It’s not as though the existence and mechanisms of piracy are a coveted secret. There’s a decent chance that they’ll learn about and attempt it independently, and the method they learn about online might expose them to greater risk than if they did it with more consideration.

On that basis, I think that knowledge transfer is at worst harm reduction. If it’s immoral, which I don’t believe it is, then at the very least your intervention could prevent them from being preyed upon by some copyright troll company when they do it despite your silence or protestations.

You might be thinking of the 1997 book Foundations of Geopolitics by the Russian ultranationalist and neofascist Aleksandr Dugin.

There have been many reports over the years that it’s popular amongst those close to Putin - and there are definitely comparisons to be drawn between the book and actually occurring events.

It’s not configurable through the UI, but if you’re the admin of an instance you can change the character limit with some fairly simple source code tweaks.

Ah, of course - that’s unfortunate, but thanks for the pointer.

Not well versed in the field, but understand that large tech companies which host user-generated content match the hashes of uploaded content against a list of known bad hashes as part of their strategy to detect and tackle such content.

Could it be possible to adopt a strategy like that as a first-pass to improve detection, and reduce the compute load associated with running every file through an AI model?

In short, it’s another hormone.

It’s still debated whether and when it’s useful for trans women to take, and it can therefore be difficult to find a doctor who’ll prescribe it - but some people who do take it report increased breast fullness / roundness, and increased libido.

There’s little risk associated with taking it, so a fair amount of transfemmes try it out just to see whether it produces desirable effects for them.

I feel like you’d be interested in the Web Monetization API, if you’re not already aware of it.

Prog is progesterone.

There actually is a Web 3.0, and it predates the cryptocurrency-oriented conceptualisation of “Web3” by quite some time.

Web 3.0 is otherwise known as the Semantic Web, a set of standards developed by the W3C for formally representing (meta)data and relationships between entities on the internet, and for facilitating the machine-reading and exchange thereof.

It’s fairly silly that this course of action is the consequence of a desire to manipulate search engine results, but at least they’re archiving the articles before taking them down.

To address the headline, though, I don’t think that anybody reputable ever seriously claimed that the internet was forever in a literal sense - we’ve been dealing with ephemerality and issues like link rot from the beginning.

It was only ever commonplace to say the internet was forever in the sense that fully retracting anything once posted could range from difficult to impossible after it’d been shared a few times.

Only in the modern era dominated by corporations offering a platform in perpetuity have we been afforded even the illusion of dependable permanence, and honestly I’m much more comfortable with the notion of less widely distributed content being able to entropy out of existence than a permanent record for everything ever made public.

I could understand upgrading so frequently at the advent of mainstream smartphones, where two years of progress actually did represent a significant user experience improvement - but the intergenerational improvements for most people’s day-to-day use have been marginal for quite some time now.

Once you’ve got web browsers and website-equivalent mobile apps performing well, software keyboards which keep up with your typing, high-definition video playback working without dropped frames, graphics processing sufficient to render whatever your game of choice is for the train journey to work, batteries which last a day of moderate to intense use, and screen resolutions so high that you can’t differentiate the pixels even by pressing your eyeball to the glass - that covers most people’s media consumption for the form factor, and there’s not much else to offer after that.

The bill says that commercial entities serving pornography are required to do age verification through either verifying a driver’s license, verifying another piece of government-issued identification, or through the use of any commercially viable age verification mechanism.

So, yeah, I’d imagine compliance to look like either uploading a photograph or scan of an identity card or document for the site operators to check, or uploading it to an affiliated service which does age verification on their behalf.

Which is obviously horrendous from a privacy and information security standpoint for the consumer, and exposes the site operator to costs and legal risk associated with verifying and storing sensitive personal information.

I’m sorry to hear that you’re struggling, but remember that to transition is a huge step and it’s very common for people to have some doubts along the way.

As you say, I think it’s unlikely that a cis person would accept hormones if they were offered freely, let alone take the steps to acquire them. I certainly don’t think that a cis person would feel euphoric about being given the option.

But if you do start taking hormones and find that you don’t like the effects, it’s okay to just stop. It’s rare, but I’ve known people to start and shortly thereafter stop because they didn’t vibe the early mental or later physical changes. Nobody worth your time will judge you for it.

Whichever decision you make, I hope that you find happiness and freedom from anxiety!