Rejus Almole

Supreme Court to decide how 1988 videotape privacy law applies to online video

facebook pixel, Meta Pixel, paramount, Policy, Supreme Court / Rejus Almole / January 27, 2026

Salazar v. Paramount hinges on video privacy law’s definition of “consumer.”

Credit: Getty Images | Ernesto Ageitos

The Supreme Court is taking up a case on whether Paramount violated the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA) by disclosing a user’s viewing history to Facebook. The case, Michael Salazar v. Paramount Global, hinges on the law’s definition of the word “consumer.”

Salazar filed a class action against Paramount in 2022, alleging that it “violated the VPPA by disclosing his personally identifiable information to Facebook without consent,” Salazar’s petition to the Supreme Court said. Salazar had signed up for an online newsletter through 247Sports.com, a site owned by Paramount, and had to provide his email address in the process. Salazar then used 247Sports.com to view videos while logged in to his Facebook account.

“As a result, Paramount disclosed his personally identifiable information—including his Facebook ID and which videos he watched—to Facebook,” the petition said. “The disclosures occurred automatically because of the Facebook Pixel Paramount installed on its website. Facebook and Paramount then used this information to create and display targeted advertising, which increased their revenues.”

The 1988 law defines consumer as “any renter, purchaser, or subscriber of goods or services from a video tape service provider.” The phrase “video tape service provider” is defined to include providers of “prerecorded video cassette tapes or similar audio visual materials,” and thus arguably applies to more than just sellers of tapes.

The legal question for the Supreme Court “is whether the phrase ‘goods or services from a video tape service provider,’ as used in the VPPA’s definition of ‘consumer,’ refers to all of a video tape service provider’s goods or services or only to its audiovisual goods or services,” Salazar’s petition said. The Supreme Court granted his petition to hear the case in a list of orders released yesterday.

Courts disagree on defining “consumer”

The Facebook Pixel at the center of the lawsuit is now called the Meta Pixel. The Pixel is a piece of JavaScript code that can be added to a website to track visitors’ activity “and optimize your advertising performance,” as Meta describes it.

Salazar lost his case at a federal court in Nashville, Tennessee, and then lost an appeal at the US Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit. (247Sports has its corporate address in Tennessee.) A three-judge panel of appeals court judges ruled 2–1 to uphold the district court ruling. The appeals court majority said:

The Video Privacy Protection Act—as the name suggests—arose out of a desire to protect personal privacy in the records of the rental, purchase, or delivery of “audio visual materials.” Spurred by the publication of Judge Robert Bork’s video rental history on the eve of his confirmation hearings, Congress imposed stiff penalties on any “video tape service provider” who discloses personal information that identifies one of their “consumers” as having requested specific “audio visual materials.”

This case is about what “goods or services” a person must rent, purchase, or subscribe to in order to qualify as a “consumer” under the Act. Is “goods or services” limited to audio-visual content—or does it extend to any and all products or services that a store could provide? Michael Salazar claims that his subscription to a 247Sports e-newsletter qualifies him as a “consumer.” But since he did not subscribe to “audio visual materials,” the district court held that he was not a “consumer” and dismissed the complaint. We agree and so AFFIRM.

2-2 circuit split

Salazar’s petition to the Supreme Court alleged that the 6th Circuit ruling “imposes a limitation that appears nowhere in the relevant statutory text.” The 6th Circuit analysis “flout[s] the ordinary meaning of ‘goods or services,’” and “ignores that the VPPA broadly prohibits a video tape service provider—like Paramount here—from knowingly disclosing ‘personally identifiable information concerning any consumer of such provider,’” he told the Supreme Court.

The DC Circuit ruled the same way as the 6th Circuit in another case last year, but other appeals courts have ruled differently. The 7th Circuit held last year that “any purchase or subscription from a ‘video tape service provider’ satisfies the definition of ‘consumer,’ even if the thing purchased is clothing or the thing subscribed to is a newsletter.”

In Salazar v. National Basketball Association, which also involves Michael Salazar, the 2nd Circuit ruled in 2024 that Salazar was a consumer under the VPPA because the law’s “text, structure, and purpose compel the conclusion that that phrase is not limited to audiovisual ‘goods or services,’ and the NBA’s online newsletter falls within the plain meaning of that phrase.” The NBA petitioned the Supreme Court for review in hopes of overturning the 2nd Circuit ruling, but the petition to hear the case was denied in December.

Despite the NBA case being rejected by the high court, a circuit split can make a case ripe for Supreme Court review. “Put simply, the circuit courts have divided 2–2 over how to interpret the statutory phrase ‘goods or services from a video tape service provider,’” Salazar told the court. “As a result, there is a 2–2 circuit split concerning what it takes to become a ‘consumer’ under the VPPA.”

Paramount urged SCOTUS to reject case

While Salazar sued both Paramount and the NBA, he said the Paramount case “is a superior vehicle for resolving this exceptionally important question.” The case against the NBA is still under appeal on a different legal issue and “has had multiple amended pleadings since the lower courts decided the question, meaning the Court could not answer the question based on the now-operative allegations,” his petition said. By contrast, the Paramount case has a final judgment, no ongoing proceedings, and “can be reviewed on the same record the lower courts considered.”

Paramount urged the court to decline Salazar’s petition. Despite the circuit split on the “consumer” question, Paramount said that Salazar’s claims would fail in the 2nd and 7th circuits for different reasons. Paramount argued that “computer code shared in targeted advertising does not qualify as ‘personally identifiable information,’” and that “247Sports is not a ‘video tape service provider’ in the first place.”

“247Sports does not rent, sell, or offer subscriptions to video tapes. Nor does it stream movies or shows,” Paramount said. “Rather, it is a sports news website with articles, photos, and video clips—and all of the content at issue in this case is available for free to anybody on the Internet. That is a completely different business from renting video cassette tapes. The VPPA does not address it.”

Paramount further argued that Salazar’s case isn’t a good vehicle to consider the “consumer” definition because his “complaint fails for multiple additional reasons that could complicate further review.”

Paramount wasn’t able to convince the Supreme Court that the case isn’t worth taking up, however. SCOTUSblog says that “the case will likely be scheduled for oral argument in the court’s 2026-27 term,” which begins in October 2026.

Jon is a Senior IT Reporter for Ars Technica. He covers the telecom industry, Federal Communications Commission rulemakings, broadband consumer affairs, court cases, and government regulation of the tech industry.

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Australian plumber is a YouTube sensation

competence porn, culture, Internet culture, plumbing, youtube, youtube creators, youtube culture / Rejus Almole / January 27, 2026

My personal favorites are when Bruce takes on clogged restaurant grease traps, including the one at the top of this article in which he pulls out a massive greaseberg “the size of a chihuahua.” When it’s Bruce versus a nasty grease trap, the man remains undefeated (well, almost—sometimes he needs to get a grease trap pumped out before he can fix the problem). And I have learned more than I probably ever needed to know about how grease traps work.

schematic illustration showing how a grease trap works — Credit: YouTube/Drain Cleaning Australia

Each video is its own little adventure. Bruce arrives on a job, checks out the problem (“she is chock-a-block, mate!”), and starts methodically working that problem until he solves it, which inevitably involves firing up “the bloody jet” to blast through blockages with 5,000 psi of water pressure (“Go, you good thing!”). This being Australia, he’ll occasionally encounter not just cockroaches but poisonous spiders and snakes. And he’s caught so many facefulls of wastewater and sewage while jetting that he really ought to invest in a hazmat suit. Even the cheesy canned techno-music playing during lulls in the action is low-budget perfection.

Bruce isn’t the only plumber with a YouTube channel—it’s a surprisingly good-size subgenre—but he’s the most colorful and entertaining. His unbridled enthusiasm for what many would consider the dirtiest of jobs is positively infectious. He regularly effuses about having the best job in the world, insisting that unclogging gross drains is “living the dream,” and regularly asks his audience, “How good is this? I mean, where else would you rather be?” Sure, he says it with an ironic (unseen) wink at the camera, but deep down, you know he truly loves the work.

And you know what? Bruce is right. It might not be your definition of “what dreams are made of,” but there really is something profoundly satisfying about a free-flowing drain—and a job well done.

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Apple’s AirTag 2 is easier to find thanks to new chip

AirTag, Apple, bluetooth, location tracker, Tech / Rejus Almole / January 26, 2026

Additionally, the speaker in the AirTag is now 50 percent louder, Apple says. These two things together address some user complaints that, as useful as an AirTag can be in ideal circumstances, sometimes it is frustrating trying to get things just right to find something. It won’t eliminate all edge cases, but it ought to help.

Apple used this announcement to also talk up some of the features of the AirTag, including the encryption that it says prevents anyone but the AirTag owner from using it, and an arrangement with airlines where users can temporarily give airlines the ability to use Apple’s network to find a specific AirTag to locate lost luggage and the like.

To be clear, the new AirTag doesn’t introduce any major new features that aren’t already offered in the previous generation—this is just an update to the device’s accuracy, volume, and range.

The price remains unchanged, at $29 for one AirTag or $99 for a pack of four. The new model is available for order on Apple’s website now and will hit physical stores later this week.

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How to encrypt your PC’s disk without giving the keys to Microsoft

BitLocker, Security, Tech, Windows 10, Windows 11 / Rejus Almole / January 26, 2026

If you want to encrypt your Windows PC’s disk but you don’t want to store your recovery key with Microsoft, you do have options. We’ll recap the requirements, as well as the steps you’ll need to take.

You’ll need Windows 11 Pro for this

Settings > System > Activation will tell you what edition of Windows 11 you have and offer some options for upgrades. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Before we begin: Disk encryption is one of the handful of differences between the Home and Pro versions of Windows.

Both the Home and Pro versions of Windows support disk encryption, but only the Pro versions give users full control over the process. The Home version of Windows only supports disk encryption when logged in with a Microsoft account and will only offer to store your encryption key on Microsoft’s servers.

To access the full version of BitLocker and back up your own recovery key, you’ll need to upgrade to the Pro version of Windows. Microsoft offers its own first-party upgrade option through the Microsoft Store for a one-time fee of $99, but it’s also possible to bring your own product key and upgrade yourself. This Macworld-affiliated listing from StackCommerce claims to be an official Microsoft partner and is offering a Windows 11 Pro key for just $10, though your mileage with third-party key resellers may vary.

However you get it, once you have a valid key, open Settings, then System, then Activation, click upgrade your edition of Windows, click change product key, and then enter your Windows 11 Pro key (Windows 10 Pro keys should also work, if you already have one). Luckily, changing Windows editions doesn’t require anything more disruptive than a system restart. You won’t need to reinstall Windows, and you shouldn’t lose any of your installed apps or data.

And once you’ve upgraded a PC to Windows 11 Pro once, you should be able to reinstall and activate Windows 11 Pro on that system again any time you want without having to re-enter your product key. Keep the product key stored somewhere, though, just in case you do need to use it for a reinstall, or if you ever need to re-activate Windows after a hardware upgrade.

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How to get Doom running on a pair of earbuds

can it run doom, coding, Doom, gaming, hack, id, port / Rejus Almole / January 26, 2026

Hard to believe the gameplay on this website is powered by a set of earbuds. Credit: DoomBuds

Squeezing the entirety of Doom onto modern earbuds wasn’t an easy task, either. The 4.2MB of game data won’t quite fit on the PineBuds’ 4MB of flash memory, for instance. That means the project needed to use a 1.7MB “squashware” build of Doom, which eliminates some animation frames and shortens some music tracks to make the game even more portable.

The earbuds also have just under 1MB of RAM, requiring the coding of a new version of the game that optimizes away many of the bits that usually fill up a full 4MB of RAM in the standard game. “Pre-generating lookup tables, making variables const, reading const variables from flash, disabling DOOM’s caching system, removing unneeded variables… it all adds up,” Sarkisan writes.

For those without their own PineBuds to test this wild idea, Sarkisan has set up an interactive Twitch stream that players can queue up to control for 45-second sessions via doombuds.com. It’s a great little break-time diversion, especially for people ready to marvel that a set of $70 earbuds can now run a game that required a $1,000-plus computer tower a few decades ago.

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A weird, itchy rash is linked to the keto diet—but no one knows why

case report, dermatology, health, ketogenic, New England Journal of Medicine, rash, weight loss / Rejus Almole / January 24, 2026

Diet downsides

Otherwise, the keto diet is popular among people trying to lose weight, particularly those trying to lose visceral fat, like the man in the case study. Anecdotal reports promote the keto diet as being effective at helping people slim down relatively quickly while also improving stamina and mental clarity. But robust clinical data supporting these claims are lacking, and medical experts have raised concerns about long-term cardiovascular health, among other things.

There are also clear downsides to the diet. Ketones are acidic, and if they build up too much in the blood, they can be toxic, causing ketoacidosis. This is a particular concern for people with type 1 diabetes and for people with chronic alcohol abuse. For everyone else, there’s a list of common side effects, including nausea, vomiting, constipation, diarrhea, bad breath, headache, fatigue, and dizziness. Ketogenic diets are also linked to high cholesterol and kidney stones.

But there’s one side effect that’s well established but little known and still puzzling to doctors: the “keto rash” or prurigo pigmentosa. This rash fits the man’s case perfectly—red, raised, itchy bumps on the neck, chest, and back, with areas of hyperpigmentation also developing.

The rash was first identified in Japan in 1971, where it was mostly seen in women. While it has been consistently linked to metabolic disorders and dietary changes, experts still don’t understand what causes it. It’s seen not only in people on a keto diet but also in people with diabetes and those who have had bariatric surgery or are fasting.

In a review this month, researchers in Saudi Arabia noted that a leading hypothesis is that the high levels of ketones in the blood trigger inflammation around blood vessels driven by a type of white blood cell called neutrophils, and this inflammation is what causes the rash, which develops in different stages.

While the condition remains poorly understood, effective treatments have at least been worked out. The most common treatment is to get the person out of ketosis and give them an antibiotic in the tetracycline class. Antibiotics are designed to treat bacterial infections (which this is not), but they can also dampen inflammation signals and thwart the activity of neutrophils.

In the man’s case, doctors gave him a two-week course of doxycycline and told him to ditch his keto diet. A week later, the rash was gone.

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Dating Roundup #11: Going Too Meta

Dating / Rejus Almole / January 23, 2026

If there’s several things this blog endorses, one of them would be going meta.

It’s time. The big picture awaits.

The most important meta question is location, location, location.

This is the periodic reminder that dating dynamics are very different in different locations, and gender ratios are far more uneven than they appear because a lot of people pair off and aren’t in the pool.

If you are a man seeking to date women, New York City is the place to be.

Churrasco Suadade: when I’m out I notice that tables at restaurants and bars in manhattan are probably around 80-95% women, it’s a new dynamic that no one is talking about.

Fixed Income Guy: Are you at all the poor people places? All the finance guy hang outs are 80% dudes.

I mention Fixed Income Guy to mock him, as in why are you spending a lot more money to hang out with 80% dudes and largely finance dudes at that? I mean, sure, if that’s what you want.

Darrell Owens: Oh this is new? Coming from the Bay Area, the amount of women I see in Manhattan is insane. You rarely see more than few young women partying back in San Francisco. The gender ratio here feels 70: 30 young women to men, its every block in Manhattan!

Noah Smith: In an ideal world, where you live wouldn’t really matter in terms of dating opportunities, but the truth is that one of the easiest ways to get chicks is to just move to New York City.

Having lived in both Tokyo and NYC, I can pretty confidently tell you that while Tokyo is not a tough dating market by any means, NYC is absolutely on another level.

This viral clip (which is viral for a reason, it’s good fun, wait for it) is another endorsement of New York City being a great place to meet women, as you have a wide variety of great and largely successful women to explore. What doesn’t get mentioned in that clip as a key reason things are so great is that the gender ratio in NYC is highly favorable for men.

The interviewer asks about dating women who make more money than then the man, clearly trying to get the guy to say this is a problem, but he isn’t buying it, instead pointing out that successful women are more thoughtful and plan for the future, and it in no way bothers him at all. Right on, but this sidesteps the other half of problem. The man has to be okay with the fact that he earns less money (and often has less formal education or other status markers), which often men aren’t, and also the woman has to be okay with it too.

That’s the rub. As a man, you might (and should be) be actively all for it (this doesn’t make you less successful, it makes you more successful), but if she’s going to be bothered by it anyway, that’s also your problem. So the key is to figure out quickly if she will actually be fine with it or not.

Being in shape is great. Having muscle can be a game changer. By far the worst plausible amount of exercise is none at all.

Lauren Self: Men severely underestimate the power of gaining 20lbs of muscle

Lauren Self (QTing from before): LISTEN UP BOYS.

But don’t go nuts. For most people that is not a problem, but yes it is very possible to go too far. As a man, as I understand preferences in general, you don’t want to go near actual zero fat and you don’t want to look actively skinny.

Taoki: why are women lying about this? like what’s the actual cause?

Lauren Self: 100% of women would choose something in between these two options

Shako: The aesthetics of a man who poses gives them the ick. But if both were shirtless at a beach they’d obviously prefer the fit guy.

Special K: No he does look better in the before. Women are correct on this one I fear. Guys obsess over these supremely tight toned muscles and they shouldn’t.

Liron Shapira: Guy on left looks like he’s a chill dude with a social life, guy on right looks like he’s obsessed with his body. Same body could look better with better social context, although just the extremeness of his rippedness is a little alarming about his life priorities.

Joel: “let’s get a burger?” v “are you really gonna eat that?”

Mason: The male equivalent of the hourglass shape is just “wall”

Teej dv: his smile is nicer in the first one

Taoki: It is actually. We like you guys wide.

LS Vision: Nah this is cap. The women who selected before is def just the insecurity of his value going up afterwards and making them feel insecure he’d cheat or leave. Any man who has went through a gym transformation, you can LITERALLY feel women treat you significantly different after.

Mason: Women generally like tall guys who have some (not crazy) muscle definition, and a little extra fat that bulks that out can actually augment that

We all have our own tastes, but this a pretty typical type.

I don’t know what there is to be mad about here.

For practical purposes, before beats after here. The before guy is already in ordinary, practical good shape. The after guy took things too far, and seems to know it except that he thinks it is good, which makes it worse.

Except one key special case?

Benjamin Ryan: People are going back and forth about whether women think the guy in the right is hot. But people have no idea how extreme the standards are for gay men. In gay culture, the man on the left is considered hopelessly fat. Many gay men have no reservations about informing such a man about his supposed corpulence being anathema.

I wrote about the rare study to examine the toxic qualities of gay culture for The Guardian.

I mean, of course there are hot guys who don’t know they’re hot, even more so than there are hot women who don’t know they’re hot.

Pandora: One surprising takeaway from Slutcon was that apparently there are hot guys who just don’t know they are hot? Guess it’s time to go objectify some more men.

Eneasz Brodski: If you grow up ugly you never really internalize that you are attractive after a glow-up. I still don’t believe it inside, and I hear I’m attractive to a fair percentage of women. Also makes me far more attracted to women w the same experience, but that may be a male universal.

Pandora: This problem seems even more pervasive than I thought.

Sparr: Hot in general, to the average viewer, or hot to you? You seem like someone who can probably tell the difference.

Pandora: I saw examples of guys being clueless about all three at once.

21 Kindness: The whole “men subsist on one compliment a decade thing” is kinda true lol.

Misha: it turns out being hot is not, in and of itself, very useful for men.

Sokoban Hero: No it’s useful.

Misha: I said not VERY useful.

Dissproportionately: I’ve seen men unhot themselves to women within minutes. I don’t think women can unhot themselves to men.

Being hot is in many ways a lot less valuable if you don’t know you are hot, because you don’t get the confidence and you don’t take advantage of opportunities or feel you’re good enough, but contra Misha I believe it is still very useful. There are even some advantages to not knowing, in that some of the behaviors that happen when someone knows they are hot are often effectively arrogant or entitled or demanding or selfish, none of which helps.

This link is almost certainly bait, but things in some spaces have gotten so insane that you can’t be sure people aren’t talking about 28-31 as a problematic age gap. What?

I mean, at minimum it’s good bait, it worked.

I’ve also seen some other examples that look a lot less like bait but still involve obviously totally fine gaps in both directions. As in, I’ve heard talk in places where it definitely wasn’t bait of 24 and 27 being radically different numbers, and I don’t understand why.

Well, maybe. Via Rolf Degen there is a meta-study.

The obvious question is whether this is a causal relationship, or whether it is primarily selection effects. You are on the dating apps for a reason.

Rolf Degen (quoting the study):

Meta-analysis: The use of dating apps is associated with poorer mental health.

Dating apps hold the promising reward of love but have been accused of using perverse incentive structures to profit from those who try to find it. We conducted the first systematic review and quantitative meta-analysis of studies examining average differences in the outcomes of dating app users and non-users.

Our results showed that dating app users had worse psychological health and well-being than dating app non-users across a variety of outcomes including depression, anxiety, affective dysregulation, loneliness, and psychological distress, although cross-sectional design limitations prevent causal interpretation. By aggregating findings from extant studies, we showed that in the nearly 17 years since dating apps have been on the market, users of these platforms have reported poorer psychological health and well-being than non-users.

There are several explanations for why dating app users may be struggling. The first is that dating apps are subject to selection effects, making the people who choose to use these platforms different from those who do not. People who are vulnerable to psychological health and well-being difficulties may prefer dating apps because they can avoid uncomfortable interactions, leading to negative patterns of reinforcement.

A second explanation involves exposure effects; that is, features such as gamification that may provide positive reinforcements that encourage problematic dating app use and keep people swiping.

The differences identified here could explain some of the challenges that users are likely to experience and be part of the reason they eventually burn out and quit dating apps altogether.

My guess is that dating apps are in important ways bad for mental health versus having better ways to find dates, and that sufficiently bad outcomes in terms of ability to find dates or find worthwhile dates is indeed worse for short term reported mental health than not trying. Whereas those who are successful get off the apps or never needed them in the first place.

What is the alternative? If the other choice is ‘do not try’ then for the median user the dating app is probably trading short term pain for chance of long term gain. If the other choice is ‘have uncomfortable real life interactions and make things happen’ and the app is blocking that instead of supplementing or leading into that, then the alternative is plausibly strictly better.

Certainly we could make app variations that are better for mental health controlling for outcomes, and also that give people better outcomes. Solving for the equilibrium, to get people to actually use those apps, is the difficult part, since people will value convenience and ease of use and low cost and avoiding trivial inconveniences dramatically more than they should, and if enough especially women effectively insist on the swiping experience it’s hard to escape from that.

I think this is importantly wrong for both e-girls and also VCs?

Anton: egirl dating takes are worthless for the same reason vc takes on how you should run your company are worthless; if you could do it you would just do it not talk about it

men in particular are truly better off without this kind of “help”

making up egirls in my head to get mad at

If she could be an E-Girl or she could date, what makes you think she would choose to date? What makes you think she isn’t also dating?

Similarly, if you could be a VC or a startup founder, it’s not that suspicious that you would choose VC. At this point in my life I would definitely prefer VC over founder. I don’t want to go through founder mode again. I am totally prepared to eat my words if I end up doing it anyway, and if I’m in then I’m in, but I don’t want to be in.

Division of labor, like dudes and also women, rocks. Matchmakers should be much more of a thing than they are. There is a profound market failure, a failure of the services to be good versions of themselves, or both.

I cannot in any way vouch for the effectiveness of Blaine Anderson’s matchmaking service. I can however vouch for her Twitter feed having consistently insightful and fun things to say. Her price range is ‘usually less than $50k’ and in exchange she goes out and sources to fit your particular criteria (which she will sometimes push back on).

You can also sign up (for free) to be a woman she reached out to for matches, on first principles being on these lists seems to be a good time investment?

There’s a lot of self-promotion, no question, but there are hard-to-fake signals that she is the real version of the thing in various ways, facing reality as it is, looking at the data and actually trying to get good results.

Also this one makes a good case:

Blaine Anderson: Underrated advantage of hiring a matchmaker, if you’re a single man:

• You sound cringe AF when you brag about yourself to women

• You sound amazing when I brag about you to women

One thing that blows my mind is she tells stories where the guy will say ‘get me a date with this specific micro-famous woman’ and she (at least sometimes) goes out and makes that happen. The guys asking this look damn good on paper, which no doubt is a lot of why this can sometimes work, but still, hot damn.

EigenGender: despite being very happily in a long term relationship im always very excited to read a dating doc. they’re some of the most vulnerable and genuine writing you can find and a window into another persons life. if you make fun of them you’re burning the commons and you should stop.

Stephen Fay: I like to read the date me docs, but I also am entertained by what Zizek has to say about them

Zizek (well okay actually Paula Rambles): Ah! You see, this miserable little document, this so-called date-me doc, is our era’s most honest pornography. It pretends to be romance, but what is it really? It is no longer the trembling hand on paper, the confession of desire. It is a spreadsheet of desire. “I am ready. I am six foot four. I have done the work.” What work? Love is precisely the place where work collapses into failure. You study and then you fail the exam.

And look at this language. “Highly agentic, emotionally warm.” Beautiful nonsense. Freedom, yes, but domesticated. Agency, yes, but pointing politely towards him. For Hegel, love is the risky collision of two freedoms. Here, there is no risk. She must arrive pre-formatted.

Then the farce reaches ecstasy. “If she does not appear, I will pursue single fatherhood.” Magnificent. Chance is canceled. Eros becomes procedure. The miracle of two gazes across a smoky room is replaced by paperwork and a receipt. The objet petit a is now a literal baby routed around the Other. And of course, the “monogamish” clause. Pure ideology. Fidelity with a footnote. Like Coke Zero: love without sugar, passion without calories. He wants the experience of devotion, but sterilized of danger.

The document offers no asylum from loneliness. It is loneliness, meticulously formatted, hyperlinked, and begging for comments. He does not whisper “I love you.” He says “I am prepared to love you, conditionally, pending review.”

That’s a funny post, and does an excellent job of mocking those who would make fun of date me docs and other actually intentional stances. Such magnificent flailing.

And thus, you have failed to look at the Date Me doc of Olga Yakimenko.

Here, in addition to the intended lede, we have at least 40% of respondents having been in a relationship for fully 8 years.

Aella: wow a whole 40% of people in long-term relationships are satisfied with their sex lives!

Critter: i imagine the numbers are worse for people not in long-term relationships

If anything these results seem potentially ‘too good,’ implying that couples are breaking up over this more than they probably should over the longer term.

One must also note that this is an Aella survey, so some of these relationships will be poly or open, but even accounting for that this says a lot. Selection effects are a lot of this, but that’s part of the point.

Perhaps you especially don’t appreciate marriage.

Raffi Grinberg writes that marriage is sexy, both figuratively that married couples are happier and make more money and have more kids and die less often and all that, and also that they have more sex (even if you only count with each other). And that the lifetime divorce rate is actually only 30% not 50%, average age of marriage is 29 and average first child is 28, despite the implicit cultural message that those numbers are in the 30s.

And yet he says Hollywood is sending us the opposite message. To which I’d say, sometimes, but I wouldn’t oversell this. Yes, in the How I Met Your Mother episode he talks about Barney keeps making fun of Marshall for being married, but the show clearly thinks that Marshall marrying Lily is sexy and awesome and great for both of them throughout and that Barney is ultimately wrong, and also the whole show is Ted trying to meet his wife and mother of his children.

Here’s another backdoor ‘are you in a relationship’ poll, 78% of monogamous heterosexual men reported having a partner for longer than a year.

Alice Playing: monogamous hetero men with 1+ year-long partners: if you could have an affair with a woman of your liking, with absolute, 100% certainty that your partner would never find out, would you do it?

On the question itself, it’s not actually possible, since you’ll know and you can’t be sure you won’t tell them, and you’ll almost certainly act differently even if they never suspect or figure it out. One could even say ‘the only way to have 100% certainty they’ll never find out is if they’re dead, so absolutely not.’

Literal ‘any woman you wanted’ with zero risk of discovery is a stupidly tempting offer. If you treat this in the spirit it was presumably intended, instead, and everyone was being fully honest including with themselves and fully understood what was on offer (as in literally whoever you’d most want), presumably the ratio would be a lot higher.

Unless, of course, the way you know your partner will never find out is that your partner (or you and the woman you’d have the affair with) would be dead, in which case yeah bad deal, but that’s presumably not this meant. mnnn oo

How do we know this? Well, one big data point is this next poll.

Um, guys, are almost none of you in a monogamous relationship? And even if you are single there’s also the issue of risking the friendship. What are you all thinking?

Alice Is Playing: men attracted to women: how many of your female friends would you have a one-night stand with, if they offered?

Only 14% of men attracted to women answering this didn’t have at least one female friend they would have a one night stand with? Presumably many of the others don’t have the right female friend. Which means substantially more than 86% of them are not, for the most important practical purpose, in a monogamous relationship?

Remember that other poll from Aella above, that showed at least 40% of people were in 8+ year relationships? And the one from Alice that 78% of herero men were in a 1+ year nominally monogamous relationship? Rut roh.

Then on top of that, a majority are willing to do this with a majority of their female friends, not only that one they have that crush on.

It doesn’t mean these people don’t think they’re in relationships. As we’ve seen, they very much do think this. They might even be right. But don’t tempt them.

Paper reminds us there is a 34 points gap (+34 versus +0) in net happiness for married versus unmarried people, with cohabitation only worth 10 points, and analyzes how this premium varies (slightly) by demographics.

As the paper readily admits this tells us essentially nothing about what makes someone happy, because the whole thing is unfixibly confounded to hell. Happier, healthier and more successful people have an easier time getting married, and being unhappy leads to divorce. Both effects are epic in size.

We do know the overall situation over a 50+ year time horizon is not good news, because while marrieds are slightly happier, the unmarrieds are somewhat less happy and more importantly are a larger percent of the population.

Beyond that, I don’t know what to do with all these graphs or how to cash it out in useful advice. One might say ‘be the type of person who gets married,’ perhaps.

As usual, never stop Robin Hansoning.

Robin Hanson: You know how in romance stories the main characters hope to find a special relation, better than that which the ordinary people around them settle for? Your relations will probably be more like those of the ordinary folks, less like those of special main characters.

This has to be true, because math.

It’s less true than it appears, because the relations of ‘main characters’ feel special to them the same as everyone else’s feel special. You could totally make a romantic comedy based on what I experienced, and you could also totally have me as a background character in someone else’s romantic comedy, although probably I’d be in a different genre entirely.

To you, it will feel more like that of the special main characters, except that you don’t need to have a false crisis in the third act.

Don’t be whoever Casy Means is being here. Or do, it’s not like it did that much harm, as long as you don’t expect any of it to do anything.

We wish everyone involved the best.

Aella: it’s really unfortunate that having an insane ex turns you personally into a greater liability for others

Grimes: hahaha [trauma laughter].

Aella: 🙁 i wasnt thinking about u when i wrote the tweet but also :(.

Try harder.

A new app lets you pay to crash someone’s wedding and be a legit guest, cost is about $100-$150 per guest. This seems low, given the cost to have a wedding worth crashing, and given you get a full meal, plus buffet and open bar, a unique experience and a reasonable amount of opportunity.

What Jacob learned about sex at the rationalist bloggers’ conference, essentially that with zero integrity you get fuckbois and pickup artists, and when you do the opposite and get sufficiently high integrity and optimize for trust and honesty way above normal levels you get something magical and suddenly many good things are possible.

Here’s another fun bit:

Jacob: My friend “Standard Deviant” gave a talk titled “How I’ve had more sex.” He described the “escalator”: starting a conversation, exchanging compliments, light touch on the arm, etc. The important thing isn’t to rush up the escalator, my friend said, but to move together in synchrony whether you’re taking a step up or a step down.

When women show interest in casual sex, he often asks: do you do this sort of thing often? If they don’t, he often forgoes the opportunity out of an excess of caution.

Afterwards, more women wanted to have sex with him. I joked that women want to have sex not with the tall guy, hot guy, or the famous guy, but with the Schelling point guy.

Someone pointed out that tall, hot, and famous are the usual Schelling points.

Discussion about this post

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Overrun with AI slop, cURL scraps bug bounties to ensure “intact mental health”

AI, Biz & IT, bug bounties, LLMs, Security, slop / Rejus Almole / January 22, 2026

The project developer for one of the Internet’s most popular networking tools is scrapping its vulnerability reward program after being overrun by a spike in the submission of low-quality reports, much of it AI-generated slop.

“We are just a small single open source project with a small number of active maintainers,” Daniel Stenberg, the founder and lead developer of the open source app cURL, said Thursday. “It is not in our power to change how all these people and their slop machines work. We need to make moves to ensure our survival and intact mental health.”

Manufacturing bogus bugs

His comments came as cURL users complained that the move was treating the symptoms caused by AI slop without addressing the cause. The users said they were concerned the move would eliminate a key means for ensuring and maintaining the security of the tool. Stenberg largely agreed, but indicated his team had little choice.

In a separate post on Thursday, Stenberg wrote: “We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports.” An update to cURL’s official GitHub account made the termination, which takes effect at the end of this month, official.

cURL was first released three decades ago, under the name httpget and later urlget. It has since become an indispensable tool among admins, researchers, and security professionals, among others, for a wide range of tasks, including file transfers, troubleshooting buggy web software, and automating tasks. cURL is integrated into default versions of Windows, macOS, and most distributions of Linux.

As such a widely used tool for interacting with vast amounts of data online, security is paramount. Like many other software makers, cURL project members have relied on private bug reports submitted by outside researchers. To provide an incentive and to reward high-quality submissions, the project members have paid cash bounties in return for reports of high-severity vulnerabilities.

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Hacker who stole 120,000 bitcoins wants a second chance—and a security job

Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, cybercrime, Security / Rejus Almole / January 22, 2026

“When I was a black hat hacker, I was isolated and paranoid,” he wrote. “Working with the good guys, being part of a team solving a bigger problem felt surprisingly good. I realized that I could use my technical skills to make a difference.

Lichtenstein, who did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment, noted that he was sentenced to 60 months in prison and spent “nearly [four] years in some of the harshest jails in the country.” While in prison, Lichtenstein says that he spent as much time as he could in the prison library studying math books to engage his mind and distract himself from his surroundings.

The 38-year-old added that he was “released to home confinement earlier this month.”

Convicted hackers cooperating with federal authorities or turning their lives around is not without precedent.

One notable example is the late Kevin Mitnick, who was convicted of multiple phone and computer crime cases in the 1980s and 1990s. Mitnick eventually started his own security consulting company and became a penetration tester and public speaker for many years before his death in 2023.

“Now begins the real challenge of regaining the community’s trust,” Lichtenstein concluded, noting that he wants to work in cybersecurity.

“I think like an adversary,” he said. “I’ve been an adversary. Now I can use those same skills to stop the next billion-dollar hack.”

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Report: Apple plans to launch AI-powered wearable pin device as soon as 2027

AI, Apple, Gemini, Humane, llm, Siri, wearable / Rejus Almole / January 22, 2026

The report didn’t include any information about pricing, but it did say that Apple has fast-tracked the product with the hope to release it as early as 2027. Twenty million units are planned for launch, suggesting the company does not expect it to be a sensational consumer success at launch the way some of its past products, like AirPods, have been.

Not long ago, it was reported that OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT) plans to release its own hardware, though the specifics and form factor are not publicly known. Apple is expecting fierce competition there, as well as with Meta, which Apple already expected to compete with in the emerging and related smart glasses market.

Apple has experienced significant internal turmoil over AI, with former AI lead John Giannandrea’s conservative approach to the technology failing to lead to a usable, true LLM-based Siri or other products analysts expect would make Apply stay competitive in the space with other Big Tech companies.

Just a few days ago, it was revealed that Apple will tap Google’s Gemini large language models for an LLM overhaul of Siri. Other AI-driven products like smart glasses and an in-home smart display are also planned.

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Blue Origin makes impressive strides with reuse—next launch will refly booster

ast spacemobile, blue origin, reuse, Space / Rejus Almole / January 22, 2026

SpaceX successfully landed its second Falcon 9 booster in April 2016, on the 23rd overall flight of the Falcon 9 fleet. This booster was refurbished and, after a lengthy series of inspections, it was reflown successfully in March 2017, nearly 11 months later.

Reshuffling the manifest

With New Glenn, Blue Origin is seeking to refly a booster on just the third overall flight of the New Glenn fleet and turn the rocket around in less than four months. Even for a well-capitalized program with the benefit of learning from both Blue Origin’s own suborbital New Shepard rocket and the industry’s experience with the Falcon 9, this represents an impressive turnaround in first stage reuse.

Blue Origin originally planned to launch its MK1 lunar lander on the third flight of New Glenn, but it pivoted to a commercial launch as the lunar vehicle continues preparatory work.

On Wednesday, the company announced that it had completed the integration of the MK1 vehicle and put it on a barge bound for Johnson Space Center in Houston. There, it will undergo vacuum chamber testing before a launch later this spring—or, more likely, sometime this summer.

Blue Origin makes impressive strides with reuse—next launch will refly booster Read More »

The fastest human spaceflight mission in history crawls closer to liftoff

artemis, artemis II, Christina Koch, human spaceflight, Jeremy Hansen, Kennedy Space Center, moon, NASA, orion, Reid Wiseman, Science, Space, space launch system, victor glover / Rejus Almole / January 19, 2026

After a remarkably smooth launch campaign, Artemis II reached its last stop before the Moon.

NASA’s Space Launch System rocket rolls to Launch Complex 39B on Saturday. Credit: Stephen Clark/Ars Technica

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Florida—Preparations for the first human spaceflight to the Moon in more than 50 years took a big step forward this weekend with the rollout of the Artemis II rocket to its launch pad.

The rocket reached a top speed of just 1 mph on the four-mile, 12-hour journey from the Vehicle Assembly Building to Launch Complex 39B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. At the end of its nearly 10-day tour through cislunar space, the Orion capsule on top of the rocket will exceed 25,000 mph as it plunges into the atmosphere to bring its four-person crew back to Earth.

“This is the start of a very long journey,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. “We ended our last human exploration of the moon on Apollo 17.”

The Artemis II mission will set several notable human spaceflight records. Astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen will travel farther from Earth than any human in history. They won’t land. That distinction will fall to the next mission in line in NASA’s Artemis program.

But the Artemis II astronauts will travel more than 4,000 miles beyond the far side of the Moon (the exact distance depends on the launch date), setting up for a human spaceflight speed record during their blazing reentry over the Pacific Ocean a few days later. Koch will become the first woman to fly to the vicinity of the Moon, and Hansen will be the first non-US astronaut to do the same.

“We really are ready to go,” said Wiseman, the Artemis II commander, during Saturday’s rollout to the launch pad. “We were in a sim [in Houston] for about 10 hours yesterday doing our final capstone entry and landing sim. We got in T-38s last night and we flew to the Cape to be here for this momentous occasion.”

The rollout began around sunrise Saturday, with NASA’s Space Launch System rocket and Orion capsule riding a mobile launch platform and a diesel-powered crawler transporter along a throughway paved with crushed Alabama river rock. Employees, VIPs, and guests gathered along the crawlerway to watch the 11 million-pound stack inch toward the launch pad. The rollout concluded about an hour after sunset, when the crawler transporter’s jacking system lowered the mobile launch platform onto pedestals at Pad 39B.

Hitting the launch window

The rollout keeps the Artemis II mission on track for liftoff as soon as next month, when NASA has a handful of launch opportunities on February 6, 7, 8, 10, and 11.

The big milestone leading up to launch day will be a practice countdown or Wet Dress Rehearsal (WDR), currently slated for around February 2, when NASA’s launch team will pump more than 750,000 gallons of super-cold liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen into the rocket. NASA had trouble keeping the cryogenic fluids at the proper temperature, then encountered hydrogen leaks when the launch team first tried to fill the rocket for the unpiloted Artemis I mission in 2022. Engineers implemented the same fixes on Artemis II that they used to finally get over the hump with propellant loading on Artemis I.

So, what are the odds NASA can actually get the Artemis II mission off the ground next month?

“We’ll have to have things go right,” said Matt Ramsey, NASA’s Artemis II mission manager, in an interview with Ars on Saturday. “There’s a day of margin there for weather. There’s some time after WDR that we’ve got for data reviews and that sort of thing. It’s not unreasonable, but I do think it’s a success-oriented schedule.”

The Moon has to be in the right position in its orbit for the Artemis II launch to proceed. There are also restrictions on launch dates to ensure the Orion capsule returns to Earth and reenters the atmosphere at an angle safe for the ship’s heat shield. If the launch does not happen in February, NASA has a slate of backup launch dates in early March.

Ars was at Kennedy Space Center for the rocket’s move to the launch pad Saturday. The photo gallery below shows the launcher emerging from the Vehicle Assembly Building, the same facility once used to stack Saturn V rockets during the Apollo Moon program. The Artemis II astronauts were also on hand for a question and answer session with reporters.

Around the clock

The first flight of astronauts on the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft is running at least five years late. The flight’s architecture, trajectory, and goals have changed multiple times, and technical snags discovered during manufacturing and testing repeatedly shifted the schedule. The program’s engineering and budgetary problems are well documented.

But the team readying the rocket and spacecraft for launch has hit a stride in recent months. Technicians inside the Vehicle Assembly Building started stacking the SLS rocket in late 2024, beginning with the vehicle’s twin solid-fueled boosters. Then ground teams added the core stage, upper stage, and finally installed the Orion spacecraft on top of the rocket last October.

Working nearly around the clock in three shifts, it took about 12 months for crews at Kennedy to assemble the rocket and prepare it for rollout. But the launch campaign inside the VAB was remarkably smooth. Ground teams shaved about two months off the time it took to integrate the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft for the Artemis I mission, which launched on the program’s first full-up unpiloted test flight in 2022.

“About a year ago, I was down here and we set the rollout date, and we hit it within a day or two,” said Matt Ramsey, NASA’s mission manager for Artemis II. “Being able to stay on schedule, it was a daily grind to be able to do that.”

Engineers worked through a handful of technical problems last year, including an issue with a pressure-assisted device used to assist the astronauts in opening the Orion hatch in the event of an emergency. More recently, NASA teams cleared a concern with caps installed on the rocket’s upper stage, according to Ramsey.

The most significant engineering review focused on proving the Orion heat shield is safe to fly. That assessment occurred in the background from the perspective of the technicians working on Artemis II at Kennedy.

The Artemis II team is now focused on activities at the launch pad. This week, NASA plans to perform a series of tests extending and retracting the crew access mark. Next, the Artemis II astronauts will rehearse an emergency evacuation from the launch pad. That will be followed by servicing of the rocket’s hydraulic steering system.

The big question mark

All of this leads up to the crucial practice countdown early next month. The astronauts won’t be aboard the rocket for the test, but almost everything else will look like launch day. The countdown will halt around 30 seconds prior to the simulated liftoff.

It took repeated tries to get through the Wet Dress Rehearsal for the Artemis I mission. There were four attempts at the countdown practice run before the first actual Artemis I launch countdown. After encountering hydrogen leaks on two scrubbed launch attempts, NASA performed another fueling test before finally successfully launching Artemis I in November 2022.

The launch team repaired a leaky hydrogen seal and introduced a gentler hydrogen loading procedure to overcome the problem. Hydrogen is an extremely efficient fuel for rockets, but its super-cold temperature and the tiny size of hydrogen molecules make it prone to leakage. The hydrogen feeds the SLS rocket’s four core stage engines and single upper stage engine.

“Artemis I was a test flight, and we learned a lot during that campaign getting to launch,” said Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, NASA’s Artemis II launch director. “The things that we’ve learned relative to how to go load this vehicle, how to load LOX (liquid oxygen), how to load hydrogen, have all been rolled in to the way in which we intend to load the Artemis II vehicle.”

NASA is hesitant to publicly set a target launch date until the agency gets through the dress rehearsal, but agency officials say a February launch remains feasible.

“We’ve held schedule pretty well getting to rollout today,” Isaacman said. “We have zero intention of communicating an actual launch date until we get through wet dress. But look, that’s our first window, and if everything is tracking accordingly, I know the teams are prepared, I know this crew is prepared, we’ll take it.”

“Wet dress is the driver to launch,” Blackwell-Thompson said. “With a wet dress that is without significant issues, if everything goes to plan, then certainly there are opportunities within February that could be achievable.”

One constraint that threw a wrench into NASA’s Artemis I launch campaign is no longer a significant factor for Artemis II. On Artemis I, NASA had to roll the rocket back to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) after the wet dress rehearsal to complete final installation and testing on its flight termination system, which consists of a series of pyrotechnic charges designed to destroy the rocket if it flies off course and threatens populated areas after liftoff.

The US Space Force’s Eastern Range, responsible for public safety for all launches from Florida’s Space Coast, requires the flight termination system be retested after 28 to 35 days, a clock that started ticking last week before rollout. During Artemis I, technicians could not access the parts of the rocket they needed to in order to perform the retest at the launch pad. NASA now has structural arms to give ground teams the ability to reach parts higher up the rocket for the retest without returning to the hangar.

With this new capability, Artemis II could remain at the pad for launch opportunities in February and March before officials need to bring it back to the VAB to replace the flight termination system’s batteries, which still can’t be accessed at the pad.

Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

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Author name: Rejus Almole