In other words, vibe coders are today's technologically accelerated script kiddie.

That's arguably worse as the produced scripts may largely work and come with even less demand for understanding than a script kid's cobbling together of code may have demanded.

I'm of multiple minds on it, but the short of it is, I don't feel out of the pop culture loop, I know I'm out of it being around here.

On one hand I don't mind that, as I'm frustrated by pop culture essentially being mass market culture. It's not typically something that arises from people interacting and creating together from shared passions, it's produced and pushed by big businesses. Nothing novel about this observation or frustration, but it's a vibe I resonate with.

On the other I know if ever you want people to shift into a popular culture produced in the alternative manner mentioned, you gotta accept the transitional situation of entertaining the mass market culture alongside what you're trying to cultivate. It's too jarring for many to switch over entirely, and frankly there's not enough contemporary non-commercial culture to keep people's interest to justify any attempts at a complete switch.

So in a way, yeah, but also I'm more bummed that it's so difficult to create an alternative non-commercial pop culture.

we can go further, somethingsomething StreetPass

Misskey is fascinating and in my opinion more compelling than Mastodon. It's also strange to see them write "somehow" as I'd think with their instance and username they would be aware that Misskey is developed in Japan, by a Japanese developer.

From login/paywalled Financial Times article that this is citing:

Data from Similarweb shows active daily users in the UK have dropped from 8mn a year ago to only around 5.6mn now, with more than a third of that fall coming since the summer riots.

Pulling the background link here to save people some clicks: https://buttondown.email/ninelives/archive/the-coming-enshittification-of-public-libraries/

With a few quotes to highlight the frustrating situation:

That’s because OverDrive, a private corporation, has a monopoly on managing the availability and distribution of ebooks and audiobooks for government-funded public libraries in North America. (I looked for exact current numbers, but turns out that would require the time and resources of a professional journalist.^1^ Best I could do: as of December 2019, OverDrive controlled digital lending for “more than 95% of public libraries in the US and Canada”.^2^)

Emphasis added.

Right away I saw that in June 2020, OverDrive was sold to global investment firm KKR. [...] The private equity firm of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, I quickly learned, was either the inventor of, or an early pioneer in, basically all the Shitty Business Practices: leveraged buyouts, corporate raiding, vulture capitalism. They’ve been at it since the 1970s and they’re still going strong. [...] Even in the world of investment capital, where evil is arguably banal, KKR is notoriously vile. They are the World Champions of Grabbing All The Money And Leaving Everyone Else In The Shit.

[...]

And if OverDrive goes belly-up at some point in the future, crushed by KKR’s leveraged debt, it’s going to take down access to the digital catalogs of nearly every public library in North America.

Emphasis added.

This service going down and me recently deciding to try to check in on whether some people I used to follow on Twitter had migrated elsewhere made me realize how much Twitter's basically isolated itself from the open web.

A part of me hopes this serves as a wake-up call for those that were still hovering between using Twitter and weaning off it using services like this, to reach out to those they follow and let them know, "Hey, if you think you're still posting publicly...You're not, only other people here can see this." For many people that may not matter, but for creators/influencers? I dunno, maybe network effect is enough that they feel the large audience there is plenty, but I'd think they might want as broad of a reach as possible, and a popular but limited view platform isn't necessarily that.

Much more importantly though are any government/critical services. They really need to be brought up to date, if they haven't been already, that the platform is no longer as publicly accessible as it may have once been. Also the same applies not just for Twitter but Facebook and the like as well, but that's another topic.

It's genuinely such a relief to get your ear cleaned out when it gets all plugged up, undoubtedly more so when it's hurting. I once had something similar happen somehow, just without as much of the pain. It started getting harder to hear out of one of my ears, and although I tried to rinse it out, it didn't seem to help and I didn't want to fucking pierce my ear drum trying something stupid. I held off but it got to the point that not only was I having trouble hearing out of the ear, my balance was being impacted.

I had started to notice I felt kinda wobbly, and so I was finally like fuck it, doctor time. Go to doctor, nice lady does like the doc in the OP poking a camera in, then has some other guy come in and he's like, "You'll wanna tilt your head to the side for this," as he holds a small bucket to the side, below my head. Gets basically a spraybottle with some special ear-nozzle or whatever, squirts a warm stream of some solution (think it was carbamide peroxide) into my ear and dislodges this big ol' glob of earwax that had inexplicably managed to build up in my ear despite me not wearing earbuds/headphones often.

I glanced at that poor little bucket now full of this nasty ass archipelago of earwax and felt fuckin' great. Cost me a bit, but the doc saved me for the future telling me about some off the shelf stuff to help avoid a return visit.

If you've never had this done before but have been congested, and briefly cleared your nostrils with a good blowing of your nose or something, it's like that but so much better because your ears getting plugged up sucks so much more.

This headline and article are begging to be in c/NotTheOnion, yeah.

Screams:
My Christian nationalist flag has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my flag.

Thanks for added background! I haven't been monitoring this area very closely so wasn't aware, but I'd have thought a publication that has been would then be more skeptical and at least mention some of this, particularly highlighting disputes over the efficacy of the Glaze software. Not to mention the others they talked to for the article.

Figures that in a space rife with grifters you'd have ones for each side.

The trails or the things leaving the trails? In either case I think they may be aircraft contrails, but I'm not sure going off the image alone.

And in this case, it's about controlling everyone else's children, despite what they claim, by trying to force schools' curriculums to only cover/include what they accept.