valaramech

If the adverts are completely optional, this is the best way to do it. “Here, if you watch this ad we’ll give you free shit!” is way more likely to get me to watch whatever it is, but “You will watch this ad or you won’t get to play anymore” is the fastest way to get me to uninstall.

Pfff, all these amateurs here using Vim. Y’all should use Emacs. You still have all of these problems, but you get to act all superior about it. /s (except for the superiority complex; that’s real)

There are places to work that aren’t complete dogshit, but you do have to avoid FinTech, FAANG, and probably anything with a lot of VC funding. You will make less money, but at least you won’t be asked to do morally reprehensible shit on the regular.

Some of my best experiences have actually been at non-tech companies with small IT teams for internal shit. Biggest team I’ve ever worked on was 30 devs and that’s probably about the largest team I’d want to work with.

EDIT: This does assume you’re working in the States which is a dumb assumption for me to make. I’m not familiar with the culture outside of the states, but I imagine it’s better than here.

I think the biggest problem is that the idea of copyright is good, but the implementation - in most places, anyways - is complete dogshit.

Like, I’m fairly certain the original implementation of copyright in the US only lasted 10 years or thereabouts. Like, that’s more than enough time to profit off whatever you made but short enough that it’ll be usable by others within their lifetimes. This whole “life of the author + 100 years” shit needs to die.

Anyone that believes your phone is sending every sound it receives to the cloud knows absolutely nothing about data storage and transfer.

It would require more storage than the entire rest of the internet combined, would horribly tax both internet and cell infrastructure, and 99% of it would be useless noise. You might get that with targeted surveillance, but we’re not all being targeted like that.

What’s far more likely is that your phone is doing semantic analysis on what you’re saying all the time and reporting that data. It’s much less data, much easier to keep track of, provides actionable insights at scale, and would be far more useful to an oppressive regime. Your phone isn’t sending recordings of your conversations, it’s sending metadata about all your conversations.

Every accusation is an admission.

My understanding is that running most of BlueSky is possible on small to moderate hardware. However, running all of BlueSky requires basically cloning 100% of all the content on BlueSky (which, as of Nov 2024, was ~5 TB).

So, like, yes, one can run part of BlueSky or a clone of BlueSky which has none of the main instance’s user’s content without much trouble, but actually running an entire BlueSky stack is eventually going to become cost prohibitive.

I found this write-up to be enlightening on the subject.

I use uMatrix (uBlock’s big brother), so sites that do this generally lose first-party JS privileges real fast.

Have you met these people IRL or online? Most of the people I’ve met online do fall into one of those two buckets, but almost nobody I’ve met IRL does.

I would assume this is selection bias before attributing it to some other thing. The kinds of circles you run in are going to heavily affect this.

I read a decent rebuttal to the “paradox” of tolerance. To summarize for those that don’t know, the idea is that tolerance is a social contract. You tolerate everyone that’s behaving according to the contract. Refusing to tolerate someone that has broken the contract isn’t a violation of the contract; it’s required in order to enforce the contract.

You break the rules, you lose the protections. Simple as.

Sure, but now they can insinuate that China did it intentionally and get people real mad over bullshit to keep them distracted from other things. Maybe also to get their base behind the tariffs against China so they can then turn around and say that the price increases aren’t the tariffs but Chinese retaliation against the tariffs.

We’ve actually discovered a few of these! Though, nothing quite so catastrophic as you might be thinking.

And what are the chances that the Democrats have learned their lesson and will pivot to a more progressive candidate for the next election cycle?

Exactly zero. The rich people in the DNC benefit just as much from the conservative agenda as any other rich asshole. Not being in power is completely irrelevant to their interests, as far as I can tell.

Unless and until Donnie makes good on his threats to imprison/murder his political opponents, none of them will give a single fuck that leftist didn’t want to vote for them because they weren’t left enough.

LAMP is a programming stack used by a couple fediverse projects. It usually stands for “Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP”; the primary components in the stack, though Perl or Python sometimes replace PHP.

Well, maybe you should put them in the second place. 😛

Protip: when you’re looking for something and you find it, don’t put it back where you found it. Put it in the first place you looked.

At least the AI gave them good trigger discipline

If the planes had entered sovereign airspace, sure. They synopsis says the Russians were flying in international airspace, which usually means it’s not under the sovereign control of any nation and the Latvians would have had no basis to fire on the Russians.

Personally, I’d love to see the Russians try to stunt their way into someone’s airspace and get dick slapped for it, but I doubt that would happen.

There’s a massive amount of ongoing research into lithium-free batteries. Sodium-ion has gotten a big boost recently and real solid-state batteries are starting to see commercialization.

Social Security Numbers were never intended to be used the way they are. They were expressly for identifying you to the Feds for the purpose of SSI. Business just looked at that and said “hey, that’s a good way to identify people” and ignored the feds when they asked politely for them to fucking not.