A group of top fashion influencers once praised the "European craftsmanship" of a $600 pair of pumps, only to realize minutes later they were actually holding a $20 pair of shoes from the discount rack at Payless.

In 2018, Payless was tired of being the place you only went to because your mom made you, so they decided to run a sociological experiment on the fashion elite.

They took over a former Armani store in a luxury mall in Santa Monica, stocked it with their standard $20 boots and sneakers, and rebranded the entire shop as "Palessi", named after the amazing designer Bruno Palessi, who didn't actually exist.

They invited social media influencers and fashion experts to the grand opening, serving champagne and treating it like a high-end Italian launch and the trap worked a little too well.

Guests were interviewed holding cheap synthetic sneakers, saying things like, "I would pay $400 or $500 for these," and describing the look as "sophisticated" and "classy."

One influencer spent $640 on a pair of boots that retailed for $30. In just a few hours, the store sold $3,000 worth of inventory at a markup of 1,800%.

Once the sales were finalized, the organizers revealed the truth: the "Palessi" logo was fake, and they were standing inside a Payless commercial.

use GitLab if you want cool updates like

Fix "Total 2FA Bypass for Users"

trying to help this FreeBSD user in China get their microphone working on a Dell Latitude 3510 which has a Realtek ALC236.

I found instructions on how to debug this in a FreeBSD bug report, but it's guessing game which bits you have to twiddle to get it to work.

By that I mean, you can "reprogram" pins for snd_hda devices (because they have very reprogrammable/reconfigurable input/output devices) using specific values in /boot/device.hints

anyway, I had a loose grasp on what the debug output means and what to look for so I pasted it into Claude and explained what I was doing and it broke down exactly what all the output means and suggested 3 different options that could get 2 different inputs working correctly as a microphone. It's always possible the hardware is lying or at least mislabeled the audio jacks though, that's why there's 3 different options.

If one of these works I'm going to laugh my ass off as it's yet another case of "AI is bad, except it debugged something that nobody has been able to fix for almost 6 years now." And then the kernel can just be patched with these same values and it will work automatically for everyone in the future.

If you could just paste the output for any Realtek ALC chip and get working values that would make it a LOT easier for kernel devs to support this spaghetti hardware. We really can't expect the devs to have access to every goddamn laptop model in existence. It's just too much to ask.

I promised myself I'd be more positive on here but I can't. I really can't.

WHY IS WHATSAPP WEB TAKING UP 812MB OF RAM?

Over 800 megs. For a messaging app. On a browser. What is going on? Where have we gone wrong? And hey, it used to be that it was easy to justify the continued use of WhatsApp because of its accessibility, but that is no longer the case. It now sucks. But hey, there's one good part to all of this:

At least, at the very least, I don't have to use Telegram.

I expect we'll be starting war with Iran soon seeing how Australia has requested all citizens leave the country immediately. They must have been given a heads up.

> "Leave Iran now. Commercial options to depart are still available but becoming more limited. Airspace closures and flight cancellations could happen soon, making it impossible to leave later," the public communique read on Monday (January 12). Canberra further said that Australian citizens staying back in Iran despite the advisory would be responsible for their own safety.

Existing World's Smallest Violin Still Too Large By Orders of Magnitude, Say Boffins

futurism.com/artificial-intell…

Furious AI Users Say Their Prompts Are Being Plagiarized

A self-described AI ambassador is in shambles after she says other AI prompters have been plagiarizing her instructions.

^{Joe Wilkins (Futurism)}

I am here once again to tell you no centralized service is the solution, the solution is #decentralization

> Investment firm buys #Threema.

> Their "investment themes":

> - Growth potential above 10% per annum
> - Profitable or foreseeable path to profitability

comitiscapital.com/news/comiti…

About one in 12 sheep is gay, but when rams prefer the company of other rams, they're considered a commercial failure and slaughtered. In Germany, some are lucky enough to end up in the Rainbow Wool sanctuary, a biodiverse sheep farm that prioritizes animal welfare, run by Michel Stücke and his partner Jochen. Last month, the wool from some of those sheep was showcased by LA designer Michael Schmidt in his "I Wool Survive" collection, a collaboration with Grindr and publicist Kelly Cutrone. Dazed talked to Schmidt and Cutrone about the collection. Learn more about Rainbow Wool — including how to sponsor a gay sheep — at the second link.

flip.it/9k3.bz
flip.it/Fe4iy_

#LGBTQ #Fashion #Farming #AnimalWelfare #Sheep #Animals

The designer making clothes with wool from gay sheep

Using the wool of 35 homosexual rams, LA designer Michael Schmidt crafted a collection that examined the ‘stereotypical tropes of gay fantasies’

^{Dazed Digital}

Introduction Time:

Mastodon was recommended by a friend, so still figuring all this out. I'm a young writer trying to learn my craft by writing in public. Learn by doing, right?

Works are free under CC BY.
100% human.
#introduction

This ad for a cheap Funai VCR on marketplace had an completely incorrect AI description (image1), because they googled the Funai UL Listing number (image2,image3) which scraped an ebay listing for a DTV box that also used the UL Listing number (image4).

The internet is eating itself and I'm tired.

😳 🥵

youtube.com/shorts/zIh3tIckyg0

Your Shadow Daddy needs a New Sword #booktok #romantasy #fantasy

Check out our website for Gear, Merch, and Training!https://www.sellswordarts.com/Help support us on Patreon!https://www.patreon.com/sellswordartsJoin this c...

^YouTube

For the fourth time, the Blind Travel Foundation $10000 travel grant is available to benefit the blind and visually impaired community.

They are doing amazing work and really put the money to good use. Please apply by February 1, or just spread the word.

blindtravel.org/

I don't know what's worse.

Links to flipboard or links to instagram or facebook ?

Just randomly thinking about that car I used to pass every week on the way to and from my child psychiatrist's office in 1995, with a missing door. Lots of tape where the door should have been.

I wonder how that person's life turned out.

'Imperialists can never save you': In Lebanon, Iranians divided over protests shaking their country #press

today.lorientlejour.com/articl…

'Imperialists can never save you': In Lebanon, Iranians divided over protests shaking their country

^{Gabriel BLONDEL (L'Orient Today)}

Sensitive content Reveal/hide

Helm's Deep is a fortress where attackers break against its strong walls. Helm's Chart is a fortress where they get lost in a maze of YAML and template errors. ​​

A new issue of #ThisWeekInGNOME is now online!

#231 Blueprint Maps
thisweek.gnome.org//posts/2026…

#GNOME #TWIG

#231 Blueprint Maps

Updates on what happens across the GNOME project from week to week

^{thisweek.gnome.org}

I’m moving away from Facebook and Instagram, as they no longer feel like the places where I want to spend my energy.

I’m a photographer working across film and digital — people, places and weddings — and I’d love to connect with others who care about analogue photography.

EOS 30
Revolog Tesla BW 200
#analogue

Comitis Capital hat den Kauf von Threema vereinbart – final abgeschlossen ist das laut Mitteilung noch nicht (Closing im Jan. 2026 geplant).
Und ja: Threema bleibt weiterhin in der Schweiz (Sitz), aber „Schweizer Souveränität“ ist am Ende auch eine Frage von Eigentümerstruktur, Governance und Transparenz.

comitiscapital.com/news/comiti…

#Threema #Datenschutz #ITSecurity #Datenhoheit

Apparently to renew a passport in Canada one has to pay a tax to Adobe, and Microsoft or Apple.

What kind of fucking elbows up is that?

#cdnpoli

I've been beaten by the LAPD. I lived in Berkeley in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I've been tear gassed and watched police push people backwards off of highway overpasses. I knew and understood many Black Panthers.

I am sick and tired of Kumbaya songs. I am sick and tired of turn-the-other-cheek reactions to current affairs in the US.

But I am also a lawyer, sworn to peaceful methods.

What do I do?

What strikes me is the age old method of ostracism - practiced in ancient Athens, written about in plays like Lysistrata, and rendered into strong force by churches through the practice of excommunication.

We ought to perform civil excommunication on ICE agents - do not sell or rent products to them in stores, do not rent hotel rooms to them, do not fund them, treat them like modern day lepers. Businesses should make it clear that they will never be hired for a job. Do not adopt Jesus' policy of acceptance of them.

Spread their names so that we may cut them off from society.

RE: tldr.nettime.org/@dk/115883068…

fanbois call it Epic Yclic Code

Dmytri

2026-01-12 16:28:20

It attempts to fit solutions from potentially very different domains together with corrective code "epicycles" until it satisfies its context, the user, and tests.
4/7

RE: cyberplace.social/@Wuzzy/11588…

Good news, i hope to see other project do the same (if technically possible ... of course) @CachyOS @fedora @opensuse @ubuntu @archlinux @flathub @IzzyOnDroid @nixos_org