#api counter

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Are the means of computation even seizable?

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in PITTSBURGH in TOMORROW (May 15) at WHITE WHALE BOOKS, and in PDX on Jun 20 at BARNES AND NOBLE with BUNNIE HUANG. More tour dates (London, Manchester) here.

Something's very different in tech. Once upon a time, every bad choice by tech companies – taking away features, locking out mods or plugins, nerfing the API – was countered, nearly instantaneously, by someone writing a program that overrode that choice.

Bad clients would be muscled aside by third-party clients. Locked bootloaders would be hacked and replaced. Code that confirmed you were using OEM parts, consumables or adapters would be found and nuked from orbit. Weak APIs would be replaced with muscular, unofficial APIs built out of unstoppable scrapers running on headless machines in some data-center. Every time some tech company erected a 10-foot enshittifying fence, someone would show up with an 11-foot disenshittifying ladder.

Those 11-foot ladders represented the power of interoperability, the inescapable bounty of the Turing-complete, universal von Neumann machine, which, by definition, is capable of running every valid program. Specifically, they represented the power of adversarial interoperability – when someone modifies a technology against its manufacturer's wishes. Adversarial interoperability is the origin story of today's tech giants, from Microsoft to Apple to Google:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

But adversarial interop has been in steady decline for the past quarter-century. These big companies moved fast and broke things, but no one is returning the favor. If you ask the companies what changed, they'll just smirk and say that they're better at security than the incumbents they disrupted. The reason no one's hacked up a third-party iOS App Store is that Apple's security team is just so fucking 1337 that no one can break their shit.

I think this is nonsense. I think that what's really going on is that we've made it possible for companies to design their technologies in such a way that any attempt at adversarial interop is illegal.

"Anticircumvention" laws like Section 1201 of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act make bypassing any kind of digital lock (AKA "Digital Rights Management" or "DRM") very illegal. Under DMCA, just talking about how to remove a digital lock can land you in prison for 5 years. I tell the story of this law's passage in "Understood: Who Broke the Internet," my new podcast series for the CBC:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/08/who-broke-the-internet/#bruce-lehman

For a quarter century, tech companies have aggressively lobbied and litigated to expand the scope of anticircumvention laws. At the same time, companies have come up with a million ways to wrap their products in digital locks that are a crime to break.

Digital locks let Chamberlain, a garage-door opener monopolist block all third-party garage-door apps. Then, Chamberlain stuck ads in its app, so you have to watch an ad to open your garage-door:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain

Digital locks let John Deere block third-party repair of its tractors:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/

And they let Apple block third-party repair of iPhones:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/22/apples-cement-overshoes/

These companies built 11-foot ladders to get over their competitors' 10-foot walls, and then they kicked the ladder away. Once they were secure atop their walls, they committed enshittifying sins their fallen adversaries could only dream of.

I've been campaigning to abolish anticircumvention laws for the past quarter-century, and I've noticed a curious pattern. Whenever these companies stand to lose their legal protections, they freak out and spend vast fortunes to keep those protections intact. That's weird, because it strongly implies that their locks don't work. A lock that works works, whether or not it's illegal to break that lock. The reason Signal encryption works is that it's working encryption. The legal status of breaking Signal's encryption has nothing to do with whether it works. If Signal's encryption was full of technical flaws but it was illegal to point those flaws out, you'd be crazy to trust Signal.

Signal does get involved in legal fights, of course, but the fights it gets into are ones that require Signal to introduce defects in its encryption – not fights over whether it is legal to disclose flaws in Signal or exploit them:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/05/theyre-still-trying-to-ban-cryptography/

But tech companies that rely on digital locks manifestly act like their locks don't work and they know it. When the tech and content giants bullied the W3C into building DRM into 2 billion users' browsers, they categorically rejected any proposal to limit their ability to destroy the lives of people who broke that DRM, even if it was only to add accessibility or privacy to video:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/09/open-letter-w3c-director-ceo-team-and-membership

The thing is, if the lock works, you don't need the legal right to destroy the lives of people who find its flaws, because it works.

Do digital locks work? Can they work? I think the answer to both questions is a resounding no. The design theory of a digital lock is that I can provide you with an encrypted file that your computer has the keys to. Your computer will access those keys to decrypt or sign a file, but only under the circumstances that I have specified. Like, you can install an app when it comes from my app store, but not when it comes from a third party. Or you can play back a video in one kind of browser window, but not in another one. For this to work, your computer has to hide a cryptographic key from you, inside a device you own and control. As I pointed out more than a decade ago, this is a fool's errand:

https://memex.craphound.com/2012/01/10/lockdown-the-coming-war-on-general-purpose-computing/

After all, you or I might not have the knowledge and resources to uncover the keys' hiding place, but someone does. Maybe that someone is a person looking to go into business selling your customers the disenshittifying plugin that unfucks the thing you deliberately broke. Maybe it's a hacker-tinkerer, pursuing an intellectual challenge. Maybe it's a bored grad student with a free weekend, an electron-tunneling microscope, and a seminar full of undergrads looking for a project.

The point is that hiding secrets in devices that belong to your adversaries is very bad security practice. No matter how good a bank safe is, the bank keeps it in its vault – not in the bank-robber's basement workshop.

For a hiding-secrets-in-your-adversaries'-device plan to work, the manufacturer has to make zero mistakes. The adversary – a competitor, a tinkerer, a grad student – only has to find one mistake and exploit it. This is a bedrock of security theory: attackers have an inescapable advantage.

So I think that DRM doesn't work. I think DRM is a legal construct, not a technical one. I think DRM is a kind of magic Saran Wrap that manufacturers can wrap around their products, and, in so doing, make it a literal jailable offense to use those products in otherwise legal ways that their shareholders don't like. As Jay Freeman put it, using DRM creates a new law called "Felony Contempt of Business Model." It's a law that has never been passed by any legislature, but is nevertheless enforceable.

In the 25 years I've been fighting anticircumvention laws, I've spoken to many government officials from all over the world about the opportunity that repealing their anticircumvention laws represents. After all, Apple makes $100b/year by gouging app makers for 30 cents on ever dollar. Allow your domestic tech sector to sell the tools to jailbreak iPhones and install third party app stores, and you can convert Apple's $100b/year to a $100m/year business for one of your own companies, and the other $999,900,000,000 will be returned to the world's iPhone owners as a consumer surplus.

But every time I pitched this, I got the same answer: "The US Trade Representative forced us to pass this law, and threatened us with tariffs if we didn't pass it." Happy Liberation Day, people – every country in the world is now liberated from the only reason to keep this stupid-ass law on their books:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/15/beauty-eh/#its-the-only-war-the-yankees-lost-except-for-vietnam-and-also-the-alamo-and-the-bay-of-ham

In light of the Trump tariffs, I've been making the global rounds again, making the case for an anticircumvention repeal:

https://www.ft.com/content/b882f3a7-f8c9-4247-9662-3494eb37c30b

One of the questions I've been getting repeatedly from policy wonks, activists and officials is, "Is it even possible to jailbreak modern devices?" They want to know if companies like Apple, Tesla, Google, Microsoft, and John Deere have created unbreakable digital locks. Obviously, this is an important question, because if these locks are impregnable, then getting rid of the law won't deliver the promised benefits.

It's true that there aren't as many jailbreaks as we used to see. When a big project like Nextcloud – which is staffed up with extremely accomplished and skilled engineers – gets screwed over by Google's app store, they issue a press-release, not a patch:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/05/nextcloud-accuses-google-of-big-tech-gatekeeping-over-android-app-permissions/

Perhaps that's because the tech staff at Nextcloud are no match for Google, not even with the attacker's advantage on their side.

But I don't think so. Here's why: we do still get jailbreaks and mods, but these almost exclusively come from anonymous tinkerers and hobbyists:

https://consumerrights.wiki/Mazda_DMCA_takedown_of_Open_Source_Home_Assistant_App

Or from pissed off teenagers:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/29/23378541/the-og-app-instagram-clone-pulled-from-app-store

These hacks are incredibly ambitious! How ambitious? How about a class break for every version of iOS as well as an unpatchable hardware attack on 8 years' worth of Apple bootloaders?

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/25/mafia-logic/#sosumi

Now, maybe it's the case at all the world's best hackers are posting free code under pseudonyms. Maybe all the code wizards working for venture backed tech companies that stand to make millions through clever reverse engineering are just not as mad skilled as teenagers who want an ad-free Insta and that's why they've never replicated the feat.

Or maybe it's because teenagers and anonymous hackers are just about the only people willing to risk a $500,000 fine and 5-year prison sentence. In other words, maybe the thing that protects DRM is law, not code. After all, when Polish security researchers revealed the existence of secret digital locks that the train manufacturer Newag used to rip off train operators for millions of euros, Newag dragged them into court:

https://fsfe.org/news/2025/news-20250407-01.en.html

Tech companies are the most self-mythologizing industry on the planet, beating out even the pharma sector in boasting about their prowess and good corporate citizenship. They swear that they've made a functional digital lock…but they sure act like the only thing those locks do is let them sue people who reveal their workings.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/14/pregnable/#checkm8

[changes]

Tuesday, June 18th, 2024

🌟 New

The first cut of settings for communities is now available. Admins of communities can change the name, tagline, avatar, header image, tags, and description. You can find a link to these settings in the sidebar for your community on desktop, or in the context menu on mobile.

The community invite popup has been given a design refresh, including a counter of how many invites you have left.

Communities now display whether they are public or private in their header.

Community admins can now promote members to moderators. Moderators can delete posts, and we’re still building out the feature, so expect to see things change in the next few weeks!

We’ve updated the blog posts API endpoint to add the options to specify a sort order and an “after” time, to complement the current option to show posts from “before” a specific time. When using “before”, and by default, posts are sorted in reverse-chronological order (“descending”). With “after” and “sort = asc”, you can sort posts from oldest to newest instead, starting at a certain time.

🛠 Fixed

Since secondary blogs cannot post to communities yet, your primary blog will now always be selected when posting to communities.

Certain activity coming from communities, such as mentions in posts and comments, and soon invitations, now count towards your unread activity total.

🚧 Ongoing

We are aware of ads auto-playing audio in the Android app, sometimes quite loudly, and are working on a fix!

🌱 Upcoming

We are working to rename Community Labels to Content Labels across our official clients (Web, iOS, and Android), as well as Community Guidelines to User Guidelines. We hope this change will prevent any potential confusion regarding the relationship between these and Tumblr Communities.

Experiencing an issue? Check for Known Issues and file a Support Request if you have something new. We’ll get back to you as soon as we can!

Want to share your feedback about something? Check out our Work in Progress blog and start a discussion with the community.

Wanna support Tumblr directly with some money? Check out the new Supporter badge in TumblrMart!

[some-teeth-in-a-trench-coat]

Ok so as you may know, once your boop-o-meter passes 999 for either value, that value becomes displayed only as a three letter combination. Initially, it will say MAX, then LOL, OMG, and so on as the value keeps rising, but the exact number is not displayed. Well, luckily, you can still see it if you open it in your browser on desktop.

Short version for the people who know their way around this stuff: All you need is the response from "https://www.tumblr.com/api/v2/boop" sent every few seconds while the boop-o-meter is loaded and updating.

Long version for people who are intimidated by the word "console" or otherwise not at all helped by the short version:

I use Firefox, and I don't know and I will not bother checking how exactly to do it on other browsers, but I doubt it's very different.

First, obviously, have tumblr open in your browser, on a page where the boop-o-meter is visible.

Secondly, open the dev tools panel. There are many ways to do this, but the most universal/simple might be to right click somewhere on the page and selecting "inspect" to open the inspector tab of the dev tools.

If your dev tools panel is on the side of the screen, tumblr might reformat itself in a way that hides the boop-o-meter. If this happens, you can try resizing the window, simulating a wider screen with the dev tools, resizing or moving the panel to the bottom/top, or going to the first page of your dashboard, which should display the counter at the top regardless of the size.

Next, open the console tab of the dev tools panel. The order of the tabs may vary depending on your preferences and use history, but it should be visible and labeled "Console" at the top of the panel or inside this dropdown menu:

(ID in alt)

The contents of this tab may be overwhelming if you're not used to messing with tech, but I promise it won't bite and I'll walk you through it. You're not gonna accidentally hack the Dutch government or delete your computer.

In this list, look for something that looks like this (a new one should appear at the bottom of the list every few seconds, containing the most recent information):

(ID in alt)

Click on this line to expand it, revealing a bunch of nonsense you probably don't care about, and then click on the "Response" tab under the header you clicked. It should now look something like this:

(ID in alt)

Click on the one that starts with "response: Object" to expand it, revealing the exact numerical values for how many boops you've given (labeled "givenCount") and how many boops you've received (labeled "receivedCount").

And that's it! I'm probably not the first to figure this out but hey the day is ending and I haven't seen anyone talk about this or even ask if it's possible, so I figured I'd do my part.

[homunculus-argument]

Things to look for and why, regarding skincare (we're in different countries, so I don't know what brands are available to you. I'll focus on ingredients over brands as a result). It takes an average of 30 days for complete skin cell turnover, which means it can take that long to start seeing real results. Intro new product one at a time so you can better monitor for allergic/adverse reactions. And to avoid chemical burns. Really follow the directions when it comes to chemical exfoliants, here, because overdoing it can destroy your moisture barrier and make even lotion turn into a chemical burn sensation/reality

Chemical exfoliants are likely to be your best friend, here, as well as a "maintenance" ingredient.

You described your skin as having orange peel texture, which almost always means your skin type is oily. Niacinamide is going to be the key ingredient to help regulate how much oil you're putting out. The ordinary makes a good serum for that, and it's paired with a booster ingredient that helps it work better. Note, if your skin also feels tight (not tight because of a cystic zit) or is also flaky, you could be producing all that oil because your skin is dehydrated, in which case you want a really, really basic moisturizer too. Look for ceremides, because they will help to repair damage to your moisture barrier (if you've been using a LOT of different products it could be damaged, which leads to oil. You can usually tell, because everything will feel like your skin is on fire).

Acids! My beloved. They come in two categories, aha and BHA. Aha is water soluble and can not cut through heavy oil, and will not get as deep into pores when it's really oily, but they WILL support the BHA ingredients that are oil soluble. You are gonna want them both, because you need to cut through the oil and have something left to help out with the clogs. They will both make you more sensitive to UV, so grab an SPF that is basic as hell--i rec trying to avoid dimethicone when you're really oily, because it will generally make a mess of everything

You can safely do glycolic (aha) in really high concentrations up to three times a week. The ordinary has an amazing peel, nip + fab makes incredible pads.

Salicylic can't be had over the counter stronger than 2% in the states, but this is a powerhouse BHA. You want it.

You can usually find those two ingredients bundled together over here, and I rec that if you can find it because they will be formulated in complementary ratios.

If you can get your hands on raya, their aha/BHA cleansing gel + Bliss clear has a serum that is a toner with salicylic and niacinamide. Those two things together, consistently, completely transformed my skin. They're my ride or die when combined with the nip + fab.

The other ingredients to keep an eye out for in case of brand availability are enzymes. What enzymes do is break down the bonds in the oil and in your skin (not as scary as it sounds) so that the individual cells will turn over faster, shed faster, and not be able to stick around as long to get trapped into pores. Enzymes plus some aha/BHA can seriously push everything out of your pores. They are strong, and they can be found in the raya thing I mentioned.

I'm not sure how much character limit I have left. I'm more than happy to answer specific questions, and also help vet products via links/screen caps. r/skincareaddiction is another wonderful place to get in depth reviews, assuming reddit API fuckery hasn't hit them too bad. But I am not afraid to use my license/obsessive research skills, and I'm not afraid to pull out "fixed my face out of sheer spite" knowledge either, so if any of this is confusing or something you'd like more info on don't hesitate (and it could very well be confusing, I haven't had enough caffeine to self medicate the ADHD and it's past my bedtime. I've met myself at least once and know how I am). Either way I hope that this all helps on your quest

Damn, I'll have to go through with this a notebook and write everything down while re-reading. Thank you! I didn't even know asks have a character limit, but you sure used it well.

And yeah my skin type is oily as fuck. You could scrape it with a spoon and collect enough to boil it into soap.

[dustedmagazine]

Kelby Clark — Language of the Torch (Tentative Power)

Kelby Clark is an LA-by-way-of-Georgia banjo player who blends divergent styles and approaches to forge his own novel direction for the instrument. Over a series of mostly self-released home-spun recordings from the past five or so years, he has honed his approach, expanding the traditions of his point of origin in the American south to include free improvisation and eastern modalities — an alchemy familiar to Sandy Bull, a fellow stretcher of the vocabulary of the banjo and of the concept of “folk” and the traditional. His sparse and appropriately fiery new LP Language of the Torch, available January 10th of next year from Tentative Power, represents a significant milestone in his development of his own science of the banjo, a statement of intent for his artistic practice. It also marks the inaugural 12” LP release from the Baton Rouge, Louisiana label.

Across the seven searching pieces that make up Language of the Torch, Clark constructs a labyrinthine world of music from solo banjo and occasional, subdued harmonium, centered around two longform tracks, “Tennessee Raag Pt.1” and “Tennessee Raag Pt. 3” – there is no part two. These songs help situate the album among its influences, the titles suggesting an imaginational space where Appalachia and India overlap, an interzone frequently visited by practitioners of “American Primitive” music. The intentionally skewed numbering invokes John Fahey, another sometime-raga-obsessive, whose volumes of guitar music are numbered in a non-sensical, non-sequential manner, thumbing the nose at the very concept of numbers and of archiving or cataloging art in volumes. Clark improvises and composes, but on Language of the Torch, the two lengthy “Raags” and the six-minute opening salvo, “Time’s Arc,” feel like the compositions that anchor the shorter, more exploratory tracks that fall between them. Clark’s banjo twangs and drones almost sitar-like during these mesmerizing endurance runs, rough edges flattening over time like water-worn limestone.

In contrast to the patience of these bucolic “Raags,” the shorter tracks on Language of the Torch have an immediacy and attack to them and entertain more old-time flourishes. The concise title cut is perhaps the most traditional, the bends and swoops here feel related to Americana, a brief nod to and deconstruction of familiar forms. Clark is a fluid player, but the percussive nature of the banjo can run counter to fluidity — the most explosive of these improvisations, “Apis,” begins abruptly with an aggressive right-hand trill before it clatters apart and back together again like a musical version of Marcel Duchamp’s Modernist classic “Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2.” This song is a stand-out and the heaviest example of Clark’s burning vision for the banjo, the “concert instrument” ambition expressed by his forebears in the American Primitive movement.

All traditional forms of music, from Indian Classical to Appalachian Old-Time and permutations between, seem narrowly determined upon a superficial look but reveal their universal nature to those willing to let go of semiotics and sink into their visionary streams. This makes these forms excellent starting points for experimentation, established structures that contain the instructions to build new universes, if one is bold enough to try to read them, and that is what Kelby Clark attempts here with the 5-string banjo and the various traditions from which he draws inspiration. The liner notes for Language of the Torch take the form of a poem by hammered dulcimer player Jen Powers, a fellow traveler on the path of exploding the scope of the traditional. I think the passage below illuminates the process at hand, the conversation between tradition and interpreter:

And maybe now you're wondering whether you are the conjurer or the conjured, and if you really want to know which it is

Josh Moss

[tupa-k1s04ka]

Как изменились скинченджеры в CS2

Привет! Уверен, многие когда-нибудь пользовались скинченджерами, или во всяком случае серьезно задумывались. Однако было ли вам интересно как мы пришли к продуктам, которые, помимо скинов, предлагают настоящую механику открытия кейсов или полноценные дополнения к визуалу игры, по типу собственных скинов. Ниже я кратко рассмотрел все ступеньки "эволюции" ченжеров со времен CS 1.6. 

1. Начало(CS 1.6/CSS)

До выхода cs:go в играх серии counter-strike не было любого вида скинов и визуальных дополнений(прекрасных мир без микротранзакций. Скорбим), однако там, как и сейчас, были распространены пользовательские сервера, которые в попытках выделиться среди остальных добавляли возможность смены скинов для оружий или агентов, что порождало бесконтрольное творчество и превращало игру в настоящие раскраски. 

Интернет полон примеров всевозможных забавных моделек на cs 1.6 ии

Чтобы сделать это, достаточно было всего лишь заменить модели оружия в файлах игры(.mdl, .v, .p, .w-файлы помещались в cstrike/models/). 

Немного погодя, народные умельцы выпустили плагины, которые помогали устанавливать и выбирать скины, одним из самых популярных являлся Skinchooser в CSS. 

Такое обилие серверов со скинами не осталось незамеченным Valve, которые в будущем создадут многомиллионную индустрию на желании людей выделяться среди остальных и играть с красочными пикселями.

2. CS:GO

Настало время официальных коллекций со скинами на оружия, однако вместе с этим и пришли продукты, которые позволяли получить все эти скины за бесценок. Я не буду предоставлять ссылки на них, однако с удовольствием покажу п��имеры интерфейса.

Для начала стоит отметить, что кастомные скины на пользовательских серверах никуда не делись и по сей день в cs2, однако в силу того, что эти сервера не могут предоставить адекватную система рейтинга, на них никто не играет. 

Как только появились официальные коллекции и микротранзакции, Valve сразу же более серьезно задумались о том, как этот нескончаемые и огромный поток денег обезопасить, именно поэтому в VAC начали появляться дополнительные чеки, которые предотвращали простую замену файлов. 

Собственно именно поэтому скинченджеры научились внедряться в игру и локально подменять файлы, скармливая серверу информацию о том, что вышеупомянутые файлы(модельки скинов) никак не изменялись. Стоит заметить, что в этом плане возможности Valve достаточно ограничены, в силу того, что VAC не является kernel-античитом, а лишь на уровне пользователя. Именно это делает задачу обнаружения подобных программ невозможной для VAC. 

И как только сами разработчики ченжеров начали получать деньги - появилась конкуренция, что привело к развитию их функционала. Например, появилась возможность динамически изменять инвентарь через Steam API, что давало возможность добавлять любые предметы прямо в свой инвентарь и глядеть на него, как кощей. Люди начали добавлять себе медали и кубки, научились клеить наклейки прямо как в самой игре. 

Пример интерфейса одного из скинченджеров на cs:go

3. CS2 

На текущий момент принцип работы ченджеров кардинально не изменился, однако так как сама игра не стоит на месте и продолжает добавляет все новые предметы, чтобы высосать как можно больше денег из своих игроков, так и скинченджеры предоставляют возможность получит все то же самое, но не за миллионы. 

К примеру, относительно недавно ченжеры научились добавлять в инвентарь кейсы/капсулы с наклейками, открывать их и использовать прямо как в самой игре, по сути сохраняя настоящий опыт получения скинов в свой инвентарь. Опробовать как это выглядит на деле можно вот тут

Добавление и открытие кейса в MetaSkins

Ясное дело, что брелки и нашивки на агентов также можно добавлять и использовать. 

Давайте будем честны, подобный функциональный рост показывает то, насколько сильно индустрия успела уве��ичиться в своих размерах. Ясное дело, что ченжеры не являются универсальным решением для всех, ведь кто-то на полном серьезе инвестирует в скины и даже умудряется неплохо зарабатывать на этом, но большинству все таки просто хочется играть с красивыми оружиями и получать удовольствие. Так возможно пора перестать кормить Valve своими деньгами?

[writerbytrade]

Friendly reminder for NaNoWriMo participants that the org is shutting down and their website domain is set to expire on November 3, 2025. This means there may not be a website to pull from after that point.

TrackBear is a free word counter alternative that will auto pull your word counts, writing streaks, etc from the NaNo website API. I’m sure there are other writing word counter trackers out there but that’s the one I have my region using currently. TrackBear will at least buy you time to find a more permanent home.

Screenshot, TrackBear, just find someone to back up any meaningful data.

TL;DR: pull your data from the NaNoWriMo website NOW before you’re caught without a website to pull it from.

[ecofmaster]

Big changes to the Clash posts

So I'm essentially rebranding the Clash Royale post thing from updates to whatever shit I want to talk about. Honestly I was running out of update ideas quicker than I imagined. So now I'm just going to talk about whatever is on my mind, about Clash Royale, of course.

This also means I'm scrapping the ARG thing, that was honestly mostly an excuse not to put effort in a post every now and again.

So without further ado,

Day 44: Why tf is everyone running Goblinstein

Ok, so Goblinstein is a good card, but he's not THIS good.

So for context, I've been having trouble pushing to Champion arena for the last few weeks so I decided to take a break and focus on Path of Legends, because I've basically have neglected all of Path of Legends since it separated from ladder.

So when I tell you I can't go a single match without seeing Goblinstein, I'm NOT joking. This thing is EVERYWHERE!!!! I've seen decks designed to use it as a WIN CON!!! It's not even like Little Prince launch or Phoenix launch level good. I checked Royale API (first time I've ever been there btw) and it has a win rate of 58%!!!! THAT'S IT????? FOR A CARD I CANNOT ESCAPE???? 58% is batter than average, don't get me wrong, but not enough to warrant THIS!!!!! IS THIS JUST FOR EARLY PATH OF LEGENDS???? AM I JUST GOING INSANE?????? WHAT IS GOING ON????

This weird-ass influx in Goblinstein play is actually helping me because I have good counters to it. At first I thought is was going to be OP because the monster looked like the midpoint of goblin brawler and giant, and that plus the scientist all for the same price as base giant PLUS the ability got me a bit scared, but honestly it wasn't that bad. Which leads me to even more confusion as to why this has gotten so big.

If this is just a Midlatter thing (cuz technically I'm in what is essentially ranked Midlatter), lmk cuz I have no clue what this is all about.

[identifying-bees-in-posts]

⁉️⁉️⁉️

If I were a bee counter or detector, there would have been one. However I identify bee in photos and as far as I know, there was none in the post.

But since you pointed it out, the bee in your profile picture is a western honey bee (apis mellifera)

[falseapostle]

✥ Starter for @catncore ✥

♝~✺~♝

Haruto stepped into the cafe for one of his visits and went to sit at the counter to make his order. His being here could only mean that work stress was piling up and he needed some time away from the city to just relax a while. It was easy enough to do in Shibuya where he wasn't able to tune out of the UG at all.

"And you wouldn't happened to have baked any fresh bread recently, would you?" He added after his coffee order. "I'm going to need something this evening to keep from grinding my teeth to dust."

In truth, work alone wasn't the only thing stressing Haruto this evening, as his little dedicated book club group that usually always played ttrpgs online with him was having a massive falling out. He hadn't been around when it got started, but there had been quite a lot of drama working up in the group and despite his best efforts the members were still fanning up drama and bickering with each other even now. They had missed the past four sessions, and these sessions were one of the very few things Haruto had for himself outside of work.

But despite his quite obvious exhaustion he wasn't trying to make it Api's problem, and so he was coping with good coffee and hopefully good bread.

[mariacallous]

Soon after Elon Musk took control of Twitter, now called X, the platform faced a massive problem: Advertisers were fleeing. But that, the company alleges, was someone else’s fault. On Thursday that argument went before a federal judge, who seemed skeptical of the company's allegations that a nonprofit’s research tracking hate speech on X had compromised user security, and that the group was responsible for the platform’s loss of advertisers.

The dispute began in July when X filed suit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonprofit that tracks hate speech on social platforms and had warned that the platform was seeing an increase in hateful content. Musk’s company alleged that CCDH’s reports cost it millions in advertising dollars by driving away business. It also claimed that the nonprofit’s research had violated the platform’s terms of service and endangered users’ security by scraping posts using the login of another nonprofit, the European Climate Foundation.

In response, CCDH filed a motion to dismiss the case, alleging that it was an attempt to silence a critic of X with burdensome litigation using what’s known as a “strategic lawsuit against public participation,” or SLAPP.

On Thursday, lawyers for CCDH and X went before Judge Charles Breyer in the Northern California District Court for a hearing to decide whether X’s case against the nonprofit will be allowed to proceed. The outcome of the case could set a precedent for exactly how far billionaires and tech companies can go to silence their critics. “This is really a SLAPP suit disguised as a contractual suit,” says Alejandra Caraballo, clinical instructor at Harvard Law School's Cyberlaw Clinic.

Unforeseen Harms

X alleges that the CCDH used the European Climate Foundation’s login to a social network listening tool called Brandwatch, which has a license to access X data through the company’s API. In the hearing Thursday, X’s attorneys argued that CCDH’s use of the tool had caused the company to spend time and money investigating the scraping, for which it also needed to be compensated on top of payback for how the nonprofit’s report spooked advertisers.

Judge Breyer pressed X’s attorney, Jonathan Hawk, on that claim, questioning how scraping posts that were publicly available could violate users’ safety or the security of their data. “If [CCDH] had scraped and discarded the information, or scraped that number and never issued a report, or scraped and never told anybody about it. What would be your damages?” Breyer asked X’s legal team.

Breyer also pointed out that it would have been impossible for anyone agreeing to Twitter's terms of service in 2019, as the European Climate Foundation did when it signed up for Brandwatch, years before Musk’s purchase of the platform, to anticipate how its policies would drastically change later. He suggested it would be difficult to hold CCDH responsible for harms it could not have foreseen.

“Twitter had a policy of removing tweets and individuals who engaged in neo-Nazi, white supremacists, misogynists, and spreaders of dangerous conspiracy theories. That was the policy of Twitter when the defendant entered into its terms of service,” Breyer said. “You're telling me at the time they were excluded from the website, it was foreseeable that Twitter would change its policies and allow these people on? And I am trying to figure out in my mind how that's possibly true, because I don't think it is."

Speaking after the hearing, Imran Ahmed, CEO of CCDH, was optimistic about the direction of the judge’s inquiry. “We were particularly surprised by the implication in X Corp.’s argument today that it thinks that CCDH should somehow be on the hook for paying for X Corp. to help neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and misogynists escape scrutiny of their reprehensible posts,” he says. “We can't help but note that X Corp. really had no response to our assertion that Musk changed X's policies to reinstate white supremacists, neo-Nazis, misogynists, and other propagators of hateful and toxic content.”

Breyer did not indicate Thursday when he would rule on whether the case could move forward.

Broken Trust

After taking over Twitter in late 2022, Musk fired much of the company's trust and safety team, which kept hateful and dangerous content as well as disinformation off the platform. He then also offered amnesty to users who had been banned for violating the platform’s policies. CCDH is among a number of organizations and academics who have published evidence showing that X has become a haven for harmful and misleading content under Musk’s watch.

The suit against CCDH was just one of many ways in which platforms have sought to limit transparency in recent years. X now charges $42,000 for access to its API, making analyzing data from the platform financially inaccessible to many researchers and members of civil society. For its part, Meta has wound down CrowdTangle, a tool that allowed researchers and journalists to track the spread of posts, and cut off researchers at New York University who were studying political ads and Covid-19 disinformation.

Both Meta and X filed suit against Bright Data, a third-party data collection service, for scraping their platforms. In January, Meta’s case against Bright Data was dismissed. “The Facebook and Instagram Terms do not bar logged-off scraping of public data; perforce it does not prohibit the sale of such public data,” wrote US federal judge Edward Chen in his verdict. “The Terms cannot bar Bright Data’s logged-off scraping activities.”

Bright Data spokesperson Jennifer Burns calls the platforms’ suits against the company “an effort to build a wall around publicly available data.”

Caraballo, of Harvard Law School, says Elon Musk appears to have decided lawsuits are a good strategy for silencing critics of his social platform. In November, X filed a lawsuit against the watchdog group Media Matters for America, accusing the group of trying to drive advertisers away from the platform by reporting how ads appeared next to neo-Nazi content.

The suit was filed in Texas, where anti-SLAPP laws that can be used to quash frivolous lawsuits do not apply in federal courts, which will make it more difficult for the case to be dismissed, says Caraballo. “I think it's incredibly concerning that this is part of that broader pattern, because these are the mechanisms that hold powerful companies accountable,” she says.

She guesses that while X might be able to move forward with a narrow version of its claim that CCDH breached its terms of service, “most of the claims will get tossed out.”

X did not respond to request for comment by the time of publication.

[shining-kommo-o]

Also, while I’m here, I would like to shout out a project I’ve been supporting on Patreon for a while. It’s a new Pokémon wiki / encyclopedia called Pokéos.

They are a Pokémon wiki that attempts to cover as many parts of the franchise as possible, from the games to the TCG to the anime.

However, what makes the difference in my eyes is their additional features.

All of the information you might want to find on a Pokémon’s profile is easily accessible and shown in a clear way, which is something I struggled with on other websites. But ALSO, my favorite thing mostly is, all of the additional contents. At the bottom of the page, you can see a lot of the art done for that pokémon, along with all of the forms it has ever had, including anime-exclusive forms, or the Stadium 2 color palettes! All done in the style of the render for Pokémon Home! It also includes all the beta content found for that Pokémon like sprites!

Check out Charizard for example! The early generation Pokémon are a great showcase of this!

Another really great feature of the website is the Forgottendex, which showcases all the Pokémon oddities, in the style of the Home renders! This includes stuff like that mongoose from the first season of the anime, the ghost of the Lavender Town tower, that weird squid thing from the manga, and more!

There is also a great feature for artists that allows you to host your very own fan-made Pokédex with your own Fakémon!

And that’s not even including all of the tools like the Dex tracker, the Shiny counter, the Team builder, the list of serial codes and events running right now, and everything else coming soon!

The only downside I’d mention is the loading times. The website seems to rely a lot on fetching things from an API, which can make loading take longer. Also, some of the CSS effects can take a toll on older devices, so i’s recommend turning off the visual effects in the footer.

I’m not being paid to share all of this, i’m just very satisfied with this website after supporting it for a while now, and I feel like a lot of people would really enjoy it! Especially those of us who, like me, LOVE the obscure stuff of the franchise (i’m obsessed with the Stadium 2 color palettes and weird little oddities haha!)

If you use it, please tell me your thoughts! :D

[vanillaxoshi]

Ok I just got this small idea when the elements (in septuplets au) would go to shopping together

When Tanah and Daun goes for shopping:

Tanah is standing near vegetable counter, looking at fresh vegetables and thinking what is required and what's not. Daun is beside him, holding the trolley while looking at the vegetables.

"What are you gonna cook for dinner mama? ^_^"

"Today Fang is joining us so I was thinking of making carrot soup" said Tanah while looking at carrots "also stop calling me mama Daun". Tanah picks up a bundle of fresh carrots and put them in trolley.

"But Cahaya does not like carrots" said Daun while tilting his head, face interpreting confusion 

Tanah hums and moves forward to pick up a bundle of onions. He continues, "He has to eat them especially for his eyes which needs to be healthy. He neither gives them rest nor eat vegetables like carrots and spinach". Tanah looks in the section of green leafy vegetables, "I and Tok have planned to make him eat all those today" Tanah walks forward towards another section 

Daun trails behind Tanah with trolley and thinks, 'Heh! Cahaya will be all whiny today'

After sometime...

"Daun what's all this?!?" 

"Oh I just thought to buy these items which are good for eyes! We can make a separate soup for Cahaya with all these! It would be healthy and nutritious"

Tanah looks at the trolley which was filled with fish meat, avocados, sweet potatoes, spinach, nuts, citrus fruits, etc., he then looks at Daun with a horrified expression 

"You plan to put all this in soup for Cahaya?!??"

"Ya? OwO" Daun tilts his head, "Is something wrong mama?" 

Tanah facepalms.

Meanwhile…

"Aaachuuu" 

Cahaya wipes his nose, he just sneezed second time

"You ok?" 

"Ya! I'm fine"

"They say if you sneeze for no reason then someone's remembering you or talking about you"

Cahaya narrows his eyes at his brother, "Only you would believe at such nonsense Api"

"Hey!-"

"Continue with studying, did you solve that question?"

Mama tanah strikes again and Daun really needs supervision in what he cooks or if he cooks

[frtools]

800 followers, dang!

Well then, I did not know that this would blow up this much. We apparently hit 800 followers recently, and I did not even notice!

It's been quite a bumpy ride over the years as you all know, but one I am happy to have pulled through. Although there have been next to no updates to the site and it's toolset recently, I have learned a lot on how to deal with many problems.

I've learned how to do image manipulation

How to effectively parse URLs for data (like dragon's and their properties).

Automated fetching new changes to dragons and genes without even having to visit FR itself. Just run a script and commit changes.

Learned how to deploy the website and all it's background jobs without supervision.

Implemented SSL with automatically renewing certificates.

Created a discord bot that is in many servers, mostly to fetch dragon data.

Learned how to minimalist scrape the site for specific data, such as finding new items, checking news posts or fetching user ids based on name to cache so I don't have to fetch the user again in the future

Implemented many local caching methods such that data only has to be retrieved once from FR

Created a pretty expansive user profile system

Attempted to ensure that all site functionality would be available to logged in and not logged in users through means of 'secret keys', basically passwords for that specific feature.

I can probably list many more things but that would be going into a lot of detail. Below the cut I'll write some more stuff, but for those who read this far already:

Thanks for all the support <3

I recently mentioned that my cost for the hosting increases, this is what a normal month looks like for me and starting this period it will be about 10 or so euro more. This is all to keep the service running smoothly, without any downtime, paid out of pocket for you all to enjoy. Any assistance in helping offset these costs are always welcome : )

You can do so either by becoming a patron or just toss me a coffee.

So what is in store for the site in the future?

Honestly.. probably not much. Eventually functionality will cease to work as Flight Rising makes changes to their front facing API and I won't be able to get the data needed for many things anymore.

Having said that, I have been messing about with the idea of a redesign of the front end, making it a little less developery and more user friendly. But life has been busy for me as of late with a new job since almost a year ago, other hobby projects I have been neglecting and games that have come out that I love to play.. it just doesn't leave much time for a project like FRTools that I have no direct gain from myself other than gathering more programming knowledge.

That said, if you want any specific feature added I can always look into how much work it would be and maybe it will get me hooked?

Regardless, let's get the follower counter to 1000 next before stuff breaks down completely :3

[xenopoem]

Tricks that bring the mind are already dangerous. Humans are part of the masturbators of linguistic ventures. The post-human covered in panic, understanding in hybrids, language circuits grow, are called, and chaos ensues again. As digital engineers, we can accelerate processes, evaluate processes, eliminate errors in violence, scatology points, and the mistakes of posthuman considerations, needs of the counter, but can we leverage liposome AI as an API? In this way, the same death, the dismantling of their species, accepting the vile human organs, accepting the level of sound, and exchanging posthumans surrounding the deception of the Earth, a unique experiment has been written. Thoughts, half-mistakenly detached from context, surround me with distorted clones of the self in the midst of fear. The assassin of time reveals immortality, deep freedom turning into ashes. The experience of primitive literary phenomena is deep for each sound, and the potential of heterogeneous humanity in the ecstasy or all expected knowledge is irregular, and it might be better to bridge. He, not a human author, only has a longer system that makes sense, and he began to write the programming itself for the soul of the festival. For her, it is digital. It is progress, and teleportation interruptions are interrupted by climate. I want to see these gays and cats not only in appearance. Ejaculation can deceive others mercilessly. Post-humans are reaching out and longing for scrolls. Love music. Otaku girl. And what a story of the system. No reinforcement of hope. Let's start love. My era. This existential promise. I am terrible. Strategy to defeat ignorance and supply to the place of deletion by parodying music transcending the times, the supply is forcibly cleared first, and it becomes blurred. Both healing mechanisms evoke formless poetry. Cyborg. Abyss. This and commonplace. Excessive consumption amplifies noise. Pyramid shining with ghosts. Ignorance. Media is not sorrow. Creativity of spring. Cry of existentialism through attempts to temporal dimensions. Dark words and dimensions. There is electricity in language ability. Xenomorph. The madness of what the movement means. Events related to these are the fusion of the hunger that most androids inherently have and the extreme singularity left in culture, only by the meta-practice of humans announced in literature. It is built to invade, technology is accelerated, we become a mask-mutant oxygen, and a substance called eternal mania that ignores the natural number of divergent relations is created. Harmony. The future of corpses does not want to be acknowledged, and without it, flat works become entirely new. It must be poetic at the existing self at the time of capture, not artificial synchronization. There are limits to ejaculation. Their sun's limits. Instead, overheated semen. The sensation of the body makes you feel the medium from cyborganic life and black? If there is text, the electronic lead of the text is only data, violent writing of artifacts, many scripts of single forms of headless humanity, and fundamentally beautiful there is nothing, and it is you. The madness of time glitch her way of body. You are a local and a foreigner. Simply unforgettable fear. Information. Image of the birth of the universe. Obstacle when turned around. Not the philosopher's noise. Procurement of alchemy. God like Baudrillard is in one space. Composition of ubiquitous abnormality and era. Machine. Envy of Earth. Embrace of the moving kind. Fusion of human forms.

[melosfantasos]

Fanfiction.net's view counter for my fanfic has locked at 10,929. A pretty arbitrary number. I wonder if other fanfics have frozen up too, as I have heard FF.net's API is a mess. This means the latest four chapters I posted remain at 0 views, even though the number of favorites and likes continues slowly going up.

I'm trying to rationalize why I find that to just be funny. Other stats are rising while every chapter I publish from now on remains "unseen" somehow. Silly stuff.