Hard Pass

US tech may lag on the important stuff... but it's also pretty meh in the shitty ones too

Dear Senator Schmitt,

While people may be online mocking the collapse of your big reveal about former special counsel Jack Smith, I want to note that I, for one, would never join in the public derision for being confused about sports.

I, too, have been befuddled trying to remember which Chicago Cubs players scored the winning touchdown of the World Series. I also never have an answer during trivia games when the question is what year the Florida Panthers won Wimbledon. Whether it is scoring a hole-in-one in rugby or the Knicks winning the Super Bowl, I find it difficult to keep track of which teams are which. I couldn’t tell you who had the most Stanley Cup wins—Michael Jordan or Cal Ripken Jr.—anymore than I could say which curling team Simone Biles led to victory during the World Cup.

It is hard in America not to be good at understanding sports! People have no idea how excluded people like us feel.

Many a night I have sat and stared, blank-faced, while friends discussed who was the better varsity basketball player, Ilya Rozanov or Shane Hollander (no relation), or while I was unjustly mocked for believing the Dodgers played for Brooklyn, because they did in Newsies, which is like sports but a musical.

So you confused two teams? It’s an easy mistake to make! The one time a friend invited me to watch a Yankees game from seats near third plate, every New Yorker I knew was outraged that I had such an amazing view but couldn’t remember whether the Yankees had faced the Lakers or Manchester United. They might as well have asked me if Caitlin Clark won her Olympic medal for fencing or Pokémon Go. I do not know. It remains a mystery, much like the ever-changing name of DC’s football team, which I hear we still have.

Sen. Jon Husted (R-OH) slammed Democrats for blocking a bill that would keep everyday Americans from having to pay exorbitant electricity bills due to data centers.

Managarr is a CLI (command-line) and TUI (Text-based User Interface) tool for managing all of your Servarr's in one place.

This most recent release adds support for Readarr and several compatible forks.

I know that Readarr has sadly been retired, however there's still community support in keeping the dream of Readarr alive. As such, extra time was put into this release to test out Managarr with four of those forks to ensure that in addition to the final release of Readarr, Managarr works with these other forks as well.

So now, as long as a fork of Readarr still is compatible with the v1 Readarr API, Managarr can work with it too.

I tested the following forks and made changes in Managarr to ensure support:

• Bookshelf
• Readarr-Resurrected
• Librarr
• Chaptarr

In addition to Readarr (and forks), Managarr supports Radarr, Sonarr, and Lidarr.

You can try it out for yourself without installing it by visiting the demo site if you'd like!

This is a passion project of mine so I'd love to hear any and all feedback! And thanks to all who contributed to this release!

Discord has announced tools aimed at expanding the number and types of companies that advertise on the platform.

This week, the social media firm announced Discord Ads Manager, an ad campaign management platform that lets companies manage ads shown on Discord in one place. The tool can be used to perform forecasting, build “a campaign with objective-based bidding,” and monitor an ad campaign’s performance, according to the announcement.

“Self-service access extends Discord advertising to smaller studios and marketers that previously needed a direct sales relationship to run campaigns, opening the platform to advertisers, regardless of their budget,” Discord said.

The ads manager is currently available to select advertisers, but self-service access won’t come until “early 2027,” Discord said.

The company is also expanding Video Quests, video ads Discord users can watch to get in-game rewards. Discord has been showing these ads to browsers in a beta format, with limited testing on Discord’s mobile apps. The company announced that the ad format is now called Video Quests Reserve and will serve as “a premium, reservation-based offering designed for high-impact brand moments.” The ads will give “advertisers a scalable, always-on way to drive outcomes, such as impressions and clicks.” Discord will offer advertisers additional objectives to track “soon.”

Just what I need. Ads for games on servers not at all about games.

The U.S. can deport the Palestinian-born leader of Wisconsin's largest mosque on the grounds that he is a foreign policy threat, an immigration judge ruled Wednesday, while rejecting allegations that he lied on his green card application.

Salah Sarsour was detained in Milwaukee in March by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers. A federal judge ordered Sarsour's release in June, saying he raised a "substantial" claim that the Trump administration was targeting him for speaking out against Israel and advocating for Palestinian rights.

Sarsour said in a statement that the ruling was "deeply disappointing," but that he intends to appeal.