Someone on Reddit just did the investigative journalism that apparently none of our major news outlets bothered to do. They traced $2 billion in nonprofit grants and lobbying records across 45 US states and discovered something that’s simultaneously shocking and utterly predictable: the company behind those age verification bills is the same company that profits from collecting your data.

Let me say that again more clearly: Meta, a company whose entire business model revolves around hoovering up personal information, has been actively lobbying for laws that would require even more data collection. And they’ve dressed it up as “protecting the children.”

There’s something deeply unsettling about reading that a former government employee walked out of the Social Security Administration with the personal data of 500 million Americans on a thumb drive. Not because data breaches are new—we’ve all received those “your information may have been compromised” emails more times than we can count—but because this wasn’t a sophisticated hack or a system vulnerability. This was someone just… taking it. With apparent blessing from above and an expectation of a presidential pardon if caught.

I came across a fascinating discussion online about someone who built a fully self-hosted web scraping infrastructure using 50 Raspberry Pi nodes, and honestly, it’s been rattling around in my head for days now. Not because it’s the most efficient solution—quite the opposite, actually—but because it represents something I find increasingly rare in our field: building something just to see if you can.

The setup is admittedly bonkers. Fifty Raspberry Pis, each running Chrome via Selenium, each with its own VPN connection, all coordinated to scrape job postings. The whole thing is local—no cloud services, just hardware sitting in someone’s home, collecting 3.9 million records over two years. There’s even an IoT power strip that automatically power-cycles nodes when they stop responding. It’s automated chaos, and I kind of love it.