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.

uBlock Origin Lite is officially on the App Store!

I’ve been using uBlock Origin and Firefox everywhere else as long as I can remember. When I switched to iPhone, I had to settle for a paid subscription to Adblock Pro — which works great. But this feels more like home.

BREAKING NEWS when you live in Ohio.