What’s the easiest way to switch instances? I didn’t know any of this. I just wanted to get away from reddit and still engage with communities focused on my hobbies… 😔

At best, that’s reductive and at worst it’s completely wrong. I get that this was probably a joke answer, but I feel like this misconception is unfortunate since it misrepresents ancient Egyptian culture and also undermines the impact of the unique evil of chattel slavery that was practiced in the US.

It’s an interesting concept, but aside from the scalability issues mentioned, I don’t think demographics are necessarily an indicator of a judge’s biases cough Clarence Thomas cough.

Would they though? In the war of “me vs annoying insects sneaking into my house”, the indoor spiders I leave undisturbed seem pretty squarely on my side…

Wow, I came to the comments section to drop the word “lecherous” only to find you casually fitting it into a reply…

“subtle”

It’s an interesting video in the sense that it seems like an honest attempt at just understanding the problem without really proposing a solution or call to action, which I appreciate. It briefly touches on two points that I thought were interesting:

• Algorithms help us solve a “short term” problem that is really a symptom of a larger problem. And unfortunately, the best “short term” solution gets us farther away from addressing the larger issue. Specifically, engagement algorithms help us “solve” the problems of being bored and wanting connection. But while it helps us pass time (and feel some level of connection to the creators of whatever content we consume), in the end we feel less fulfilled and more lonely. And the quick satisfaction of the algorithm ends up making it even harder to put the work in to accomplishing things that are actually meaningful and going out into the real world to form real connections.

• Engagement algorithms go beyond echo chambers into actually changing people. The issue of engagement algorithms only exposing you to amplified versions of things you already believe is something I remember reading about years ago. But this video points out that you can actually end up adopting entirely new interests and ideologies just because people who are similar to you engage with those things. So in a way, these algorithms can end up creating entirely new “communities” of people who are identified, not by what they really care about or believe, but by what common topics are most engaging to the community. Which is crazy because that effectively amounts to a group of addicts bonding over the substance that they are addicted to, but thinking of it as an identity rather than a problem.

A surprisingly thought-provoking video from one of my favorite motorcycle channels.

If you’re building a website, you’ll probably want to stick to Javascript over Rust.

This MDN article does a pretty good job at introducing the concept of making network requests in Javascript: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn_web_development/Core/Scripting/Network_requests. It focuses on the “fetch” API as the tool for making requests, which is the standard way to make network requests in Javascript. There are other tools like Axios that may make things easier, but “fetch” should be fine for your use case.

Another concept that will be relevant here is asynchronous programming: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn_web_development/Extensions/Async_JS/Introducing. Basically, there will be some delay between when you make the request and when you get a response. So you’ll need to write your logic in a way that does the “waiting” part correctly.

One important detail is that most APIs use some form of authentication. So when you’re “grabbing the data” from an external site, the site knows who you are and that you are allowed to access that data. Getting authentication right might be a little tricky, but here is an entry point: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Guides/Authentication. Basically, you’ll need to figure out what authentication strategy your headless CMS is using, and then make sure to safely pass those credentials when making your network requests. If the API(s) you are using are public, you won’t need to worry about this.

If your goal is primarily to get data from an external source, this should be a good starting point. You don’t necessarily need to get too deep into the backend or even the technical details of things like HTTP or REST. However, if you’re interesting in getting a deeper understanding of Web APIs, the other comment talking about building a skeleton API would be a good exercise.

I 100% agree with the idea that rap is certainly not the only genre to glorify violence, drugs, etc. But the specific song choice is not really a great example in my opinion considering the last verse is

C’mon you gotta listen unto me

lay off that whiskey, and let that cocaine be.

This song always struck me as a cautionary tale. Nothing about the song really seems to glorify the behavior.

For this specific HN post, speedrunning is a bit of a misnomer. He used similar tooling to effectively add support for a physical keyboard and additionally a bunch of keyboard shortcuts that are capable of inputting custom text, songs, and fabric patterns.

There’s a YouTube video where the author showcases this. It’s pretty short and a really interesting watch: https://youtu.be/Yw8Alf_lolA

I do have enough time, but I don’t have the self control. If I could hold myself to an hour a day, that would be fantastic, but I inevitably get myself too addicted and end up spending closer to 4 hours a day. At that point, all my other chores aren’t getting done. As a result, I haven’t played video games in several years.

I don’t know if there’s video footage of Padilla specifically preceding this moment of the press conference, but I think this clip captures most of what happened. Here’s a description from AP News:

Padilla interrupted the news conference after Noem delivered a particularly pointed line, saying federal authorities were not going away but planned to stay and increase operations to “liberate” the city from its “socialist” leadership.

- https://apnews.com/article/alex-padilla-noem-immigration-protest-california-f67d220a0254473c53c16aa96f554239

In terms of why he was removed, the article also says this:

In a statement, DHS said that Padilla “chose disrespectful political theater” and that Secret Service “thought he was an attacker.” The statement claimed erroneously that Padilla did not identify himself — he did, as he was being pushed from the room.

Which is obviously a retroactive justification. From what I can tell they did it because it was “disrespectful” to Noem (which is not illegal) and they knew they could get away with it.

EDIT: Found some slightly longer footage here which just shows him pressing towards the front of the group before getting pushed back.

Math doesn’t change, we just learn more about it.

Isn’t that true of almost all the sciences?

Yeah, if the “surgery” was having your organs harvested. And you’re awake enough to feel the pain and observe the horror of what’s happening, but without enough strength to stop it.

Why can’t the world have more of this and less of… everything else that’s going on right now? 😕

I don’t really have a point, it’s just sad that humans have the capacity to do such cool, fun, creative things, and instead we’re burning the world down so computers can churn out garbage and blowing each other up because we’re different from each other.

The death of social media is kind of fueling the death of human to human communication.

I understand where you are coming from, but I feel the exact opposite. In my opinion, the rise of social media started the decline of real human connection.

Connection over social media is not a substitute for connection with humans in real life, but a lot of times it feels like it can be. I recently made a very deliberate effort to drastically cut back on my social media usage and instead force myself to go out and build community by participating in local groups and events. I’ve had so many good experiences and made several friends. That feels so much more valuable to me than the hours a day I used to spend doom scrolling.

It’s giving Captain Holt in a red hat energy: https://youtu.be/4heE4Nu_Yik

https://youtu.be/1BCXJ3yC65o

But with the rise of AI, the dynamic is changing: We are observing a significant increase in request volume, with most of this traffic being driven by scraping bots collecting training data for large language models (LLMs) and other use cases. Automated requests for our content have grown exponentially, alongside the broader technology economy, via mechanisms including scraping, APIs, and bulk downloads. This expansion happened largely without sufficient attribution, which is key to drive new users to participate in the movement, and is causing a significant load on the underlying infrastructure that keeps our sites available for everyone.

- https://diff.wikimedia.org/2025/04/01/how-crawlers-impact-the-operations-of-the-wikimedia-projects/

This is part of the larger problem that AI tools are trained on (and profit off of) content that is produced and hosted by others who are now seeing their traffic change from humans to bots. For content sources that pay for hosting with ads, this means a loss in revenue to pay for hosting. For content sources like Wikipedia, they are seeing their hosting costs increase significantly due to the increase in bot traffic. Even if you want every website that depends on ad revenue to fail (which I don’t entirety agree with), AI is still damaging the open web in other ways. Websites like Wikipedia for example may soon be forced to lock content behind logins or leverage aggressive captchas just to fight the bot traffic, which makes things worse for those of us that still prefer to use actual websites over AI summaries.