Hello. I had some business in midtown Manhattan, but stuff still happened.
So what's up? It's a Funk-Off! Not the good kind.
You know Funko Pops? Like, the weird looking toy things?
They took down itch.io, the gaming website. Itch is a pretty popular indie gaming website.
It's like Steam, but for indie games and art and a bunch of other stuff.
And recently they were taken whole ass offline because this like AI powered bot that Funko Pop uses
to detect copyright infringement saw itch and was like, that's copyright infringement.
Why? I don't know. I don't think they know either.
But ultimately what it meant was there was a takedown request and itch was taken offline.
When you have a website, the domain name, the URL, whatever.com, that's like leased to you.
Like somebody else is managing that and you just can control where it points.
The owner of the domain name that's giving it to you is called a registrar.
And this bot reached out to the registrar for itch.io and was like,
that's a bad one. Get rid of that one.
And the registrar didn't really look too hard into it and was like, okay.
It's back up now. But it's kind of a big deal that an AI bot crawling the internet
reached out to a company that has the ability to take down entire websites.
And that just happened for no reason. It's also the same domain registrar that I use for my websites.
Oops. Elon Musk may need to settle for his $350 billion that he already has.
After using his child as a human shield in the wake of a recent CEO's execution,
Elon Musk has been denied his $56 billion pay package from Tesla again.
This is the second denial of this pay package by a judge in Delaware who's basically saying,
no, stop that. Knock it off.
Musk used his influence over the Tesla board to rubber stamp what would be the biggest payout
to any executive ever for all that great work he's doing at Tesla.
What is he doing? The man just tweets all day.
Here's a quote. This comes from Charles Elson from the University of Delaware
Center for Corporate Governance, which is, I mean, that's a unique one.
Quote, you had a board that wasn't independent, a process that was dominated by the chief executive
and a package that was way out of any sort of reasonable bounds.
It's quite a combo.
The lawsuit brought to stop this payout was actually brought by a shareholder of Tesla
to begin with. Their legal complaint was, this is some bullshit.
Musk is, of course, not happy because he's a soulless monster whose only happiness comes from
being the center of attention and getting paid more than anyone else in history.
And he also likes Diablo 4. He likes Diablo 4 a lot.
Join me. We flock together in these bluest of skies.
Blue sky's popping off. It's really popping off.
They recently hit 24 million users with an exponential increase in users.
I didn't have a different word. Usage?
So what the hell is blue sky and what makes it any different? Why?
You know, blue sky is a microblogging service similar to Twitter.
It was originally founded actually by Jack Dorsey, the original creator of Twitter.
He has since left because he got upset that they wanted to have moderation standards on blue sky.
Blue sky refers to itself as open and claims that it can't be taken over by billionaires.
I want to quickly analyze what that means.
So if you've heard of Macedon, similar to Macedon,
blue sky is built on top of a protocol rather than being a privately held service.
So whereas Twitter is a privately held service that was bought by a single person
who now has total control over the data and who can access it and whatnot,
if it's a protocol, it's a open system and people can build on top of it.
And blue sky is one of those things built on top of it.
Think like email. You can have a Gmail and email a Yahoo account.
That's because both of those services speak the language of email.
They use the email protocol.
There's an existing open standard called activity pub.
That is a protocol for Twitter like stuff to be able to publish updates
and like reply favorite stuff like that.
That's what Macedon is built on top of and a bunch of other services
that all speak the language of activity pub and they can all interact that way.
Blue sky is different.
Blue sky looked at the existing standard and said,
no, we're going to make our own standard.
And they did that and it's called the act protocol.
And that's what blue sky is built on top of.
Thanks for sticking with me.
Largely what this means is that ideally,
despite the fact that blue sky is currently just a VC funded startup,
ideally, no one will have sole ownership over the stewardship of data,
which would mean that you wouldn't have an Elon Musk coming in and buying blue sky
because he can't like structure.
So that's that.
Follow me on blue sky endeavor in stock camp on blue sky.
Okay.
The French government went, it wasn't long ago that I was doing one of these episodes
talking about French president Macron installing Michel Barnier
as a new prime minister in France.
And that was deeply unpopular.
Barnier is far right and was selected to be the prime minister
right after a bunch of left leaning groups made huge headways in elections.
So in a shocking twist, that didn't work out.
The French government has now collapsed after a historic vote of no confidence passed
for the first time in about 60 years.
It was brought because the new prime minister was trying to ram through a budget bill
without a parliamentary vote,
which is not something that people are usually pretty okay with.
Now, to be clear, the phrase the French government has collapsed sounds pretty dramatic.
It's not, it's not.
I mean, it's notable, but all it really means is
they're going to pick a new prime minister and restructure the parliament.
Macron has been facing calls to step down and he's still like,
no, I'm going to finish out my term.
And speaking of governments collapsing,
after 13 years of civil war in Syria, Bashar Assad has fled.
Assad has been the authoritarian leader of Syria since 2000.
And people haven't liked that.
In 2011, civil war broke out and has been raging ever since,
escalating into a proxy war and just causing untold human suffering.
But recently, with the ongoing situation with Israel
and other powers in the region being preoccupied,
Assad didn't have anyone to call for help when the opposition forces took over Damascus.
They rushed in, took the city in a pretty quick sweep,
and Assad fled the country like the little bitch boy he always was.
There's been rejoicing in the streets and around the world
because the refugees from this war have been astronomical.
So think for a second about the amount of relief currently being felt
that was brought on by nothing but this man's ego.
Lightning round.
Those outdoor splash pad things that kids jump around and play in are disgusting.
And the CDC looked into it and it's really, really bad.
Don't have your kids play in those.
After a recent cyber attack on major American network infrastructures,
the FBI is changing their tune and they're like,
hey, maybe y'all should actually use encrypted messaging after all.
Like the FBI is like, no, we like, hmm.
All right, maybe use encryption.
Meta will be joining Google, Amazon, and Microsoft
in pushing for a nuclear power plant
to power their data centers to run their AIs that nobody wants.
What if we had nuclear power for anything but that?
Speaking of massive wastes of electricity,
the Hawk 2A girl recently launched a crypto shit coin
that then crashed in value 95% right after launching.
All signs are currently pointing to a rug pull,
which is essentially a pump and dump scam.
She may be up shit creep.
Nick Fuentes, the very loud white supremacist
who made that video that he said, your body, my choice.
He's been charged with battery and arrested.
So that's nice.
And finally for today, Broward County, Florida,
is finally going to be expunging criminal records that were generated
from a 1993 sting operation where their own police department
was producing and selling crack cocaine to get convictions.
Yes, the police department was producing and selling crack cocaine.
And those convictions were still on the books.
This was back in 1993.
This didn't just happen,
but they're just now getting rid of the conviction.
So, you know.
Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Stuff Keeps Happening.
Head to skh.news for sources, bonus content,
and a blackout curtain for your mind.
My name is Endeavorance.
I'll be back on Monday.
Take care and be well.
Hello, podcast folk.
I'm back.
I said goodbye and now I'm back.
Hope you're doing well.
Thank you so much for listening to the Stuff Keeps Happening podcast.
I would love if you would leave a review of some kind.
It really, really does help.
And especially with the looming TikTok ban potentially actually happening,
I'm going to be leaning more into podcast stuff.
So keep an eye out for more announcements in the world of podcaster-y from your boy, Truly.
And thank you so, so very much.
Take care, be well, and I'll talk to you soon.
Bye-bye.