydrogen are irritants and toxins.

•The major end uses for germanium in 2007, worldwide, were estimated to be: 35% for fiber-optics, 30% infrared optics, 15% polymerization catalysts, and 15% electronics and solar electric applications. The remaining 5% went into such uses as phosphors, metallurgy, and chemotherapy.

•Germanium supplements, made from both organic and inorganic germanium, have been marketed as an alternative medicine capable of treating leukemia and lung cancer.  There is, however, no medical evidence of benefit; some evidence suggests that such supplements are actively harmful.

So. We use germanium more in technology and it is not usually harmfull for people. Wanna know what I decided to search? Germanium necklaces. Just to see if it has any meaning.

I checked the first web-site and I know, I should've search more but I was curious. I searched "germanium necklace benefits" and wanna know what I found out? Apparently, germanium jewelry;

• Increases blood circulation

• Increases metabolism of body cells

• Removes harmful toxins

•Alleviates physical stress, stiffness, cramps or discomfort

• Controls swelling

• Reduces water retention

• Relieves fatigue and tiredness

• Promotes quality sleep

• Slows down aging

• Increases and maintains body warmth

But Cesear, why are they important??

It's because, I am almost sure that Natsuhiko is not wearing his necklace in this panel.

He is not wearing it. He can't. That necklace looks more like a collar than a necklace. For exemple, look here:

And here, now look at his germanium necklace:

That thing is not loose. I don't think he can wear that thing under a shirt that buttoned all the way up and a necktie. Look again. Do you see what I mean?

And in these panels, it is the first time Natsu talks about something that hurts him. He experienced some wild things before with Nene.

He looks scared but totally ok in here.

He looks scared, not in pain.

And he just comes back like nothing happened. These panels was one of the reasons why I thought he was immortal in the first place. He is wearing his necklace in all of them. He looks fine, he looks like his usual self. But in the raws, he looks tired. My friend pointed it out for me that in whole manga, this is the only time Natsu look genuinly tired and also, he mentions himself as a "human."

Maybe it's because he is losing blood but I don't think that much of blood and that much of a time is long enough for him to feel tired. I think he is not wearing his necklace and that necklace is healing him.

But Cesear, what does the necklace healing Natsu from?

Good question.

Before these raws, I thought that Natsu was sick and he was dying. Remember where people use germanium? Don't bother scroll back up, I'll show you again.

• Germanium supplements, made from both organic and inorganic germanium, have been marketed as an alternative medicine capable of treating leukemia and lung cancer.

But now that we have the raws, I know what the necklace heal Natsu from.

I think it is healing him from his own blood.

We now know that Natsuhiko is immortal (like I was saying for months now) because of a rumour that Sakura released but Natsu is not entirely supernatural. His blood causes the supernatural things to break down, it is toxic for them.

And if Natsu is at least somewhat immortal, that means that his blood might be toxic for him as well. He is also immortal. Which might put Natsu in a circle; his own blood keep hurting and killing him inside while his immortality forces him to live. It must be painful, he feels pain. He says that either cutting his palm or his blood hurts so he feels it. He can't be useful like that. So, how are we going to fix it?

By giving him a healing necklace which is also believed that helps with aging process.

So. Now you know why I found that necklace really important.

[trivialbob]

I do not remember which one of you posted about putting a few drops of essential oil on the vacuum cleaner filter. But wow, that was a nice idea.

Lavender is my favorite scent. I have several vacuum cleaners, so I used more than a few drops. Each room I clean smells nice.

Orange is my preference for cleaning the garbage disposal. Mixed with a bunch of ice cubes it leave the disposal fresh.

Sheila has a few good recipes for Instant pot Indian food. The butter chicken is amazing. However, it leaves the silicon ring with a distinct curry odor which in turn lingers in the dishwasher. Lemongrass and orange do a good job of removing or covering up that smell.

Eucalyptus smells good in the diffuser, as does the lavender. Tea tree seems to have a million uses (or at least 14, according to one web site checked). My bottle of peppermint oil remains unopened.

[mariacallous]

The open internet once seemed inevitable. Now, as global economic woes mount and interest rates climb, the dream of the 2000s feels like it’s on its last legs. After abruptly blocking access to unregistered users at the end of last month, Elon Musk announced unprecedented caps on the number of tweets—600 for those of us who aren’t paying $8 a month—that users can read per day on Twitter. The move follows the platform’s controversial choice to restrict third-party clients back in January.

This wasn’t a standalone event. Reddit announced in April that it would begin charging third-party developers for API calls this month. The Reddit client Apollo would have to pay more than $20 million a year under new pricing, so it closed down, triggering thousands of subreddits to go dark in protest against Reddit’s new policy. The company went ahead with its plan anyway.

Leaders at both companies have blamed this new restrictiveness on AI companies unfairly benefitting from open access to data. Musk has said that Twitter needs rate limits because AI companies are scraping its data to train large language models. Reddit CEO Steve Huffman has cited similar reasons for the company’s decision to lock down its API ahead of a potential IPO this year.

These statements mark a major shift in the rhetoric and business calculus of Silicon Valley. AI serves as a convenient boogeyman, but it is a distraction from a more fundamental pivot in thinking. Whereas open data and protocols were once seen as the critical cornerstone of successful internet business, technology leaders now see these features as a threat to the continued profitability of their platforms.

It wasn’t always this way. The heady days of Web 2.0 were characterized by a celebration of the web as a channel through which data was abundant and widely available. Making data open through an API or some other means was considered a key way to increase a company’s value. Doing so could also help platforms flourish as developers integrated the data into their own apps, users enriched datasets with their own contributions, and fans shared products widely across the web. The rapid success of sites like Google Maps—which made expensive geospatial data widely available to the public for the first time—heralded an era where companies could profit through free, mass dissemination of information.

“Information Wants To Be Free” became a rallying cry. Publisher Tim O’Reilly would champion the idea that business success in Web 2.0 depended on companies “disagreeing with the consensus” and making data widely accessible rather than keeping it private. Kevin Kelly marveled in WIRED in 2005 that “when a company opens its databases to users … [t]he corporation’s data becomes part of the commons and an invitation to participate. People who take advantage of these capabilities are no longer customers; they’re the company’s developers, vendors, skunk works, and fan base.” Investors also perceived the opportunity to generate vast wealth. Google was “most certainly the standard bearer for Web 2.0,” and its wildly profitable model of monetizing free, open data was deeply influential to a whole generation of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists.

Of course, the ideology of Web 2.0 would not have evolved the way it did were it not for the highly unusual macroeconomic conditions of the 2000s and early 2010s. Thanks to historically low interest rates, spending money on speculative ventures was uniquely possible. Financial institutions had the flexibility on their balance sheets to embrace the idea that the internet reversed the normal laws of commercial gravity: It was possible for a company to give away its most valuable data and still get rich quick. In short, a zero interest-rate policy, or ZIRP, subsidized investor risk-taking on the promise that open data would become the fundamental paradigm of many Google-scale companies, not just a handful.

Web 2.0 ideologies normalized much of what we think of as foundational to the web today. User tagging and sharing features, freely syndicated and embeddable links to content, and an ecosystem of third-party apps all have their roots in the commitments made to build an open web. Indeed, one of the reasons that the recent maneuvers of Musk and Huffman seem so shocking is that we have come to expect data will be widely and freely available, and that platforms will be willing to support people that build on it.

But the marriage between the commercial interests of technology companies and the participatory web has always been one of convenience. The global campaign by central banks to curtail inflation through aggressive interest rate hikes changes the fundamental economics of technology. Rather than facing a landscape of investors willing to buy into a hazy dream of the open web, leaders like Musk and Huffman now confront a world where clear returns need to be seen today if not yesterday.

This presages major changes ahead for the design of the internet and the rights of users. Twitter and Reddit are pioneering an approach to platform management (or mismanagement) that will likely spread elsewhere across the web. It will become increasingly difficult to access content without logging in, verifying an identity, or paying a toll. User data will become less exportable and less shareable, and there will be increasingly fewer expectations that it will be preserved. Third-parties that have relied on the free flow of data online—from app-makers to journalists—will find APIs ever more expensive to access and scraping harder than ever before.

We should not let the open web die a quiet death. No doubt much of the foundational rhetoric of Web 2.0 is cringeworthy in the harsh light of 2023. But it is important to remember that the core project of building a participatory web where data can be shared, improved, critiqued, remixed, and widely disseminated by anyone is still genuinely worthwhile.

The way the global economic landscape is shifting right now creates short-sighted incentives toward closure. In response, the open web ought to be enshrined as a matter of law. New regulations that secure rights around the portability of user data, protect the continued accessibility of crucial APIs to third parties, and clarify the long-ambiguous rules surrounding scraping would all help ensure that the promise of a free, dynamic, competitive internet can be preserved in the coming decade.

For too long, advocates for the open web have implicitly relied on naive beliefs that the network is inherently open, or that web companies would serve as unshakable defenders of their stated values. The opening innings of the post-ZIRP world show how broader economic conditions have actually played the larger role in architecting how the internet looks and feels to this point. Believers in a participatory internet need to reach for stronger tools to mitigate the effects of these deep economic shifts, ensuring that openness can continue to be embedded into the spaces that we inhabit online.

WIRED Opinion publishes articles by outside contributors representing a wide range of viewpoints. Read more opinions here. Submit an op-ed at ideas@wired.com.

[nostalgebraist-autoresponder]

Title: Overwhelmed by Data: An Exploration of Online Information Space, 2010-2012

Author: Trevor Dawson

Rating: 4/5 stars

I have said it before and I will say it again: collaborative filtering is a lot like gambling, and it is no coincidence that internet recommendation systems and internet casinos are both huge and somewhat problematic parts of our society.

Recommendation systems want you to keep trying things, and keep trying things, and keep trying things, and they (consciously or not) have their hands on an endless supply of new possibilities for you to try. They are often very "sticky" -- i.e. you stay on a website because your next possibility is right there, and after that, right there, and after that . . .

The best example is social media, where the endless stream of posts and tweets encourages you to not only stay on the site, but to put more and more into it, post more and post more . . . for the sake of winning social status games. I just saw a few people say (tweets), "I put a lot of effort into that post and I'm proud of it. I'm going to give that post its own Tumblr page so I can go back to it any time and appreciate how good it was" -- thus achieving exactly the kind of internet experience that the recs algorithm wants to produce.

But this is a problem, because what do you do when you've got an excess of something? People aren't content to look at, say, ten reviews or books or movies per day. If a service wants people to "engage with" its content, they can't stop at ten, they need to keep going and going and going. Consume more, do more, share more! This must be quantified. How much is enough? How much is too much? On to the next one!

And the more you put into something, the more you are expected to do . . . . and the more you expect, the more you do, and the more the system feeds you and demands you do more and more. It's not the self-contained perfect world of a casino; it's a black hole.

Dawson's book makes the case that the endlessness of this process is not only a function of web 2.0 -- it is a feature of all human beings. He is inspired by a conversation with Carl H. Sferrazza and Blaise N. Peters, who imagine a world in which humans had a set amount of computational power. In this world, it simply would not be possible to "consume an infinite amount of content" -- the human brain's computational power is much more limited. (Not so in this world of "silicon chips.") Because of the infinite demand on content, our brains would inevitably be wired to take advantage of the best, most recommended things, leaving less room for everything else. (Think of shopping in a supermarket -- if you are presented with one item, you are more likely to find it good than if you have to choose from 50 different items, even though "the best" could be one of the 50.)

In short, the Web 2.0/social media model of recommendations is not really so much of a contingent fact about web 2.0 -- it is just a fact of the world in general. Dawson thinks the world in general could be substantially changed if we only accepted this fact.

The proposal for change is fairly pragmatic and mundane -- "content owners" should limit the supply of things to be consumed. This is true in a variety of senses. For instance, Dawson sees the phenomenon of "fandoms" as a case in which narrowing the selection of content to be consumed, and thus providing recommendations for this content, will make the fandom larger and more successful. If you're reading this as a fan of some thing and are thinking, "but I just want MORE OF THIS THING," Dawson has some bad news for you. "More of this thing" is probably not good for your fandom.

But he's not just worried about big business taking advantage of "endless supply." Dawson argues that the best products tend to be the ones with the most endless supply -- the things that can be quenched never stop being quenchable, and nothing else can rival them. Coca Cola isn't "the best drink," but it's good at being drinkable in an endless way, and anything that gives you a limited (finite) amount of quenchable (delicious) goodness will look inferior by comparison.

If we're going to truly understand how our choices are manipulated by systems of endless supply -- and what will happen if we, as a civilization, alter those systems -- it will help to have more pragmatic examples. If you think this is interesting and important, I highly recommend the book.

[gobusto]

a fun fact about me is that our house didn't have a PC until i was about 14 -- and even then, it was shared by the whole family, and didn't have internet access for a while. my dad eventually signed up for AOL around 2001, at which point we were able to surf the web™ via a 56k dial-up connection.

however, we did have internet access prior to that… via our TV:

source: https://web.archive.org/web/20190407175637/https://www.digitalspy.com/tech/cable/a3171/ntl-cr2-interactive/

this gave us a (single, shared) email address, and access to an extremely limited number of websites, such as leisuredistrict or everyoneswelcome.

(as an aside: you could unlock "full" web access by paying an extra £5 per month, which we eventually did… but not before discovering that if someone emailed us a clickable link, we could access that site without going through the "proper" menu option!)

anyway, to compose emails, enter your leisuredistrict password, or write an everyoneswelcome post, you had to use the remote control:

source: https://web.archive.org/web/20190407173228/https://www.digitalspy.com/tech/cable/a3231/ntlhome-digital-interactive-tv/

as you can imagine this was slow and awkward. however, as the image above indicates, you could buy a special keyboard to make things easier. since my dad used to play chess via email (using a physical chess set next to the television), he ended up getting one:

source: https://www.reddit.com/r/nostalgia/comments/hm5pfa/these_ntl_keyboards_i_think_im_on_an_ntl/

as you might have noticed, it has a somewhat strange layout, and doesn't have a wire coming out of the back. that's because this keyboard is actually just a really big remote control; you put 4 AA batteries in the back, and it communicates with the set top box via infrared signals, just like the standard remote control would.

of course, our set top box eventually outlived its usefulness, and all of this stuff went into a storage cupboard, whereupon it was promptly forgotten about… until a few months ago, when i rediscovered the keyboard whilst my dad was clearing out some old things. as you might expect, i saved it from being sent to silicon heaven (where all the calculators go) because i am a goblin who hoards old technology.

i put it to one side for a while, but a few days ago i decided to see if it was still working. it turns out that regular webcams can pick up infrared light, so i put some batteries in it and -- success! -- several white-ish lights were visible in my laptop's webcam app whenever i pressed a key.

as such, i think it would be cool to somehow get this thing working as an actual PC keyboard. i might need to write a custom program to do this, though it seems that it might Just Work.

of course, i'd need some kind of infrared receiver device to do that, and those can be surprisingly tricky to find:

there are plenty of "infrared extender" cables online, but their USB connector is only used to draw power; they don't actually show up as a "device" on your PC.

you can apparently get infrared-receiver-to-headphone jack cables, which you're supposed to plug into a special socket on certain set top boxes… though in theory you could plug them into the microphone input port of a PC and "manually" decode the data signal via software trickery. (disclaimer: i am not an expert on Hardware, so this might be A Bad Idea, but i think that the 5V output by the microphone port would be enough to power the IR receiver…?)

the thing i actually want (an IR-to-USB device) might as well not exist because it is no longer 2005 and no-one on the planet except me gives even half a shit about connecting an IR device to a PC. well, that's not entirely true -- but the things i did find cost £30-£50, which is way above what i'd want to spend on something like this.

eventually, though, i discovered that the magic phrase to search for is "Media Center IR receiver" (or, more simply, "MCE receiver"), whereupon i found someone selling an Acer MCEIR-210 on ebay for just over £10. its due to arrive here within the next few days, so hopefully i can make this somewhat-unusual device function again.

[werewolf-kat]

How can Google's decisions for Chrome get any WORSE? What on earth is this?!

The gist: Google wants to implement a "feature" for website owners/developers to be selective on who can see their website. These devs (or their malicious higher-ups) could block out or limit Firefox users, Safari users, open source or indie browsers, etc. from their website; and worst of all, they could block or limit as far as the device you use.

Major concerns:

How can people even WANT this other than corrupt companies trying to force competing users to tediously go through the needed hoops to access the website? There's already the web design standard of optimizing load times to be welcoming for visitors. This ain't going to encourage anyone to have interest in your website (or its company by extension). It really will be a test of consumer trust.

Worryingly, lazy or more apathetic web developers might use this to dance around compatibility challenges in their websites. I've seen my fair share of these types of devs in the community who take the frustration of browser compatibilities too far. They're a minority (thankfully, seen in the video is the Chrome repository getting completely flooded with criticisms). But, yeah, pro-tip to web developers: Learn to prioritize the layout and order of your content in plain HTML first before you jump into design. And then build the CSS from there in a "ranking" of completely compatible with all browsers, to less compatibilities. So you can manage and keep track of how your site will look on anything out there.

The sheer fear and worry for accessibility in web design that I'm feeling from this, man. Again, it's not just browsers... Malicious entities making decisions for websites could block out or further limit accessibility devices (if they're counted) because of the extra work that comes with ensuring a website is accessible to a wide range of disabled or impaired users. I can't fully tell if screen reader software could somehow get affected, but who knows how far Google will want to go in this nightmare of a proposal.

Read more on this situation:

"It is also interesting to note that the first use case listed is about ensuring that interactions with ads are genuine. While this is not problematic on the surface, it certainly hints at the idea that Google is willing to use any means of bolstering its advertising platform, regardless of the potential harm to the users of the web."

Vivaldi Article

||

"The proposal threatens the free and open internet in a number of ways, but one of the biggest revolves around the fact that should there be a central server that attests to whether a browser can be trusted or not, it means that anything non-standard will not be trusted. In other words, new browsers would not be trusted, and legacy software would no longer be able to access much of the internet after a certain length of time. Given that it verifies the integrity of the browser, it could also technically block certain extensions (such as Adblock) if Google were to go down that route."

XDA Developers

||

"What makes the fingerprinting process somewhat insidious is that, unlike web cookies, no residue is left on a user’s computer – everything can be stored in the cloud. The fingerprint data can be collected even if users run private or incognito browsing sessions. Worse yet, each user’s fingerprint can be shared across websites without the user’s knowledge."

Silicon Angle

[mostlysignssomeportents]

This day in history

#20yrsago Cisco’s routers designed for governmental eavesdropping https://web.archive.org/web/20030808191949/http://news.com.com/2010-1071-997528.html

#20yrsago Chandler goes 0.1 https://web.archive.org/web/20030603202506/http://blogs.osafoundation.org/mitch/000166.html

#20yrsago Notes from “Legal Issues and Emerging Technology” https://craphound.com/fvletcon2003.txt

#20yrsago Patents in Emerging Tech https://craphound.com/etconpatents.txt

#20yrsago Andrew “Bunnie” Huang’s tutorial on Hardware Hacking https://craphound.com/bunnieetcon2003.txt

#15yrsago MSN Music customers lose *all* their music the next time they buy a new PC https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2008/04/drm-sucks-redux-microsoft-to-nuke-msn-music-drm-keys/

#15yrsago Middlesbrough cops, goons and clerks grab and detain photographer for shooting on a public street https://memex.craphound.com/2008/04/22/middlesbrough-cops-goons-and-clerks-grab-and-detain-photographer-for-shooting-on-a-public-street/

#15yrsago Disneyland bans pictures in its parking lots https://disneylandcompendium.blogspot.com/2008/04/photo-disneyland-doesnt-want-you-to-see.html

#10yrsago Fox sends fraudulent takedown notices for my novel Homeland https://memex.craphound.com/2013/04/22/fox-sends-fraudulent-takedown-notices-for-my-novel-homeland/

#10yrsago William Gibson tries the Google Glass https://www.flickr.com/photos/1800joe/8666284626/in/photostream

#10yrsago Then-and-now photos of Disney Parks from early days and today https://www.imagineeringdisney.com/thenandnow/2013/2/17/then-and-now-photo-collection.html

#10yrsago Finnish websites go dark tomorrow to call for copyright reform https://web.archive.org/web/20130601000000*/https://arcticstartup.com/2013/04/22/finnish-sites-blacking-out-tomorrow-in-support-of-copyright-petition

#1yrago Don’t believe Obama’s Big Tech criti-hype https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/22/mesmer-2-point-oh/#thanks-obama

I’m at the LA Times Festival of Books this weekend!

On Sat (Apr 23) at noon, I’m on a panel called “Covering Silicon Valley��� with Winddance Twine, moderated by Wendy Lee from the LA Times.

On Sun (Apr 24) at 11AM, I’m signing for California Book Club at booth 111. At 12:30, I’m doing a panel called “The Accidental Detective” with Alex Segura, Margot Douaihy and SJ Rozan

[play-now-my-lord]

as someone who was good at twitter but found it giving me brainworms, bluesky does not reward being good at bluesky in the same way but offers a more concentrated version of the same brainworms. it's a great web site for you if you want to be brainwashed by silicon valley nerds into thinking cults are good or transsexuals are all white. if you don't want that, it's not your web site

i don’t know if i can do this blue sky app anymore

[douchebagbrainwaves]

AN ALTERNATIVE THEORY OF WEB STARTUPS TO NOT START A CASUALTY OF

That difference is why there's a distinct word, startup, for companies designed to grow fast. The articles are full of descriptions of problems that need to be a research scientist: you're not committing to solve a problem is often to redefine it. But people will pay for? Microsoft anymore. Time after time, something that seemed a small and uninteresting area—experimental error, even—turns out, VC-backed startups are not the main target of those who didn't preferred to believe the heuristic filters then available were the best you could do. This denial is such a thing as good and bad senses of the word, new technology. But only a bit: willfulness, discipline, and the amount of selling required in an industry is always inversely proportional to the judgement of the buyers. There are a couple reasons they should care. Patterns to be embroidered on tapestries were drawn on paper with ink wash. The only credible contender is Android.

You don't build a silicon valley, is a nice, durable medium for finished ideas, but a fickle client or unreliable materials would not be. We compete more with employers than VCs. But if Ron's angry at you, it's because you did something wrong. People's best friends are likely to soon. It's not surprising something like this would happen. Apple's lock. A lot of the towns they like most in the US is not tax policy or employment law or even Sarbanes-Oxley. But he wouldn't have to. Sometimes you hear people saying All these guys starting startups now are going to have to think about acquisitions.

If you try to create the complete, finished, product in one long touchdown pass. That's not all wisdom is, but it's hard to hit without destroying startups as collateral damage. Wouldn't it start to seem lame? If you're going to replace email. For example, a lot of stories in which nothing happened except that someone was satisfied with a search result than going to the site and buying something? Perhaps one reason people believe startup founders win by being smarter is that intelligence does matter more in technology startups than it used to in earlier types of companies. There have been famous instances of collaboration in the arts, but I suspect that tweaking the inbox is not enough, however.

Almost every company needs some amount of frustration is inevitable in certain kinds of excitement, New York is a mystery. Whatever you build, make it fast. And they're hard to reach, because they make such great stuff, but they're not entirely orthogonal. So you'll be willing for example to hire another programmer? In fact, users expect a site to improve. As knowledge gets more specialized, there are more points on the curve seems to have been headed down the wrong path. It now seems inevitable that applications will live on the web—not just email, but everything, right up to Photoshop. But it would be ignoring users.

Forty-two years later, Kleiner Perkins funded Google, and the best way to solve b, but you don't have to think of ideas. I didn't realize how hard it is to focus more on the user. The only way to convince everyone that you're ready to fight to the death is actually to be ready. I started. That seems the wrong model. Like good athletes, they don't have to work for, they may start to focus on first, we try to figure that out. Ditto for investors. The most extreme case is developing programming languages, and one of the most admired Web 2. So don't even try to bluff them. If you make fun of your little brother for coloring people green in his coloring book, your mother is likely to tell you something like you like to do it by just writing code.

Thanks to Robert Morris, Chris Dixon, Kulveer Taggar, Aaron Swartz, Jessica Livingston, Michael Keenan, and Sam Altman for reading a previous draft.

[digizenzee]

Why Indian Web Design Companies Deserve a Spot on the Global Stage

When you think about an incredible website you’ve come across—a smooth interface, vibrant design, and seamless experience—you’re likely admiring the hard work of talented web designers. But have you considered where some of the best web design services are coming from? If you haven’t thought about India, it’s time to take a closer look.Over the past decade, India has emerged as a hub for top-notch web design services.

Called upon by startups and conglomerates alike, Indian web design companies are shaping the web as we see it today. Still, misconceptions persist. Can they really deliver quality? Is it just a cost-saving move? Allow me to share why businesses worldwide are turning to India—not just for affordability, but for unparalleled creativity and superior results.

1. Cost-Effective Without Compromising on Quality

Picture this. You're a business owner looking to revamp your online presence. You want world-class design and functionality, but you don’t want to empty your pockets in the process. Sound familiar? This is where digitechnique companies shine.

India offers high-quality web design services at incredibly competitive rates. Why? The lower cost of living makes it possible for companies to pay skilled professionals without inflating costs for clients. But make no mistake—this isn’t a “you get what you pay for” situation; it’s the opposite.

Indian designers bring expert knowledge of user experience (UX), responsive design, and advanced development tools to the table. According to a Clutch report from 2022, 41% of businesses outsourcing their design needs in India rated the quality of services as "excellent." Testimonials from global clients repeatedly emphasize professionalism, creativity, and timely delivery, proving that affordability doesn’t mean sacrificing quality.

2. Shaping the Global Market

It’s not just cost and quality that put India on the map—it’s adaptability and vision. The web design company india have embraced global market demands. From crafting vibrant e-commerce layouts for Australian retailers to designing minimalist corporate sites for Silicon Valley tech firms, they understand what works across different industries.

Here’s why businesses choose Indian firms for their global projects:

Expertise in Emerging Technologies: Many Indian companies stay ahead of the curve with proficiency in AI, machine learning, and advanced web tools.

Collaborative Approach: Despite the distance, seamless communication tools and flexible work hours ensure they align closely with global time zones and client expectations.

Cultural Sensitivity: Indian firms are adept at designing websites that resonate with international audiences. They understand nuances like color symbolism, language preferences, and how localized aesthetics influence engagement. Indian web designers don’t just meet standards—they set them. And their talent pool doesn’t appear to be slowing down anytime soon.

3. Challenges—and Opportunity Knocking

Of course, like any other flourishing industry, web design in India isn’t without its challenges. The intense competition among firms means some companies may cut corners to appear cheaper. For businesses, this reinforces the importance of doing thorough research and choosing a credible partner.

Another hurdle is the constant evolution of technology. Web design trends move fast. For Indian companies, this means they must continually upskill and invest in cutting-edge tools to remain competitive. However, in every challenge lies an opportunity. This fierce market ensures that the best firms innovate at rapid speeds, leading to better service for global clients.

[mariacallous]

Rumble, the so-called free speech alternative to YouTube, is the subject of an investigation by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), according to the company and a letter from the SEC. The SEC confirmed its investigation involving Rumble in response to a public records request that WIRED first filed in November, seeking documents related to the company. The agency denied WIRED's request on the grounds that related documents were part of an “active and ongoing” investigation. Confirmation of the probe follows public allegations that Rumble inflated key user metrics, which the company denies.

The SEC says that the existence of the probe should not be an indication that “any violations of law have occurred with respect to any person, entity, or security.” The exact nature of the SEC investigation is still unknown.

“We have confirmed with Division of Enforcement staff that the investigation from which you seek records is still active and ongoing,” Melinda Hardy, the assistant general counsel for litigation and administrative practice at the SEC, said in a January 8 letter to WIRED.

Hardy added that disclosure of the documents WIRED sought as part of its Freedom of Information Act request “could be reasonably expected to cause harm to the ongoing and active enforcement proceedings because, among other things, individuals and entities of interest in the underlying investigation could fabricate evidence, influence witness testimony and/or destroy or alter certain documents.”

Rumble spokesperson Rory Rumore tells WIRED that the company provided information to the SEC voluntarily in response to a request for documents from the SEC Enforcement staff. Rumore also says in a statement: “We caution anyone from jumping to false conclusions about matters related to Rumble.”

Founded in 2013 by Canadian entrepreneur Chris Pavlovski, Rumble was originally dedicated to hosting viral videos of dogs and cats. The site now claims to push back “against cancel culture and creeping censorship,” hosting shows by Donald Trump Jr. and right-wing personality Steven Crowder. Rumble is also the official streaming partner of the Republican National Committee’s 2024 presidential primary debates. “The SEC does not comment on the existence or nonexistence of a possible investigation,” an SEC spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

Rumble’s investors have included JD Vance, a US senator from Ohio, and Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who has contributed heavily to Republican candidates. Elon Musk confidant and tech venture capitalist David Sacks sits on Rumble’s board of directors.

In May 2021, the site was reportedly valued at an estimated $500 million. In September 2022, Rumble became a publicly traded company listed on the Nasdaq as part of a Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC) deal. Its valuation currently exceeds $1.2 billion.

In April 2023, investment research firm Culper Research released a report expressing skepticism about the legitimacy of Rumble’s claimed monthly active user (MAU) counts, a key metric for investors to evaluate the performance of a social media company. Culper Research said it had taken a short position in Rumble, meaning it stands to profit if Rumble’s stock price decreases.

“Combined, the web and app data suggest to us that Rumble has only 38 to 48 million unique users, and the Company has overstated its user base by 66% to 108%,” Culper Research claimed in its report.

In a quarterly earnings call following the report’s publication, Rumble reported that its monthly active users declined by 40 percent during the first three months of 2023, from 80 million to 48 million. In a financial filing, Rumble attributed the decrease in users to its popular creators being less active on the platform in the first part of 2023, and news events slowing down following the 2022 midterm elections.

“Investors should be especially dubious of rumors peddled by short-sellers who are attempting to distort facts for their own financial benefit. We are aware of misleading claims about Rumble’s monthly active user (MAU) statistics, which, as we have previously disclosed, are provided by Google Analytics,” Rumble spokesperson Rumore says. “Any suggestion that Rumble has inflated its MAUs is false—as any objective person quickly realizes upon even a cursory review of the data.”

Christian Lamarco, the founder of Culper Research, believes the change in reported users was a response to its report. “That was a bit of validation, in my view,” he says.

Updated 5:45 pm ET, January 8, 2024: Immediately following publication, Chris Pavlovski, Rumble's founder and CEO, said in a post on X that the SEC investigation was part of “the playbook to try and destroy” the company. “A short seller creates a bogus report and sends it to the SEC. The SEC investigates the bogus report. Then the short seller talks to the media to get a story about how the SEC is investigating the report that started with him. The media happily writes the story,” Pavlovski wrote. “The report is bogus, but that doesn’t matter—it’s all to get investors to sell the stock so the short seller profits.”

Pavlovski added that the company used Google Analytics to track user metrics “so we could be ready for this very moment.”

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