i took a month long hiatus and am probably gonna continue that pattern. the threadiverse has gone completely insane the last couple months and i worry about the people for whom this is their sole gateway into the fediverse, and what they think the consensus on what reality is. i’m mostly on mastodon at this point and have been just… talking to my neighbors more

he knows the nfl is stealing the value he creates. he doesn’t need to pay them

yeah but for that the corporate dogs that enforce those rules have to feel like enforcing the rules

signal has been eroding it’s trustworthiness, and all the stuff you said is why myself and most folks keep using it despite its downsides. in a perfect world more of us would be working to make xmpp a viable option for most people but as it stands it’s a touch too technical for the average person’s mom and dad, who are ultimately who you have to appeal to

telegram did something important by being the first mass market “private” messenger that people were aware of. it has outlived this usefulness by nearly five years now. even the things that replaced it at this point are getting run into the ground and require replacing.

Piped cracks CAPTCHA blocks meant to ensure YouTube maintains access to their hosted videos. That CAPTCHA includes a EULA that by engaging with the captcha to continue using youtube you agree not to circumvent google ads. Piped intentionally (and correctly, from an ethics perspective) circumvents this

the EULA for YouTube says they own all videos uploaded to their site. watching through something like Piped is a soft (and important) form of piracy

I think the issue is that this marketing consultant didn’t build anything. They just prompted an LLM to generate output

Microsoft is still who vetted and hired the contractor and who selected the location.

And yeah. Past CEOs of Microsoft have continued to be shitty. They’re who’s responsible for what’s going on. I just wanted to talk about the ways white knight philanthropy doesn’t help, it just perpetuates colonialism, and Bill Gates+Microsoft have always been in lock step in this regard.

The point is the true villain here is colonialism

So construction waste is a subcategory of industrial waste. Typical industrial waste includes toxic materials like excess cement, fiberglass, bits of plastic from wires and cables. But once the data center is in place, most likely the waste will be e-waste in nature. Think heavy metals, copper, and yet more plastic. And the thing is… This is why they’re putting this data center here. Disposing of this toxic waste will be cheaper because it’s less regulated. The long term cost of high tech industries like this to neo-colonialized communities like this is the communities themselves. It doesn’t matter to Microsoft they’re making the water undrinkable. They don’t have to live there.

And realize, too. Bill Gates’ philanthropic missions aren’t accidents. He may not run the show at Microsoft anymore but he still benefits greatly from their business. His philanthropic efforts aren’t about making the lives of people who are exploited better. They’re about maintaining that cheap form of labor just a little bit longer. And that may not be Bill Gates’ actual intention, but the fact of the matter is he’s a billionaire. He could make much larger changes in the world by not being a billionaire. He has power and influence to do things the rest of us can’t, but instead of treating the illness he treats the symptoms. His actions sustain the system he benefits from

Yup. A lot of people don’t vote because they don’t feel heard. Well. We have a major opportunity right now with how unpopular Donald Trump is and his violent his band of weirdos are about to get. We can get in president Harris and then make ourselves heard as we stand against the violent weirdos. We can say “we the people of the united states of america don’t stand for this nonsense. We don’t stand for violence being what decides everything. We will resist violence with violence if we must, but we will not allow ourselves to rule with or be ruled by it. If we are going to continue living on this earth we must dismantle the global system of torture we live under and for good. The people of Palestine need to be free. The people of Africa can’t constantly be at civil war for what’s left of the resources we stole from them. And the Russian Federation cannot continue to be allowed to interfere in elections across the globe”

Harris has made it clear she is willing to court us, willing to be seen listening to us, but she is not willing to like us or be of us. That’s fine. Joe Biden has called himself a transition president. Perhaps Kamala will be, too. We just have to show that this matters to us, and that there’s too many of us to stop the movement.

I said in another comment that I see Harris as riding a wave of optimism, not as driving it. Well? We are that wave! It would be irresponsible for us to let her ride that wave into the white house without benefit to who’s doing it. We must demand what we deserve from all this:

• Food
• Housing
• Fair pay
• Leisure time
• Clean water
• Healthcare
• For our comforts not to come at the cost of torture with the only benefit going to the uber wealthy

Personally I think Harris is riding a wave of the uprising of hope. She is not driving it, but she has managed to tap into it and to give people who believe in the power of breaking free of pessimism a candidate who at least plays lip service to hopefulness even if here core values remain the typical doom and gloom. In many ways she’s an updated version of Barrack Obama: aware of social issues and willing to engage with them, ultimately a neoliberal conservative. Unfortunately, this year, this is the best we’re gonna get so a lot of people involved in the uprising of hope are going to, and should, vote for her. Its just we need to keep this all going. We need to vote in local elections for candidates who will give us superior voting systems to first past the pole, and we need to continue demonstrating in the streets for the decolonization of earth. Kamala wants us to shut up, and the democrats want to tell us the DNC isn’t the right time to protest for the end of genocide. We need to show them they can’t shut us down that easy. But we also need to avoid a Donald Trump presidency at all costs. So keep telling Kamala she’s wrong about Israel. But also do vote for her. But then also make her presidency difficult without recognizing that sending F-35s to Israel is a subversion of the will of the people

The ad company blocking an ad blocker is totally about security

- Google stans

Legitimately! Early Metallica was all about liberatory politics. Then it turned into center-right american politics. The kinds of dudes who really have hard-ons for how great the status quo is.

Hey good news. Turns out you can use bing and not get back Reddit results

They don’t care about traffic. They care about the existing barrel of data for the data models

I read it as a law that the bootloader has to be unlockable so that the phone can be serviced by the end user past the manufacturers end of support

Conspiracy theory: got paid to write a smear piece about a piece of technology the spies of capitalism doesn’t like

Um… What fucking paradox? Authy is a know security vulnerability. If you’re installing GrapheneOS before switching away from Authy, you’re putting the condom on after getting fucked

I mean… Not YouTube specifically but YouTube is representative of why us programmers are unhappy. The era of feeling like the tech industry and the internet are making the world better is over. All of them media platforms exist to co-opt our social interactions and replace them with ads for microwavable meals. They’re spying on us, and for what? They control major elements of how we live out lives, and WHAT THE FUCK DO THEY EVEN GAIN? A lot of them are going bankrupt because it wasn’t profitable. Their ads are less effective than the oldest forms of advertising. Ultimately, these platforms were about control, not about… Any other stated goal. And us programmer? We got tricked into thinking we were developing platforms to connect people and create a global culture of interconnectedness. Turns out we were building the infrastructure to implement genocide