TechyDad

Yup. The guy was caught by the Secret Service as he was "trying to find an opening in the security." About the only saving grace in all this is that the people trying to do this are idiots. Like that guy who came up with a brilliant plan to get past the bullet proof glass at an FBI building by using a nail gun.

Unfortunately, throw enough idiots into the mix and some of them will succeed just by dumb luck. And the right has plenty of idiots to throw.

Same thing happens in the Jewish community. My father is a Republican and believes that Republicans support Jews because "they support Israel." He doesn't see that the only reasons that Republicans support Israel are because:

1. The evangelicals want Israel to exist and be run by Jews so it can be attacked and Jesus can return.

And

2. So the right has a place to say Jews really belong (not in America).

They'll "support Israel" all day and night while actively pushing for a Christian Theocracy in America where Jews are (at best) second class citizens.

It was the worst possible response. Had they stuck to their guns, the right would have remained angry, but the left would have been fine. By ditching Mulvaney over the "outrage," the left became upset and the right wasn't mollified.

Back in 2016, I got to taste a new flavor from Ben & Jerry's called "Feel the Bern" which showed their support for Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary. Anyone who gets surprised that Ben & Jerry's is political hasn't been paying attention.

Then again, some people became shocked that Rage Against The Machine was political leading to a commenter asking "what machine did you think they were raging against?"

I was the victim of a cyberstalker about a decade ago. This person was convinced that I was really someone else that she had a beef with. Her reasoning? We both like taking photos. (Apparently, I'm the only one posting photos online. All those pictures you see online? That's all me. No wonder I have no free time!)

I couldn't argue with her to let her know that she was mistaken because she had it on "very good authority" that I was lying about who I was. Namely, "God told her." And I'm not exaggerating here. She literally thought that God talked to her and told her stuff like who was committing crimes.

Oh and I was guilty of those crimes according to "God." I won't name those crimes because they're heinous, but suffice it to say she thought I was doing unspeakable things to kids. She was threatening to call my employer, the police, and everyone who knew me to tell them about what I was doing.

Luckily for me, all she had to go on was "TechyDad." I blogged at the time, but didn't post my exact whereabouts or my real name. The guy that she thought I was wasn't as lucky. She contacted his employer (a school in New Zealand) and everyone with the same last name as him that was on Facebook and near him. All to tell them what he did to kids. (Again, her source was "God." He didn't really do anything and he had to have quite a few awkward conversations to clear things up.)

I finally got rid of the stalker by grabbing her IP address (from one of her comments) and modifying my htaccess file to report 404 Page Not Found for only that IP. She crowed on Twitter about how she singlehandedly took me down and then moved on. (I and her other targets would report her to Twitter, but she'd constantly have dozens of other handles ready and waiting and would switch to them the second her main one was banned.)

To my knowledge, she's still out there stalking people.

Now, how would this have been different had she had my real name? Well, with a little work she would have been able to look up my location. (My name's pretty common, but she'd find me eventually.) Then, she'd locate my employer, my address, and other information. She could send me packages or mail harassing me. She could contact my local police to swat me or just to report my "crimes." She could contact my employer to report me and try to get me fired.

Now, I eventually did tie my real name to "TechyDad." I wrote a book and didn't want to publish under "TechyDad" so I used my two name. That being said, it was my choice. I definitely wouldn't want it to be required for me to use my real name everywhere.

I bought one with Bluetooth headphones built in. I have tinnitus and going to sleep was torture. I'd lay in the quiet room and be unable to sleep thanks to the loud ringing in my right ear. During the day, my hearing aid helps, but I take it out at night. With the Bluetooth sleep mask, I can put on white noise, drown out the ringing, and fall asleep.

As a bonus, I made a specific white noise mix for sleep and I seem to have trained my brain to have a Pavlov-type response. When that white noise goes on, my brain says "time to go to sleep" and I'm able to quickly fall asleep instead of having my brain run a mile a minute in the dark. (At least, on most nights. The Pavlov response isn't strong enough to overcome me being stressed about something if I go to bed.)

The sleep mask with Bluetooth cost me about $30 and it was worth every penny!

I heard about Boost coming to Lemmy also. I don't have any information about development progress, but I'll definitely be trying it out once it launches.

Boost is still working for Reddit because Reddit realized that turning off their API access was harder than they thought. It will take them a few weeks to do this. Once they do, Boost for Reddit will be dead.

I'm still using it to look into a few subreddits every so often. (Ones that I haven't found Lemmy replacements for.) When it dies, my time spent on Reddit - already very reduced from the pre-API crisis levels - will drop even more.

I like Liftoff and Jerboa. I flip between them depending on my mood.

I'm proud of my son. He decided to read a book based on "it was banned in some school districts" (not ours). He then scoffed at the reason for the ban.

I can't recall the book title at the moment, but the reason was that two characters have sex and the incident takes up one page. From what my son described, it wasn't overly graphic. This wasn't an erotica sex scene tossed into the book. It was just the normal kind of story description of events. Books like the Bible have much more graphic content.

The only reason that he seemed like a "Genius CEO" with SpaceX and Tesla was because those companies had layers of management dedicated to protecting the company from Musk.

If Musk marched into Tesla and decided that all Tesla cars should have eyeball shaped headlights, managers would tell him what a genius idea that was and that they'd get right on it. Then, they'd distract him with something else while the idea went in the trash can.

Twitter has no such management layer so every Elon Epiphany becomes Twitter policy no matter how bad or destructive it is. SpaceX and Tesla were successes despite Musk and Musk gained his "genius" reputation because those companies were able to filter out his idiocy.

I was assuming that the reason was that Twitter fired all their system administrators so the services are basically held together with bubble gum and string. If too many people use the services, it'll crash so they need to limit usage.

They can't admit that the rate limits are due to unmaintained servers, though, so they trotted out the "people are scraping Twitter" excuse.

Come to think of it, didn't Reddit use something like that as an excuse for the huge API pricing? Are they coordinating on how to ruin their services? If so, they're doing a great job!

Including sites that are hosted outside of the US. Does Virginia think that a site hosted in the Germany and run by people in the Netherlands will care that Virginia says they need to verify the age of their visitors? (I picked those countries at random. If I somehow picked countries that wouldn't work due to local laws, just substitute different countries.)