• Eight thousand subreddits have gone dark, ranging from r/funny with 40 million subscribers down to ones that shall remain nameless involving porn of specific individual Pokemon.  Oh, and Reddit itself crashed.  (The Verge)
  
  With every major subreddit with an ounce of self-respect banished to the Nether Realm, what's left of the self-described "front page of the internet" looks like something scrawled by Rachel Maddow's evil twin on the walls of her padded cell with what you only hope is a smuggled crayon.
  
  Even r/programming has vanished from view, and one of the moderators of that subreddit is u/spez, also known as Steve Huffman, for now the CEO of Reddit.
  
  Oops.

• Microsoft Edge sends the images you view online back to Microsoft.  (NeoWin)
  
  That is not good.
  
  It's supposedly so that Microsoft can apply AI upscaling, which is as much a thing I asked for as ads in my Start menu.
  
  
  
• Intel has - again - shown off benchmarks proving that its new server CPUs are 7x faster than AMD's in workloads that everyone runs on GPUs anyway.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's not entirely a waste of time, but it is almost entirely a waste of time.  Particularly since the special functions needed for that performance are not even included in Intel's regular CPU models.
  
  
  
• AMD meanwhile is announcing its 128 core server CPUs today.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Those will face up against Intel's latest 56 core models, and by face up I mean annihilate.
  
  
  
• The FTC is planning to block Microsoft's takeover of Activision Blizzard.  (CNBC)
  
  Actilizard just chose to Budweiser itself, so perhaps time for Microsoft to step back from the troubled acquisition of a company that hasn't had a good reputation since 2002.
  
  
  
• There is no cloud, just other people's computers, managed by other people, and subject to other people's mistakes.  (The Register)
  
  And sometimes those mistakes are doozies.

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, June 13 2023 10:00 PM (oJgNG)

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• Making friends and influencing people, part one: After a remarkable performance by Reddit's CEO in an AMA (ask me anything) event, many of Reddit's largest communities - called subreddits - have reversed course on their plans for a two day outage in protest over recent changes the the platforms API and are now planning to go dark indefinitely.  (The Verge)
  
  Whoops.
  
  Reports are that CEO Steve Huffman didn't answer a single question from developers, spending all his time whiffing paid softballs.
  
  Here's a list of all the subreddits going offline in protest.  (Reddark)
  
  It's a lot.  Most of the big default subreddits - which, to be fair, are all communist-ridden shitholes - the default subreddits that new users are subscribed to will be going private so that new users can't access them at all.
  
  Which actually improves the site, but I don't know if Reddit will see it that way.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Making friends and influencing people, part two: Online mortgage company Better.com just laid off its entire real estate - after forcing them to take a pay cut of 50% last November in order to keep their jobs.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Eighteen months ago the company made headlines when the CEO fired 900 employees in a Zoom meeting and then took a month's holiday.
  
  Better was in the news again in March last year when it accidentally processed severance pay for 3000 employees before actually telling anyone they were being laid off.
  
  Legally those two events don't count as notice, but as a practical matter, if you're surprised at being fired by Better, you really need to pay more attention.
  
  
  
• Making friends and influencing people, part three: What really went on in the Wuhan lab in the weeks before COVID.  (The Sunday Times)
  
  The usual, you know.  Splicing together deadly viruses that Chinese authorities had kept silent, and researching a vaccine for, uh, COVID.
  
  
  
• Betteridge's Law of Headlines, part one: Does the new Mojo programming language offer a faster superset of Python?  (Slashdot)
  
  No.
  
  
  
• Betteridge's Law of Headlines, part two: Will tech layoffs trigger a wave of unionisation?  (Slashdot)
  
  No.
  
  
  
• Everything new is old again: Inland's - Micro Center's house brand - new PCIe 5 TD510 SSD takes a solid state storage device with no moving parts and revolutionises the concept by adding moving parts.  (Serve the Home)
  
  In this case, a tiny but very annoying fan that runs all the time.  And is probably absolutely needed, because PCIe 5 SSDs run extremely hot and performance plummets by as much as 99% when they aren't properly cooled.
  
  It's fast.  It's very fast - it can transfer over 10GB per second on sequential access, and 5GB per second on random writes, which is phenomenal.  But once it fills its SLC cache, performance is worse than many competing PCIe 4 and even PCIe 3 drives, some of which are half the price.
  
  Basically if you're wondering if you need a PCIe 5 SSD, you don't.  The few people who need them already have spreadsheets full of benchmarks.
  
  
  

Posted by: J Greely at Monday, June 12 2023 06:32 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, June 13 2023 12:03 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Tuesday, June 13 2023 04:21 AM (doHQa)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, June 13 2023 05:16 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, June 13 2023 05:17 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, June 13 2023 08:12 AM (PiXy!)

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• Musicians have no need to worry: MusicGen is ChatGPT for music.  (Honu)
  
  It's terrible.
  
  Not even amateurish.  The page presents dozens of examples of different categories of music created by different software.  None of the ones I listened to show any sign that the software has picked up on what makes music, music.
  
  Sony used to have a software package called Cinescore, that let you pick a theme and basically paint music with it.  You'd say I want a three minutes and twenty seconds of surf rock, and it would give it to you.  You could then say, I want a transition here and the bridge here, and it would do that.
  
  Not high art, no, but great if you wanted to create original background music for videos or games.  And infinitely better than this drivel.
  
  
  

Tech News

• 8GB of GDDR6 RAM costs $25.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Worth asking why Nvidia charges $100.
  
  
  
• A blog that loads in 1 second around the world.  (SwitchupCB)
  
  It's self-promotion, yes, but that site does load fast.  I'll take a look.
  
  Update: I took a look and it's rubbish.
  
  
  
• The Surgeon General has issued a warning about the dangers of government education to teenage minds.  (CNN)
  
  Just kidding.  The chief blitherer is blathering about social media.  Which sucks, yes, but relatively speaking is a tuna in a school of whales.
  
  
  
• Shove it, Clippy: Microsoft's Bing is inserting polls intpo search results.  (Torrent Freak)
  
  Always vote for ancient aliens.
  
  
  
• TThe FBI says that renewing FISA Section 702 is absolutely critical to allow them to continue their job of legally spying on American citizens.  (The Register)
  
  Without it, they might be forced to go back to doing it illegally.
  
  
  
• I rewatched Good Omens season one.  I stand by my earlier assessment that it is one of the best TV series of the past five years.
  
  Which admittedly is like being one of the most honest Democrats in Congress, but still.  Hoping they don't shit all over season two.

Posted by: normal at Monday, June 12 2023 01:27 AM (obo9H)

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• Had a fun start to the weekend when our cloud provider at work decided to migrate twenty-five of our servers to new hardware.  On a Friday afternoon.  5AM Saturday for me.
  
  Yes, we have everything set up with redundant servers.  Doesn't help much when 25 of them reboot all at once.
  
  
  
• The creator of dystopian science-fiction TV series Black Mirror used ChatGPT to write the script for an episode.
  
  It was shit.  (Gizmodo)
  
  All it did was smush together the scripts for other episodes.
  
  What you need to do to be a successful Hollywood writer is smush together the scripts for other episodes while stealing an idea from somewhere else.
  
  
  

Tech News

• The CEO of Reddit has accused the creator of Reddit app Apollo of larceny, pettifoggery, mopery, dopery, and intimate relationships with barn animals, but says he's open to discussion with other developers.  (The Verge)
  
  The other developers aren't buying it and are shutting down their apps as well.
  
  
  
• Why is Apple finally producing a 15" MacBook Air?  Because sales of the more expensive MacBook Pro are in the toilet.  (The Verge)
  
  All the major laptop makers are seeing sales declines in the 20-30% range, but Apple is closer to 40%.
  
  
  
• Speaking of major laptops HP's ZBook Fury 16 G9 is one.  (Notebook Check)
  
  At 2.6kg this is no lightweight - HP's own ZBook Studio 16 weighs in at 1.8kg - but apart from the 16" 3840x2400 screen, the high-end Intel CPU (12th or 13th gen), and Nvidia workstation graphics, it also offers four SO-DIMM slots and four two M.2 slots.*  So you can upgrade it to 128GB (and probably 192GB) of RAM and 32TB 16TB of SSD, which is enough even for me.
  
  Four Essential Keys are sort of there in the shape of a full numeric keypad, and it has two Thunderbolt ports, mini Displayport, HDMI, wired Ethernet (just gigabit, sadly), a full-size SD card slot, two USB-A ports, a headphone jack, and a smartcard reader for corporate security stuff.
  
  Price starts at $1500 with a 12th gen Intel CPU and goes up to around $6000 with every available option. 
  
  * The review says four, and they have the laptop and opened it up to take a look, but they're wrong.
  
  
  
• We don't trade with ants.  (World Spirit Sock Puppet)
  
  But we do with bees.
  
  
  
• MSI's Spatium M450 1TB M.2 SSD is available for $37.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Is it any good?  Only a year ago it was considered reasonable value at $115.  (Tech Powerup)
  
  For less than forty dollars you get two trillion working transistors.  I'm not sure how much you can complain that it's a PCIe 4 device that barely runs faster than PCIe 3.  It's a technological marvel.
  
  In fact, at that price it could start starting to force the fake SSDs out of the market.  You can't make much money selling knockoff Rolexes if the real deal cost ten bucks.

Posted by: Frank at Saturday, June 10 2023 10:42 PM (rglbH)

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• Apollo, the third-party Reddit mobile client for iOS, is shutting down at the end of the month following Reddit's abrupt move to paid APIs.  (The Verge)
  
  Quick summary:
  
  
• Reddit's API has been free for years.
  
• Reddit said as recently as January the API would remain free through the rest of the year.
  
• Reddit is now going to start charging for their API with just 30 days notice.
  
• The Apollo app uses billions of API calls per year and would cost $20 million per year to run with the new pricing.
  
• Apollo doesn't make anything like that.
  
• The Reddit API doesn't cost anything like that to run.
  
• The new API pricing of $0.24 per thousand requests is actually in line with other APIs.
• Infura (which I use at work) costs $0.225 per thousand requests.
  
• This has been compared with the Twitter API changes under Elon Musk.
  
• Twitter is actually orders of magnitude worse.
  
• For $100 per month on Twitter's plan you can read 10,000 tweets.
• The same amount of data from Reddit could cost as little as 2.4 cents.
• What Reddit wants to charge for its API is at least ten times more than it makes from the same activity on its website.
  
  
  
• Okay, I guess that wasn't so quick.  
  
  Reddit is in trouble like so many other tech companies thanks to rising interest rates and loss of investor interest.  They'd rather take the risk of killing of their community than bleed out slowly, which is what will happen if they don't change course and Elon Musk doesn't buy them.
  
  And Reddit actually has a working product and cashflow.  Startups that don't aren't going to survive.

• Google really insists on its workers showing up to work.  (The Verge)
  
  As in, at the office.  No lounging around at home in your pajamas.
  
  (Shifty eyes.)
  
  
  
• At the same time Google is dropping a million square feet of office space.  (Mountain View Voice)
  
  The combination of those two does not bode well.
  
  
  
• First of many: A Georgia radio host is suing ChatGPT maker OpenAI for defamation.  (The Register)
  
  This one is weird even for ChatGPT.  A journalist used ChatGPT to summarise a civil rights suit against Washington state's Attorney General, and ChatGPT barfed up a completely fictitious criminal complaint against a man not even involved in the case it was asked to summarise.

  According to the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, in Georgia, a private figure plaintiff bringing a defamation lawsuit must "prove that the defendant was at least negligent with respect to the truth or falsity of the allegedly defamatory statements."

  Since ChatGPT is negligent by design, that should be a reasonably easy hurdle to clear.
  
  Sam Altman-Fried's company might not survive long enough to buy off the regulators at this rate.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, June 10 2023 01:51 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, June 10 2023 05:26 PM (PiXy!)

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• It's not the nine-to-five (well, eight-to-six) that gets me, it's the wakeup call at one and the working until nine again.
  
  Got hit by a botnet at work and, well, Docker is complete and utter shit the moment anything unexpected happens.
  
  
  
• Oh, hey, Monday is a public holiday here.  Forgot about that one.  I might actually get some of the repeatedly delayed blog upgrades done.
  
  
  
• Good Omens, everyone!
  
  When Good Omens aired on Amazon I had two reactions: First, that they had perhaps not nailed it perfectly but they had done as well as could be hoped in this debased age, and far better than could be expected; and second, what do you mean "season one", there's only one book and you've already covered it.
  
  Good Omens season two airs July 28.  (Ars Technica)
  
  It's based on a sequel Pratchett and Gaiman planned together many years ago but never wrote because that was when their individual careers took off.  Gaiman is attached to the project, and the original cast is all returning, so maybe, just maybe, this one also won't suck.

• A judge has granted the SEC's request for a global restraining order on Binance doing anything with funds generated from its US subsidiary, BAM.  (Tech Crunch)

  The respective parties have between five and 10 days to move the crypto assets involved in the restraining order to BAM. Within the next 30 days, the defendants have to transfer all customer crypto assets to "new wallets with new private keys, including new administrative keys." The keys, along with the crypto assets and staking assets, will be in sole control of BAM Trading employees based in the U.S. and will "not be provided to or in any way shared” with Binance, Zhao or any Binance entity.

  What the SEC is alleging here is nothing specific to the blockchain, but the sort of thing major banks get in trouble with all the time when they don't strictly separate customer deposits from investments.
  
  And given the way Binance operates - it's not a total scam but they do play fast and loose with the rules - the SEC likely has a strong case.
  
  
  
• If you recently deployed a modded Minecraft server, you may have creepers spawning on your computer right now.  (Prism Launcher)
  
  A number of popular mods and modpacks on CurseForge and Bukkit had nasty malware added after individual creator accounts were compromised.
  
  The malware is known to work on both Windows and Linux, but is not believed to be active on other platforms.  (Minecraft runs on everything, including some of the more advanced toasters.)
  
  Additional details at Bleeping Computer.
  
  It's pretty serious, so if you're running mods and don't want your computer turned into some hacker's personal raid farm, worth checking.
  
  
  
• AMD has released details of its new Epyc Bergamo chip with 128 Zen 4c cores.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Well, not chip exactly - it's made up of nine smaller chiplets, but everyone does that these days.
  
  The interesting part is the new 16 core Zen 4c chiplet is only 10% larger than the 8 core Zen 4 chiplet from just a few months ago.  Partly because it has the same amount of L3 cache as before - 32MB - and only doubles the cores.
  
  And partly because AMD has taken the same Zen 4 core design but optimised it to reduce the size of the chip rather than maximise the clock speed.
  
  It's a different approach to efficiency cores.  Intel's efficiency cores are a completely different design to its performance cores, dropping instructions like AVX-512 that take up too much space (which led to Intel disabling AVX-512 on its performance cores as well).  Intel's E cores provide half the performance of its P cores, but are one quarter the size.
  
  AMD's E cores (Zen 4c) look to be half the size of its P cores (Zen 4), a much lesser reduction, but could deliver 80% of the performance of the full-size cores, also a much lesser reduction.
  
  This looks pretty good.  If Zen 4c cuts power consumption along with die size, it would be a welcome addition to Ryzen chips, particularly on laptops.  For now though it's for servers only.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Friday, June 09 2023 12:22 PM (obo9H)

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Posted by: Frank at Wednesday, June 07 2023 07:35 PM (rglbH)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, June 07 2023 09:32 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, June 07 2023 11:06 PM (oJgNG)

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Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, June 08 2023 01:43 AM (BMUHC)

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Posted by: David Eastman at Thursday, June 08 2023 08:19 AM (oHlLc)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, June 08 2023 08:45 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, June 08 2023 10:33 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, June 08 2023 04:38 PM (PiXy!)

12 Don't you just love tools that think they know what you want better than you do

Posted by: Frank at Thursday, June 08 2023 10:19 PM (rglbH)

Posted by: Mauser at Friday, June 09 2023 10:22 AM (BzEjn)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, June 09 2023 11:14 AM (PiXy!)

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• Apple today announced its new Vision Pro XR headset, a revolutionary augmented / virtual reality device at $349.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The crowd at Apple's Developer Conference was rendered speechless in amazement.
  
  
  
  
  Oh.

• Apple also announced the new 15" MacBook Air starting at $1299.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Though the real price is much higher because it is physically impossible to upgrade current MacBooks after purchase.  At that price you get a paltry 8GB of RAM and 256GB of SSD.
  
  Now, not long ago I bought an HP laptop with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of SSD, but that's because they're not solder in place and the laptop glued shut, and I already had spare SSDs and RAM I could drop right in.
  
  And the MacBook maxes out at 24GB of RAM and 2TB of SSD, at more than twice the price of my HP with 64GB and 4TB.  And it lacks the Four Essential Keys.
  
  
  
• Apple also also announced the new M2 Mac Studio starting at $1999, and the Mac Pro starting at $6999.  (Serve the Home)
  
  You can actually add storage to the M2 Mac Pro, which is a relief because its seven PCIe slots are basically useless for anything else.
  
  As for the Mac Studio - no.
  
  It's beautifully-designed hardware, but it's much easier to make hardware beautiful when you can hermetically seal it to keep nasty, dirty customers out.
  
  
  
• Online marketplaces - Amazon, Walmart, eBay - are filled with fraudulent storage devices.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Lots of other junk too, but it's a particular problem with storage devices, because they look like they work at first.
  
  What the scammers do is take a cheap 64GB microSD card (which used to be a lot), reprogram it to think it is much larger, and put it in an enclosure so you can't see the card.
  
  You can write 64GB of data to it and everything will be just fine.  Everything after that, though, will silently disappear.
  
  The companies all know this, and when alerted to a specific fake product they will remove it, but it's back an hour later with a different brand name.
  
  
  
• Dozens of the largest communities on Reddit plan to go private next week in protest over the company's rapacious API charges.  (The Verge)
  
  Since the largest communities on Reddit are universally awful - the site is only useful at all because of vibrant small communities that haven't been snuffed out by communists yet - nothing of value will be lost.
  
  But since Reddit is run by community-snuffing communists who love those large valueless "subreddits", it's possible they will take notice.
  
  
  
• And probably make things worse.
  
  
  
• French startup Escape has raised $4 million to use AI to automatically scan APIs for security flaws.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  This is actually a good use for the current Large Language Models like ChatGPT.  Its something they can be trained to do, and the worst that can happen is they fail to prevent a disaster that other measures also failed to prevent.
  
  I have no idea if this particular company is producing a good product, but there is at least a chance that they are producing a good product, unlike most of the other big announcements which are basically computational cancer.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, June 07 2023 05:43 AM (BMUHC)

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• The end of programming as we know it, part one.  (New York Times)
  
  Farhad Manjoo, professional idiot, writes in the Times that AI is going to totally revolutionise programming and allow people who don't understand the question to somehow get the right answer.

  This won’t necessarily be terrible for computer programmers —the world will still need people with advanced coding skills — but it will be great for the rest of us. Computers that we can all "program,” computers that don’t require specialized training to adjust and improve their functionality and that don’t speak in code: That future is rapidly becoming the present.

  Yes, it's called automatic programming, and we've had it since COBOL.
  
  Programming used to be hard.
  

  A.I. tools based on large language models — like OpenAI Codex, from the company that brought you ChatGPT, or AlphaCode, from Google’s DeepMind division — have already begun to change the way many professional coders do their jobs. At the moment, these tools work mainly as assistants — they can find bugs, write explanations for snippets of poorly documented code and offer suggestions for code to perform routine tasks (not unlike how Gmail offers ideas for email replies — "Sounds good"; "Got it").

  And they are terrible at those things, with one exception: They can be useful for finding bugs.  After all, if you write the code and then have an AI check it for bugs, the worst that can happen is you waste some time verifying that the bug is not actually a bug, and at best you catch an embarrassing mistake before your customers' critical data ends up in a Laotian bot farm.

  But A.I. coders are quickly getting smart enough to rival human coders. Last year, DeepMind reported in the journal Science that when AlphaCode’s programs were evaluated against answers submitted by human participants in coding competitions, its performance "approximately corresponds to a novice programmer with a few months to a year of training."

  Which is rather like a doctor with a few months of training.  We call such people...  Well, we don't call them doctors.

  "Programming will be obsolete," Matt Welsh, a former engineer at Google and Apple, predicted recently. Welsh now runs an A.I. start-up, but his prediction, while perhaps self-serving, doesn’t sound implausible.

  Not unless you know what you're talking about, anyway.
  
  AI can take over programming tasks but not the form of AI currently being pushed by all the same people who were pushing the blockchain as the cure for all our ills a year ago.  To work for such tasks, you need a fact model accompanying the language model, and systems like ChatGPT don't have that, at all.
  
  The lack of a fact model is also why ChatGPT lies constantly.  One of the reasons.  It's not that it lies deliberately, it's that it simply makes no distinction between true and false statements.
  
  And that is what these people want to use to write the code that runs modern civilisation.
  
  I'd suggest stocking up on gold, guns, ammo, and canned goods, but I expect this bubble to implode of its own accord.  It's just too damn stupid.

• The end of programming as we know it, part two.  (GitHub)
  
  DreamBerd is the perfect programming language.  We know this because the documentation says so.
  
  Sadly this perfect language hasn't actually been implemented; rather it's a parody of every breathless announcement of a New Programming Language that is set to Change The World, like...  What was that one that showed up last month?  Mojo, that's it.  The first programming language in the world with a waiting list.
  
  
  
• And the reason the AI bubble is going to implode sooner rather than later is, of all things, Facebook.  (Slate)
  
  Facebook open-sourced its own AI (we're referring to Large Language Models, because that's where all the noise is right now), and the open-source community picked it up and ran with it.
  
  The open-source versions are faster, more efficient, and produce better results than the commercial versions, and they don't refuse to answer your questions if the answer would make a Berkeley philosophy grad student cry into his chai latte.
  
  They still share the same fundamental limitations of LLMs - they don't actually know anything - but they don't have the arbitrary limitations imposed on ChatGPT and other big tech products.
  
  
  
• So, for example, Google's new AI-enhanced search is too slow to use.  (The Verge)
  
  While you're waiting for it to generate a wildly inaccurate summary, you can just...  Read the search results.
  
  
  
• Blaseball is over.  (The Verge)
  
  Apparently an online fantasy baseball league simply cost too much to run.
  
  The article calls it a "fake" fantasy baseball league, and I'm not sure whether I hope that's redundant or not.

Posted by: Frank at Monday, June 05 2023 09:08 PM (rglbH)

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Monday, June 05 2023 10:44 PM (NaPyl)

Posted by: J Greely at Monday, June 05 2023 11:05 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, June 06 2023 03:08 AM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, June 06 2023 09:48 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: thornharp at Wednesday, June 07 2023 02:09 AM (7lcFP)

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