xkcd still has the best approach to this; four random common words

This is great + well-deserved, plus it has the side benefit of making some of the world’s worst people really, really mad.

Vonnegut wasn’t a Too Good For This recluse like Pynchon or Salinger or whoever, and the content of his books made him fairly well insulated against charges of being a sellout; they probably offered him a bunch of money and he shrugged and said sure.

Or - as many of us hope for - we manage to make the economics of the fediverse work (don’t forget to support your instances, people) and the most valuable users move to blissful ad-free places like Lemmy and Mastodon.

Indeed, throw in open-source AI (thanks, weirdly, to Zuckerberg) and Wikipedia and you can start to see the contours of a post-advertising internet.

I love how everybody is so busy about mining your behavior for ad tracking data and then like 2/3 of the ads I actually see are utterly irrelevant gut doctor / toenail fungus / 17 Most Embarrassing Topless Celebrity Moments crap.

(I think the reality is that they’re mining that data to identify a small number of people susceptible to high-value scams - like getting addicted to an F2P mobile game and spending $1000s on it - and the rest of us just get generic infill)

locals may have to accept that same-day delivery is a thing of the past

In a pedestrian-friendly city like Amsterdam, couldn’t they mostly replace this with a pickup depot / Amazon locker type setup? (maybe residents with wheelchair / limited-mobility / etc permits can still get front-door package delivery, but it’s not something most people need)

Mostly in the northwest but yeah - 95 sightings this year, you can even track them on a map on the DEEP website.

They mentioning Maine up in here

A Møøse once bit my sister…

Can I get a ‘fuck spez’

This seems kind of… cruel, honestly. I mean the kid is 4; I could imagine a 9 or 10 year old being mature enough to view this as an honor / thrill of a lifetime, but 4 is reallllly pushing it.

Can’t wait until my King Arthur AI-Generated Flour turns out to be a 5 pound bag of uncut cocaine.

This is wonderful. Churches are one place where the 1st Amendment is so mighty that even the current Supreme Court would be reluctant to weaken it for the sake of politics; they can teach whatever they like and Ron DeSantis can’t do a damn thing about it, and I hope they take full advantage of that.

(Perhaps some progressive white churches might join them in teaching about Black history and gender issues and other stuff students are no longer allowed to learn about in school)

One thing that would go a long way in helping with that would be if we improved the quality of urban schools / parks to the point where fewer people felt like they had to move to the suburbs to start families.

The Stardewification of everything continues - can’t wait until Half-Life 3 finally comes out and it turns out that Black Mesa has purchased a dilapidated farm in the countryside that they’ve taken Gordon Freeman out of stasis to restore for them.

Shoot your ghost shot

“All right, you look like a future pedophile in this picture, number 1. Number 2, it doesn’t even have a first name, it just says AppLovin!”.

Aren’t those supposed to be surprisingly tasty + a potential new industry if we can get restaurants to start serving them?

Yeah, Bribercutter has really gone downhill since the NYT acquisition

That moment in Hades when after innumerable long-ass treks through the underworld you think you’ve finally beaten Hades and then it turns out now you have to beat super-Hades…