Yeah, I’ve done the black light check at hotels before. I was pleasantly surprised.

One tip though: They don’t usually change the top comforter in between guests. They’ll typically change the sheets, but the comforter is only changed on a regular (typically weekly) schedule. But they’ll be happy to change it for you if you ask.

Unless it’s a honeymoon suite. That shit all gets changed in between every guest, for obvious reasons.

Just an FYI, since privacy seems to be a big concern for you… AirBnB used to allow hosts to hide cameras inside of their rented spaces. It was explicitly allowed in their renting rules, under the premise of allowing owners to enforce rules and collect evidence in case of excessive mess/damage/theft. They banned hidden cameras in 2024, but over half of rental owners still admit to using them, and about half of all guests still report finding one inside of their rented spaces if they bother to look.

Libertarians are grumpy indoor cats. They’re violently independent and want to be left alone, but their survival is also entirely dependent on the systems surrounding them, which they completely take for granted.

The grumpy indoor cat doesn’t want your attention, they just want their auto-feeder to activate like it always does. Never mind the fact that you’re the one who keeps the auto-feeder filled. They don’t care about that, they just care that the auto-feeder dispenses food.

I work at a roadhouse and art gallery. It’s a cloud-based app that manages our bookings. My list of complaints includes, but is not limited to:

• The software is just a shell for a VM, running on a server in Canada. This was their solution for “cloud” access… Because why bother coding an actual locally-run program to connect to an external server, when you can just connect the user directly to the server and have it run in a VM? It means everything we do is bogged down by round-trip latency to and from Canada, plus the server’s processing lag because it’s running a VM for every user that is connected. Opening an event’s detail page easily takes 15-20 seconds. So does adding/changing anything in an event. In an average day, I manage anywhere from 10-30 events. We joke that all of our events are planned via carrier pigeon, because of the latency and long load times.
• It cannot send an alert to users when specific things are changed on a booking. Our labor manager wants to be able to get an alert whenever an event planner changes the labor. Makes sense, right? This was marketed as a key feature of the software, and it was why the labor manager originally wanted to use the software. It is entirely broken.
• The software also features a website, for the part timers to be able to access the event data… The website is completely broken.
• The website cannot show event drawings or floor plans, despite the fact that the floor plans are a large part of the part-timers’ jobs. They set the rooms up prior to events, but they can’t see what they’re supposed to set up, because the website doesn’t support that feature. This was marketed as a feature when we purchased the software.
• To work around the lack of room diagrams on the website, I tried to set up an automated report to compile the day’s event setups, and email them to everyone. I set up a filter to ignore events without a diagram, so only events with listed drawings would show up in the report. The filter works when I run it manually. The automated report ignores the filter, and spits out a ton of blank pages for each empty event. This has resulted in a “boy who cried wolf” effect, where the part-timers don’t bother checking the automated report because they assume it will be like 40 empty pages.
• the server has a 20 minute session timer. You’d think this means you can be logged in for 20 minutes at a time… Maybe even that it starts counting after your last activity, so you can remain logged in while active, then get automatically logged out after you walk away… You would be incorrect. The server logs every user out, on a rolling 20 minute timer. You just logged in 60 seconds before the timer tripped? Fuck you, log in again. It isn’t even on a nice round number, (like every hour on the :00, :20, and :40 marks), because the timer is based on whenever the server was last rebooted. Logging in easily takes 45-60 seconds for the VM to load.

Again, this is a non-exhaustive list. These are simply the more mind-numbingly frustrating things I have to deal with on a daily basis.

It’s just Poe’s Law in action. It’s impossible to create satire that is too extreme, because there will always be someone who believes it to be a genuine post. The law was originally coined to refer to fundamentalist Christians, but was later expanded to encompass any kind of satire or sarcasm in online text.

Yeah, the government’s big shift from “spy on our citizens” to “create a private corporation and pay them to spy on our citizens” was largely driven by public scrutiny. Governments realized that people were watching what they did online. And rather than stop encroaching on peoples’ privacy, the various governments simply shifted towards hiring private contractors to do it for them.

A giant “Spy Agency To Definitely Spy On All Of Our Own Citizens: Fifty Bajillion Dollars” line item on the government budget looks bad when lawmakers go to vote on it. But that same fifty bajillion dollars allocated to “Private Government Contractor 19452046” looks a lot better on paper.

Yeah, the Snowden leaks didn’t change a ton for the end users… But it was a big kick in the pants for the site admins, programmers, database admins, etc who build all of the internet’s infrastructure. The mindset shift from “I just need to keep my server secure from external attacks” to “I need to keep my server secure from external attacks and make sure every end user remains secure” was massive. Before the Snowden leak, many site admins basically had the mentality of “eh, nobody will be interested in intercepting my unencrypted traffic. It’s not like this is high security stuff anyways…”

Yes and no. The vast majority are just script kiddies who want to be edgy. The real power (and drawback) of Anonymous lies in the fact that anyone can claim to be a part of it. Anyone can hack something, then attribute it to Anonymous.

The reason Anonymous doesn’t get more huge public hacks is because the people doing the hacking largely aren’t interested in giving attribution to some giant faceless organization that didn’t help with the hack. It’s sort of a catch-22, where anyone can claim to be Anonymous, but the venn diagram of “really good black hat hackers” and “people who are willing to give credit to some faceless organization that hasn’t helped them at all” is two almost entirely separate circles. The best black hat hackers largely aren’t interested in it, because they’re hacking for money or prestige, not politics.

There’s always a trade-off in some way, though. For instance, Toyota is one of the best in regards to keeping physical controls. But they’re basically the worst offender in regards to data privacy. “Insist” is fine on paper, but (unless you’re a millionaire who can afford a custom-built car) you’re inevitably going to have to purchase one on the existing market. And the existing market is all about digital controls and privacy violations.

Saying “just don’t get one that has those things” is a little like saying “just don’t get a house that catches on fire” after a wildfire rips through an area. It’s not exactly up to the customer, and the average person could never hope to afford the custom work that those kinds of requirements would entail.

I used to date a fairly popular camgirl. Like “she made more money in a 4 hour stream than I made in a month” popular. She eventually grew to hate the work, but the money was too good for her to pass up.

The “it’s not dating if you’re paying her” jokes got old pretty quick.

Yeah, the prosthetics have always been campy, but the miniature models are gorgeous even by today’s standards.

Yeah, the behind the scenes stuff for that movie is wild.

They had to keep reshooting the fire swamp scene, because Cary Elwes (Westley/Dread Pirate Roberts) kept panicking every time Robin Wright (Princess Buttercup) got lit on fire.

The R.O.U.S. scene had to be delayed, because they had to go bail the dude in the rat suit out of jail. He had apparently gotten too drunk the night before, and was in the drunk tank on the morning that they were supposed to shoot the R.O.U.S. scene.

No, those are the eight scapegoats who have a full four years before they have to run for re-election, meaning they can wait for this to blow over. The party leadership wanted this, but they didn’t want to be seen voting for it because they know it’s wildly unpopular. There’s a reason those 8 were the ones who voted yes; None of them are up for reelection any time soon. They had a back room meeting and were promised some future concession in return for taking the fall for this. No more, no less.

My guess is that it’s because the FAA started shutting down private flights as more and more ATCs stopped working without pay. As soon as the billionaires were affected by the shutdown, the dems capitulated.

AFAIK, the source maps are only actually requested/downloaded when the user opens the dev tools. There’s no reason to have them automatically download for every visitor. The enable/disable simply toggles whether or not the request is accepted when the user opens the dev tools.

So if my understanding is correct, keeping it enabled wouldn’t really impact server load, unless lots of users are constantly using the dev tools.

This was linked in like the first sentence of the article, and it has an up-to-date list of the current URLs.

Yeah, Radcliffe is in the uniquely special circumstance, where he has more money than God but he also wants to keep making movies. The result is that he only does the movies that he wants to do. He doesn’t attach himself to movies just for clout or money, because he doesn’t need either of those.

Alex Jones was a CIA plant to discredit conspiracy theories that were a liiiiittle too close to reality.

Basically, the government saw some conspiracy theories that were edging too close to what was actually happening. But they couldn’t just outright deny those theories. Because the government spontaneously going “no, we didn’t get microwaves from aliens, and those aliens definitely don’t live among us now as billionaire lizard people” would look suspicious as hell. Any outright denial would only lend credibility to those theories. Like the Streisand Effect, denying them would catapult them to fame. So instead, they created a patsy.

Enter Alex Jones. He’s an idiot, very opinionated, and very vocal about it. But most importantly, he has that spark that makes mediocre white dudes feel smart when they listen to him talk. All the government had to do was give him a platform, and occasionally feed him some juicy conspiracies for his next script. Alex doesn’t even realize he’s being helped along. The government used Alex to give conspiracy theorists a recognizable face and a household name. When Alex Jones hit the air, conspiracy theories were suddenly up front and center in the zeitgeist. Largely due to the government’s help, though he didn’t even know he was the controlled opposition.

And they intentionally got him to parrot those too-close-to-reality conspiracy theories, right alongside the super crazy ones. By making Alex Jones a household name, they were able to collectively discredit all conspiracy theorists. And all they had to do was set him up to skyrocket to fame, and then fail very publicly.

Sandy Hook happened, and that was what the CIA had been waiting for. I don’t think they caused the shooting, but they certainly capitalized on it by getting Jones to fall down the conspiracy rabbit hole with it. Once he had time to work through all of the theories they wanted to discredit, they realized he was getting out of control, and they needed to burn him. And so they did, by leaving him completely disgraced. And the best part (from the government’s perspective) is that burning him only helped further discredit those real conspiracy theories.

This conspiracy theory is called Last Thursdayism. Basically, the conspiracy is that the entire universe was created last Thursday. But we were all created with “memories” of time before last Thursday, so we all collectively believe the universe is much older. Basically, all of the evidence we have of an old universe was also created last Thursday.

This isn’t a conspiracy at all. Plastic recycling was originally driven by plastic producers, to shift the blame for pollution away from themselves. Basically, it was a way for the producers to go “it’s not our fault the world is full of plastic. It’s the consumer’s fault for failing to recycle all of it!” They saw the inevitable plastic mountain on the horizon, and took steps to ensure they weren’t going to be blamed for it.