I have no sleep schedule

Oh, yeah, let's compare overly elaborate skincare routines that women choose for themselves (albeit under the influence of advertising that, in aggregate, has a very negative effect on perception of women and their bodies) and pay for with their own money with the fucking tradwives who actively promote submitting yourself to a sexist man. Surely spending way too much on skincare is the same thing as devoting your entire life to an extremely unequal relationship and actively eshewing all forms of independence, financial, social or emotional.

We owe so many apologies to choice feminism holy fuck

These skincare routines, the ones that the OP is referencing specifically, the ones that are eight steps a session and want you to use red light therapy and dermal fillers and microneedling - why are you doing this for yourself? Okay, it makes you feel good. Why? Is it that you are taking the time to care for yourself because you’re lacking care in another are of your life? It’s anti-aging; okay. Are you using anti aging products for a health reason, because you have a family history of skin issues, or because you fear aging? If you fear aging, then why do you fear it? If it’s for your self-image, why are you comparing yourself to others?

Yeah, it’s a lot, asking why why why why like a toddler. It’s soooooo much easier to sit back and not be critical and just go “it makes me feel good” and let someone else do the thinking for you.

And that’s the pipeline, right there; if you outsource your critical thinking skills, you outsource your agency.

First: THIS RECALL IS NOT STATE SPECIFIC. IT IS NATIONWIDE.

here are the specific products and dates:

FDA page on this:

1. The court holds Google responsible for statements made by its AI, considering them Google's statements (search engines have limited liability for results in their engine as they're the words of other sites/companies/people), meaning when their AI lies/hallucinates they're liable for the defamation/harm resulting from those statements.

2. Google's defense that customers are generally aware of the lack of reliability and are responsible for fact checking was dismissed. As the court pointed out, that would "significantly diminish" AI Search's stated purpose and it can't be distinguished from Google's business practices/statements as a search tool.

3. Studies have found about 91% of Google's everyday AI responses are accurate, leaving millions of searches per HOUR with potential liability for falsehoods. 56% of correct responses weren't supported by the sources the AI listed. Both of which mean Google is now liable for a LOT more AI "errors."

4. Google was held liable for 80% of court costs in this case and this precedent is expected to reverberate around the world. This is a massive shift from the 3rd-party search provider role Google has previously played and it comes right as they've tied ALL searches to their AI search.

For all the reasons above AND ALSO because this particular lawsuit is a defamation case

Privacy lawsuits are hard because most privacy laws are super super weak, and there's very rarely a lot of money or enforcement backing privacy laws for...twenty million reasons, really...

But defamation suits? Those have teeth.

(In large part because, at least in some countries and including in the US, defamation laws protect public figures the least - and "public figures" legally includes most if not all politicians, and a hell of a lot of other rich ppl too)

A German court has ruled that Google can be held directly liable for false claims made by its AI Overviews, a decision that could put a serious legal dent in the whole “the AI made me do it” defense. According to The Next Web, the Regional Court of Munich issued a temporary injunction after Google’s AI Overviews wrongly tied two Munich publishers to scams, subscription traps, and dubious business practices. The court treated those AI-generated summaries as Google’s own statements, not just ordinary search results pointing to third-party pages. That distinction matters. Search engines have traditionally had more protection because they index and link to other people’s content. AI Overviews changes the machinery. Google is not just showing the web anymore. It is summarizing it, rewriting it, and sometimes apparently hallucinating a tiny legal grenade into the results page.

Sketches from my last video

i work with unhoused people fleeing domestic violence, and i have a client rn whose driver's license expired in 2024, and she needs a new id to apply for apartments. ok, cool. problem is, she lost all her documents due to the domestic violence

so we call the dmv. dmv needs a birth certificate. like i said, she lost her birth certificate. she needs a new one. her birth certificate is from out of state

we look up how to get a new birth certificate. the birth certificate needs an id to order it. cool cool cool

ok then what about secondary options? well, she needs two secondary sources of identification to order a replacement birth certificate, and she only has one, because for everything else she needs an id. fishing license? need an id. fucking park pass? id. she could have her 18+ child use their birth certificate to vouch for her, except her abuser won't let her talk to her children, so that's a no go

ultimately we land on social security card. this is where we're at in the process rn. ofc she doesn't have her ss card, so we need to order that. social security also requires an id to request a new card, but they'll take a health insurance card with a picture attached (god fucking bless them). she has medicaid but doesn't have a physical copy of the card, so we have to figure out how to get that. then once we do that we have to upload it to the social security website, and if that doesn't work, we have to, god forbid, call the social security office (takes literal hours) and then make an appointment. she doesn't have transportation or cell service, so we would have to figure out a way to coordinate me getting her to the appointment in order to present the document

then we wait 10+ days for the replacement, that has to be mailed to me bc she is unhoused and doesn't have an address

then we need to submit her request for a new birth certificate, which we have to figure out how to pay for, bc it is not free. they're at least a month behind on requests, btw, so we are probably looking at may at the earliest for that to arrive

then we need to take the birth certificate to the dmv

dmv also requires two pieces of mail not from a po box. she doesn't have an address, she is unhoused. she can use the homeless shelter in town, but we will need to mail her stuff there and have her receive it first, and also then the homeless shelter address will now be on her new id, which landlords will recognize and may discriminate against her for

during all of this she is sleeping in a garage. it was negative one degrees this morning. also, forgot to mention, she is terminally ill. some days i legitimately don't know if she lived through the night. every day is a toss up

the absolute soonest she will have an id is probably late may. forget voter registration--most rentals won't let her apply without it. she won't be offered section 8 housing without it. she can't apply for ssdi without it. she is blocked at literally every corner without it, and the absolute soonest she can get it is late may. the dmv literally has her old card on file, and she knows the number by heart, but it doesn't matter. it doesn't count if it's expired, as if she's somehow become someone new

and that's all with the help of someone whose job it is to do this shit. imagine if she didn't have a caseworker. she has a ten year old donated iphone that only works on wifi, she can't even do her own research bc she doesn't have internet half the time. how the hell is she supposed to get anything done on her own?

It was only legalized in 8 US states (the 8th only a few months before), and wouldn’t be legalized nation-wide until 2015.

It was only legal in TEN COUNTRIES in 2011. We wouldn’t hit 20 countries until 2017. (Australia was 23rd)

As of today (April 14, 2026), I believe only 38 countries have fully legalized same-sex marriage. Out of somewhere around 200 countries in the world. That’s only ~19% of countries.

Typing this from Graphene now, in fact. But, both of those take the Android Open Source Project, without all the bloatware--and largely de-Google the whole thing. They give you much more control over privacy and what the apps you choose to install can do and access on your phone.

I know Graphene sandboxes everything, including the optionally installed Google Play Services which a lot of apps unfortunately require to run. (Lineage uses an alternative to Play Services instead.) So, you can install what would normally be unacceptably intrusive apps and just lock them away from pulling any funny shit with your data, or phoning home. Including the couple of Google things I do still keep around.

I also prefer running much more transparent, privacy-respecting open source apps where possible. Besides the transparency, I'd rather avoid the shitty tech corps entirely where I can. There are pretty good alternatives available for a lot of the usual suspects.

An alternative app store:

Carolina Milanesi, an independent technology analyst, said Google is trying to make its cash cow business — search — richer and more personalized, and it will make shopping easier. But there is a risk that users may have fewer choices about what to click. "Right now it's: I ask a question, I get a bunch of answers and I feel that I'm in control as to which answer I take, or if I'm looking for something, which product I'm going to end up buying. That is going to be less so going forward," she said. Milanesi envisions AI-enabled search and agents proposing products to consumers — perhaps even those they have requested — but with less clarity or choice around where it's coming from. "If you're going to say: 'I want a pair of Jordans, go find them,' you're not necessarily sure what steps have been taken and whether the AI has used a source or a store that was paid for and therefore came up in the search results," she said, "or if AI actually went and did their due diligence and picked the best for me as a customer."

And here's one from Time magazine (May 20, 2026):

While Google already has “AI Mode,” the company will now power the whole search bar through its new Gemini 3.5 Flash model.  Instead of the classic list of blue links, Google Search will now also generate a custom page with an AI-generated summary of what you’re searching about, which will then trigger a conversation with AI Mode on the main page, allowing users to ask follow-up questions—similar to the kind of layout you would see when opening ChatGPT.

And a little more from Time's article on how this may affect the websites that we are trying to search for:

“It will severely cut into the main source of revenue for most publishers and it will disincentivize content creators who rely on organic search traffic, which is millions of websites, maybe more,” she told Technology Magazine.