Wednesday, September 3, 2025 →
RSS is so awesome it made the front page of Hacker News
There’s probably not too many people on HN who don’t use RSS, but more generally, uptake is not particularly high. On that basis, any publicity is helpful. Let’s keep encouraging the adoption of RSS.
Hell yeah! This is a link post of a link post of a link from Hacker News, but I love to see people talking about RSS. I can’t imagine getting news any other way.
Wednesday, September 3, 2025 →
Rogue is a worker-owned cooperative business that features several former Polygon writers…You can always be assured that the writing that appears on our website is for you. If we want to write about Grand Theft Auto 6, it’ll be because we want to, not because someone else noticed how well it’s trending. If we want to cover a rad indie game instead of a AAA release, nobody can stop us.
Real indie vibes here. Polygon sold out to a content farm recently, and Rascal.news helped set up some of their former writers with their own blog: Rogue.site. Feels like 404media for games.
Wednesday, September 3, 2025 →
Trusted news sites may benefit in an internet full of AI-generated fakes, a new study finds
…what matters to the consumer’s choice is the source’s value relative to the alternatives, which are degrading more rapidly.
As long as trusted sources don’t start replacing their writers with AI, I think it’ll be good. Authentic personal blogs will benefit from all the AI slop taking over for the same reasons; having that real human touch is becoming a commodity.
Substack just killed the creator economy
Last week, they announced that all writers would be required to offer Apple’s in-app purchase (IAP) payment option. That means that Apple will be collecting a 30% fee for all subscriptions purchased on Substack via IAP.
This is one of many reasons it sucks writing on someone else’s website. I know not everyone can self host, and not everyone wants to. But if I was on Substack, something like Ghost would be looking pretty appealing to me right now.
PBS, NPR stations struggle with US government funding cuts
Pleas for donations exceed expectations in many parts of country
I’ve never donated to PBS in my life until this past month. I set up a monthly donation to our local station, WOSU Public Media. It’s not much, but I’m hoping there are a lot more people like me; people who might not have felt a need to donate in the past, but realize a really great thing is in jeopardy and give PBS/NPR or their local channels what they can afford.
Jenna Ortega Cracks me up in Wednesday
“I have FOBI: Fear Of Being Included.”
Just listened to the latest episode of Cory Doctorow’s podcast where he reads an hour of his upcoming book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It
I hope that listening to this long sample will convince you to pre-order your copy!
That’s exactly what it did! 🤪 Just pre-ordered the hardcover copy and audiobook from Kickstarter.
It’s so fucking good! I wanna keep going but it’s not out yet. I don’t know if it’s the most important book of the year, but it’s definitely the most relevant.
Mass shooters are not disproportionately transgender, contrary to claims
There were 195 mass shootings committed by 200 people between 1966 and 2024 that met the VPP’s definition. Of those 200 mass shooters, VPP only listed one perpetrator as transgender: the 2023 Nashville shooter. That’s 0.50% of all the shooters.
So there have been a total of two trans people involved in mass shootings since 1966. In reality, almost every mass shooter has been a white male. And that’s based on actual data, not a cocaine fueled tweet storm from Don Jr.
1999: Blogs Burst Onto the Scene, but RSS Is Slow To Settle
“a phenomenon known as the weblog is one of the fastest-growing and most fertile creative areas on the Web today.”
Excellent history lesson from Cybercultural on blogging. The blogosphere is still alive and well, 26 years in <3
Republicans investigate Wikipedia over allegations of organized bias
Wikipedia has long faced accusations of its entries having a political bias, with the right-leaning Manhattan Institute releasing a report in 2024 that found Wikipedia entries are more likely to attach a negative sentiment to right-leaning terms.
The problem isn’t bias, it’s that the right is increasingly cruel and authoritarian. I’m biased against anyone whose goal is to make life harder for anyone they don’t like.
Google’s AI Is Committing a Unique Evil: Giving Gamers Tips That Are Actually False
It’s been a long time since people were playing Pokemon Yellow and Final Fantasy for the first time, however, and AI has apparently taken over the role that used to be filled by your idiot brother.
I feel dumb for admitting this, but I’ve gone on wild goose chases for half a day trying to use ChatGPT as a walkthrough. Even on old games with tons of information online, it still conflates different versions across different consoles, sometimes from different decades. It’s just so bad.
Vivaldi browser capo doubles down on generative AI ban
“If people want to use AI as those services, it’s easily accessible to them without building it into the browser. But I think the concept of building it into the browser is typically for the sake of collecting information. And that’s not what we are about as a company, and we don’t think that’s what the web should be about.”
Vivaldi has always been such a sane alternative.
I’m on Firefox ESR so I haven’t gotten any of the AI stuff yet, but it’s nice to know Vivaldi is there if/when enshittification ensues.
Radiohead’s “Let Down” Charts on Billboard Hot 100 After Going Viral on TikTok
“Let Down,” a song from their seminal 1997 LP OK Computer, has charted on the Billboard Hot 100 at #91 after recently going viral on TikTok.
I love how 90s Gen Z is. They’re wearing baggy clothes and listening to the stuff us millennials and Gen Xers grew up on.
I think I’m beginning to understand how my dad felt when I started wearing tight jeans and a black t-shirt, and listening to Pink Floyd back in high school.
YouTube’s Secret AI Video Enhancements Ignite Creator Backlash:
Critics argue that such alterations erode trust, especially in an era where authenticity is paramount.
I can see a silver lining in some of this. If AI keeps getting force-integrated into everything we do on these big platforms, it’s gotta cause some kind of exodus. YouTube blew up over the years because it was a place people could upload real DIY videos of their life, or things they’re interested in.
That’s the stuff I want to see. That’s why I used to prefer YouTube over watching something on cable TV. That’s why I love the indie web: it feels like one of the few places you can still get that raw authenticity in a world where everything is becoming more phony.
Perplexity’s Comet browser naively processed pages with evil instructions
Asked to summarize the page, Comet ingested the text on the page, saw the instructions, and then exfiltrated a one-time password granting access to the user’s Perplexity account.
I can think of exactly zero reasons I’d need or want a browser with built-in AI. Bums me out that even Firefox is starting to go down this bumpy road. I’m not a doomer, I just don’t want AI everything all the time.
Google’s fight against ad blockers on YouTube enters another round:
YouTube users from all over the world are starting to see new anti-ad-blocking prompts, when they try to watch YouTube videos with enabled content blocker. This looks like an exact copy of the March 2025 attempt to get ad blocking users to disable their content blockers or subscribe to YouTube Premium.
I’m a YouTube Premium subscriber, and lately I’ve noticed the page load time has slowed down significantly. Our internet plan is 1gb/s and YouTube consistently takes a solid 10+ seconds to load. I wonder if they’re throttling because I use uBlock Origin on Firefox ESR? There’s still plenty of tracking garbage it blocks, even without the ads.
Trump has no business taking a stake in Intel
How are voters raised on the glories of “manufacturing jobs” going to feel when the government has a stake in a CEO who is firing thousands of workers?
That’s what makes me cringe the most—they’ll just rationalize it and redirect to some arbitrary figures Trump makes up. It doesn’t matter what he does. These people are in a cult, and he is their beloved leader.
Real Footage Combined With AI Slop About DC Is Creating a Disinformation Mess on TikTok
In these videos, it’s only totally clear to me that the content is fake because I found the original sources. Lots of this footage is obviously fake if you’re familiar with the actual situation in DC or familiar with the geography and streets in DC. But most people are not.
TikTok is already one of the worst places for AI-generated misinformation. It started getting flooded almost immediately after Google Veo came out. It’s like a trial run for how bad the rest of the web is about to get. 😬
Still, considering that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the anti-vaxxer in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services that oversees the FDA, once ate so much tuna and perch fish that it gave him mercury poisoning, it seems unlikely that the agency is going to put that much effort into warning people not to consume potentially radioactive shrimp.
Just be sure to take your iodine tablets and you can have a little radioactive shrimp, as a treat.
UK commissioner suggests govt stops kids from using VPNs
But the banhammer has also driven a surge in VPN use, giving children and adults alike a way around the new digital fences. That puts VPNs firmly in the commissioner’s sights.
This just keeps getting worse. I feel like that’s the ultimate goal though; to outlaw anything that could possibly give people any kind of privacy online. How do you even enforce this? Make people submit their photo ID to a service that literally exists to preserve anonymity?
Meet the First Nicotine Energy Drink
In what can only be described as a prophetic vision, more than 15 years, Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! featured a skit called Cigarette Juice, about a nicotine energy drink in 2009, at a time where cigarettes were getting their taboo treatment, and as with everything in 2025, parody became reality.
One of my favorite Tim & Eric sketches. Of course absurdist comedy is becoming reality in 2025.
Ohioans will need to submit their photo ID to watch pornography online starting this fall
Moving forward in some ways and going back to the dark ages in others. Good news for VPN companies I guess.
Found this while browsing Ye Olde Blogroll.
The Wild Wild Web: another StumbleUpon clone like Cloudhiker. No account required; just click the button and surf the web like it’s 2009.
No means no, even for Perplexity · Victor Wynne
When a website puts up a robots.txt file, it’s basically putting up a “No Solicitors” sign on their digital front door. It doesn’t matter if you’re selling Girl Scout cookies, collecting for charity, or claim you’re there to help the homeowner. The sign says no, and that should mean no. Period.
I like this analogy. People argue that robots.txt doesn’t necessarily have to be respected. So technically you can ignore it all you want, but it kinda makes you an asshole and a parasite to the open web if you choose to go that route.
Ohio legal weed sales reach $702.5M in first year
Wild that it’s already been one year! I honestly can’t believe I used to meet some sketchy guy in a parking lot, get in his crusty 4runner and hand him cash for some random strain with a made up name.
We are truly living in the space age now 🥲
Trump Is Launching an AI Search Engine Powered by Perplexity
I recently gave Perplexity another try, but after hearing the recent news about how they’ve been circumventing no-crawl directives, and now this? I’m good.
Cannabis Is Being Grown Like It’s Bitcoin: That’s A Problem
According to Mills, the sector now burns through 595 petajoules of energy annually, costing roughly $11 billion. That’s on par with all other U.S. crop production combined, and more than the energy consumed by the entire pharmaceutical or beverage industries, and it doubles the amount of greenhouse emissions produced by cryptocurrency mining.
The weed is smoking us, man!
I feel like I’m always yammering about Metroidvanias. I was just scrolling my RSS feed and came across a link to a new (to me) site: MetroidVania.GG
It’s exactly what it sounds like; a curated list of games from the genre across every current gen platform.
Med Student Horrified to Learn How Much His Zoomer Patient Was Actually Vaping
…a “zoomer patient” of his, who was struggling with “fairly serious alcohol dependency/withdrawal and risk of seizures,” had been going through an entire disposable vape cartridge from the brand, Geek Bar, every two days…“That’s like nicotine equivalent of 30ish packs of cigs EVERY DAY.”
Who needs crack when you can just get a Geek Bar? 😬
Reddit considers iris-scanning Orb developed by a Sam Altman startup
In one scenario, there are far more AI “agents” operating on the internet than humans. Humans will have to have some way to differentiate themselves and quickly present credentials for various tasks.
I don’t think the solution is to let bots run wild and leave the burden on humans to prove they’re human. Why not focus on a way to identify AI agents instead?
I’m sure that’s a complicated thing to figure out, but it’s pretty fucking dystopian to force people to hand over biometric data to prove they aren’t a computer.