Frezik

I don’t think OnlyFans had to do much of anything in the end. There was just enough media stink about it to make it go away.

Credit card companies don’t have to make a consistently applied set of rules the way a government of laws does. They can make it all up for each individual site if they wish. Capitalism can create a censorship regime that’s stronger than nominally democratic governments are willing to do.

Capitalism is creating a level of censorship that exceeded what the US government was ever able to do after the Warren court. Parts of this have been there for a long time. You can drop f-bombs on cable TV all you like; the FCC can’t do anything about it since it’s not over public airwaves. They generally don’t do that, because advertisers don’t like it. Capitalism set the rule, not the government.

YouTube has put this idea into overdrive. You can’t make a straightforward, monetized video about the Holocaust anymore, because the language you would have to use would violate YouTube’s written and unwritten rules. Meanwhile, actual fucking Nazis have had little issue using YouTube to spread their bullshit.

Credit card companies have had issues with porn sites in terms of fraud reporting. Not necessarily because of actual fraud–if the site you use is under CCbill, it’s fine–but because some guy’s spouse sees the card transactions, asks what this particular line is for, and he lies and says it’s probably fraud and he’ll call it in. Get more than a few of those, and the processor will always be flagged for review.

They do outright stop some of the more fringe porn. Bree Mills (of Adulttime) has said that they get limited by the credit card industry far more than the government. All the faux-incest videos go out of their way to mention in dialog that everyone is a step family and over 18. You won’t find scat on Kink.com, again because their payment processor won’t allow it.

That’s been the situation for a few decades, but it has gone beyond that in the last few years. They tried it on OnlyFans, and the company maneuvered things to show why that’s an incredibly bad idea, and then the card companies backed down. But they’re trying again elsewhere, and they’re starting to be successful. I severely doubt they had any significant fraud issues on Steam or itch.io, NSFW items or otherwise.

Ultimately, this stuff is a tiny slice of their revenue. If they want to shut it all down on a moral crusade, they will barely notice the hit to their numbers.

On a side note, I’d like the advocate that you should pay for porn if it’s within your means. You’ll often find better quality stuff at sites that properly run their sets with consent. If you like queer porn or unconventional body types, there are a lot of sites for that which just don’t show up on PornHub.

When you’ve been shown facts that contradict your argument, concede politely. People will respect you for it. In fact they’ll probably respect you more than if you go down endless chains of trying to save face.

Remember, this should go both ways. There will be times when people concede to you, and other times when you need to concede.

I don’t think it needs to take very many people doing this to create a snowball effect where it becomes the common way to debate.

What 2003 forum thread did this comment crawl out of?

At least with Rust, there is a specific, defensible goal for why it does that.

Java is just over designed. All of java.io reads like somebody’s Object Orientated Programming 101 final project, and they’d get a B- for it. Lots of things where you can see how they’re abstracting things, but there’s no thought at all in bringing it together in a tidy way.

These days, search engine optimization tends to force new single letter languages into obscurity. Even Go would have issues there if Google hadn’t been behind it.

K&R started with BCPL as their base of inspiration. They then made B, and then C. The followup should be called P.

There is way, way more to it than that.

Attack of the PETSCII Robots. Been ported to a ridiculous number of retro computers.

The Star Wars prequels are still bad movies. The Clone Wars may be good, but it can’t fix the problems with those movies.

Also, if those movies can be widely considered rehabilitated when the kids who watched them grow up, then so can the sequels.

The way starfighter combat works is definitely WW2. There’s some hand wavy explanations in-universe for why it works that way, but it clearly comes from WW2 fighter and bomber turret footage.

Politically, the empire is pretty clearly Nazi-coded, but I don’t think Lucas ever had more than a surface level understanding of fascism.

There are other examples of possibilities than the USSR.

Western Europe gave up most of their colonial possessions after WW2. They ended up fine. Arguably better off, even.

Ancient Rome went through many periods of crisis and getting their shit back in order. The Eastern half of the Empire went on for about another 1000 years after the split–it lasted almost long enough to see Columbus get completely lost and stumble on some land. At one point, it held almost the whole territory of the original Roman empire, albeit briefly.

There are a million ways this can go. Liberal America could reassert itself more or less as it was. It could break into coalitions of loosely affiliated states kinda like Prussia. It could undergo great reforms and fix a lot of problems with its structure of government. I couldn’t even guess which is more likely right now.

Valens said on her stream that she was paid $30 an article; a contributor to the previous iteration of Waypoint, Nick Capozzoli, said rates used to be at least $300.

Holy shit.

I’ve dabbled a bit in writing tech articles. I was published in a print magazine >20 years ago, and I think I got around $300 for it. More recently, a few articles I did for a niche tech website went for $100 each.

$30/article? For a site that has Vice behind it? Yeah, pretty easy to walk away from that money.

I’d never trust a USB stick with my only copy of anything I care about. They get dropped, stepped on, accidentally dropped into vats of hydrofluoric acid, etc. Doesn’t matter how long it can theoretically last if its USB jack gets bent and becomes detached from the PCB.

I was thinking more in the sense of an exercisism.

No JavaScript, just HTML and CSS. Basically no images. The heaviest page dumps 50 rows of logs in a table.

It’s admittedly a fundamentally simple frontend, but we all know of frontends with a simple job and a not so simple frontend.

AJAX everything is icky. It’s part of what’s made browser tabs take more RAM than a typical desktop had in 1998.

I exercised all client side JavaScript from an app I maintain. It’s fast, clean, and the back button always works. I just checked on one of the more complicated pages, and according to Firefox’s memory profile, it takes about 2.6MB of RAM.

Where PHP really goes wrong is mixing HTML and code by default.

I have met people who claim to have seen ghosts. I still need more proof of ghosts than “we all saw something we couldn’t explain”.

You’d be speeding, too, if you had to get home to make the ziti.

It’s a disagree button. That’s how it’s used in practice, and we’re better off just accepting that.