AmbitiousProcess (they/them)

For anyone wondering, miso powder + alcohol = paper cards that can induce abortions without looking like pills. Can be hidden inside a book, as a postcard, etc, looks identical to regular paper otherwise, then mailed without issue.

https://fourthievesvinegar.org/abortion-care/

This company is known for this. To clarify, I mean known for making deliberately inflammatory ads, then showing them as obtrusively or carelessly as possible, because it gets people to post about it.

The only reason their company got popular in the first place was when they put these ads everywhere to piss people off and generate engagement.

https://startupsmagazine.co.uk/article-clickbait-stop-hiring-humans-marketing-campaign-made-artisan-go-viral

“The goal of the campaign was always to rage bait”

This guerrilla marketing approach, combined with traditional media coverage and tactics, led to significant success. Artisan saw a remarkable +197% growth in brand search traffic, quickly establishing itself as the most well-known AI employee creator.

Now quiz yourself!

https://e-mail.wtf/

This is garbage.

This is still less than some areas’ true living wage in this country. Look up essentially any city here, and you’ll find its living wage is often much higher than both the current minimum wage, the most frequently proposed $15 increase, and this new $25 increase.

Minimum wages should be living wages, not the bare minimum to not starve unless you even temporarily lose your job and are now deemed ineligible to live.

https://livingwage.mit.edu/

It appeals to a far left constituency

74% of Democrats (center-right), and 55% of voters overall (left, center, and right combined) support a minimum wage increase to $25/hour. This is not a fringe idea.

https://www.onefairwage.org/research-reports/poll-testing-%2425-minimum-wage-in-competitive-congressional-districts

while alienating the moderate left people who are just trying to make their small businesses work.

When minimum wages rise, small businesses find it easier and cheaper to hire new employees, face less turnover, and are able to charge a high enough price to cover the newly increased cost without inflating prices faster than the minimum wage.

Raising the minimum wage for everyone benefits individuals, small businesses, and the economy at large. It even reduces the high school dropout rate!

https://news.berkeley.edu/2023/03/14/even-in-small-businesses-minimum-wage-hikes-dont-cause-job-losses-study-finds/

This is not how you win elections.

Pushing a broadly popular issue relating to affordability at a time when economic uncertainty is around the highest it’s ever been is an incredibly good strategy to win elections.

It also benefits movements through the radical flank effect. (e.g. when white people saw the Black Panther Party carrying guns to protect their community, MLK Jr’s fairly peaceful sit-ins seemed not that bad in comparison, and when having to make a choice on whether or not to give black people rights, it was easier to justify doing so if the perceived alternative was “black people in the streets with guns”)

In this case, the options then become “buy products that always have random sticky notes and are telling me I’m a bad person” vs “grab the product that doesn’t have the sticky notes”.

If it becomes increasingly annoying to buy products which support Israel because there’s constantly little sticky notes/stickers, people pushing things further back on shelves or flipping products around, etc, then it becomes a lot easier to justify just… not bothering buying the products that are being boycotted. (and it also saves people the hassle of looking up which products are being boycotted, which just makes the lives of anti-Zionists easier)

without knowing there’s a deeper meaning to it.

Honestly I dunno if that’s necessarily the “actual” meaning behind it. (not that it can’t be the way someone technically means it, though)

You can genuinely just be saying “you’re lucky to be together with someone you love”, without also saying “I find that person you’re with attractive and want to have sex with them”

what else am i supposed to say when a friend finally gets a GF?

“Congrats, happy for you!” “You two look cute together!” “I’m glad you two hit it off!”

Don’t sweat it. Most people are fine with just a simple congratulatory statement. Doesn’t have to have any deep meaning or anything, but hey, “you’re a lucky man” doesn’t have to have a deeper meaning either.

You won’t get anywhere if you end up having to use their devices.

If you’re able to bring and use your own, just use it how you normally would. Maybe throw on a VPN while you’re at it though, (assuming you have to use their Wi-Fi network) since a lot of these institutions use filters on the router level, but if all they see is a stream of arbitrary traffic from your device to a VPN company’s server, they won’t get much info or blocking ability.

It doesn’t really matter how much they’re worth, it’s considered an exchange of SNAP benefits for goods or cash not covered by the program. In my area they’re a few bucks, which isn’t nothing, but even if they were worth less, the store could permanently lose its ability to take SNAP payments if they were found selling the returnable bottles for SNAP credit.

For returnable ones?

Legally speaking, that store could get in big trouble. That’s why my local store doesn’t do it. That’d be equivalent to them letting you exchange your SNAP benefits for cash, since the bottle could be redeemed for money/credit.

Also causes a lot of confusion for more niche products. For example, my local store has glass bottles of milk where you can return the bottles to get some money back, but EBT doesn’t cover the cost of the bottle, even though the milk itself is cheaper than the other milk options when you factor in the value from returning the bottle.

Everyone on EBT either needs extra cash to pay the bottle deposit, or they spend more money on milk.

Better portrayal of Mozilla’s response from this ars technica article:

The vulnerabilities identified by Mythos could have also been discovered either by automated “fuzzing” techniques or by having an “elite security researcher” reason their way through the browser’s complex source code, Holley writes. But using Mythos eliminated the need to “concentrate many months of costly human effort to find a single bug” in many cases, Holley added.

The key part there is fuzzing. These tools have existed for a while. (and many are free!!!) Mythos just does what most AI tools do: Take something that requires more understanding or effort, and condense it into a prompt. Instead of starting a fuzzing tool, configuring its scope and some parameters, then letting it go hog wild for a bit, you just tell the AI model with a prompt to perform similar functions. (while costing more money and taking more time due to inevitable overhead from running a whole LLM)

If anything, this points more towards Mozilla not using existing fuzzing tools to find flaws in their code because they were too lazy, not that Mythos is magic and superior to all else.

Most can, but they still rely on your phone getting an internet connection later, on your phone being trusted to send data over itself, and of course still require your phone to actually be charged. (Can change if it’s a regular card depending on the issuer though)

Also, if you’re just generally curious about stuff related to offline payments, there’s actually a major security hole that Visa refuses to fix, which allows a device to pretend to be an offline-only card reader, then charge any value to someone’s card, and get away with it, even if their device is locked.

Not really a point in favor of my original argument though, since CBDC infrastructure would require replacing or updating all the readers anyways, and implementing the standards to prevent such an attack, like MasterCard has used for a while now.

In 2026, when is your phone running out of battery

Not too regularly to me, but it happens frequently to most of my friends, and some street performers I know who don’t always have good access to a power outlet, or the money for a portable charger.

…or losing wifi?

I and many other people regularly experience complete cell dropouts when at my local grocery store. No service. (Works fine outside and slightly down the block) We are in a city, not the middle of nowhere either.

There have also been internet dropouts for my local store’s machines, meaning people paying with cash could go instantly, whereas people who only had cards or phone payments had to wait in a massive line since every transaction took 2 minutes to go through.

You can also just get a crypto card if your worried about your phone being unreliable.

Sure, but at that point I could just get literally any card. I was only commenting on CBDCs, though I suppose the same critiques could apply to direct crypto transfers.

At the end of the day, CBDCs tend to rely on phones to work, and thus can’t work if your phone doesn’t, unlike cards, and especially unlike cash. (given cash relies on nothing but you and the person you’re transacting with believing the cash is real, vs phone payments or even just cards still requiring an internet connection at some point, and power to the reader, plus permission from an external gatekeeper as the cherry on top)

Not even just permission, especially given most of these systems are made to operate on your phone rather than through a physical card.

Oops, your phone died? Sorry, no groceries for you! Did your internet connection stop working on your phone? Sooooooooooorry, you’re not gonna be able to pay your bus fare.