aquafunkalisticbootywhap

TIL people still run eggdrop bots. I don’t think Ive touched one since maybe 2003. was probably the last time I messed with tcl

what would you choose to replace mailing lists with? e-mail is accessible, easy to archive, and archives are also accessible and easily searched

genuinely curious

had youtube open in a new private window on a vpn connection the other day after clicking a link to a video about the new raspberry pi compute module

was scrolling down thru one of the top comment threads and noticed, sandwiched between relevant tech videos on the right? some talking head, designed to enrage (as opposed to inform) fox news video about nothing related.

I think Im just done with youtube for the forseeable future. if your profit model requires inducing engagement like that, your product isnt good enough to stand on its own, and/or you’re ok with being shitty to make more money. either way, I want nothing to do with you at that point.

there is shelter and food, plenty to go around- it’s being locked behind an amoral paywall.

do the moral things at your job and get fired over it. make it clear when you apply elsewhere why you were fired.

if we’re being forced to choose between doing the right thing and surviving, the system is broken AND those hoarding obscene amounts, living in luxury, making the decisions to further screw customers and employees in the name of investors and executives need to be addressed, one way or another.

…Im not saying any of this is easy, but the other option seems to be just try to be happy with the scraps they let us fight over? no thank you.

unfortunately we’ve entered an era where not wanting to condone/support/endorse/encourage shitty corporate behavior requires the sacrifice of not getting to enjoy most products and conveniences that are available. theyre often enjoyed by many other folks who just shrug and say “everyone else is doing it”

I find most companies that undercut their competitors’ prices are cutting corners somewhere I don’t want to be involved in. quality and customer service has a price. I try as hard as I can to pay that price, or just do without.

just try your best, pick your battles; it’s all anyone can do without going insane and/or full modernity-hermit

(reminds me of the cattle “rancher” in ‘king corn’ who says theyd love to go back to selling grass fed, grass finished beef, but all anyone wants to buy is cheapass, corn sileage-stuffed feed lot crap, so it’s either sell that, or go out of business. producers cant just choose their market; there has to be a demand for it.)

email. email is federated. literally everyone has an email address and understands they might be on a different service, but its all email, and you just use their account name and the service part with the @ in between.

it’s not a complicated subject at all, and a good chunk of the humans on earth have no experience being alive without a federated service being a part of their daily life. (lets not mention telephones, or national postal services)

the issue isn’t perceived complexity, it’s that the negatives of using a centralized service are outweighed by the benefits. people don’t see it as a personal liberty issue, or a free speech issue, or a propaganda issue, or a billionaire oligarchs ability to control the flow of information between citizens issue. they just want it to be easy to use. and the more people that do it, the less personal responsibility they feel about the choice.

learning from history is for suckers, I guess

I played around with old iPads for a bit and then gave up. successful vendor lock for sure. I just wanted a home assistant front end without having to sign in to apple or use safari

Adventure

“somebody get this freaking duck away from me”

with matter devices, you can possibly do some fun networking, and block them from reaching the outside world completely. then you just need to trust your firewall

etckeeper, and borg/vorta for /home

I try to be good about everything being installed in packages, even if Im the one that made the package. that means I only have to worry about backing up my local package archive. but Ive never actualy recreated a personal system from a backup, and usually end up starting from a fresh install, slowly adding back things from the backup if I missed them. this tends to cut down on cruft and no longer needed hacks and fixes. also makes for a good way to be exposed to new paradigms (desktop environments, shells, etc)

something that helps is daily notes. one file for any day Im working on my system and want to remember what a custom file, confg edit, or downloaded/created package does and why. these get saved separately and I try to remember to grep them before asking the internet

i see the benefit to snapshots, but disk space is expensive, and Im (usually) careful (enough) not to lock myself out or prevent boots. anything catastophic I have to fix is usually seen as a fun, stressful learning experience! that rarely happens anymore, for better or for worse

oh how nice it would be to see the world unite as one just to take us (the USA) down a peg. I feel like russia and china are really dropping the ball lately

oh, wait lol theyre also run by egomaniacal baffoons :shrug:

shoutout to USAA banking app that detected my root, but just showed a warning and allowed me to continue. that’s how it ahould be imho

“don’t feed the trolls” is all that comes to mind

because workers don’t collectively own the means of production.

not to be like that, but once some new hotness graduates from 2 people in a garage, the controlling interest is never the workers who have a vested interest in products, daily work (and a brand) they can be proud of, but investors with only short term profit on their mind. innovators- and inventors-turned-C suite executives jump ship when bought out, leaving the real meat and potatoes, the real work behind the brand, to be offshored, profit prioritized and picked clean.

buy from worker-owned co-ops. buy from local crafters and people deserving of the label ‘artisan’. flat out refuse to buy from brands that are a sad, hollowed out husk of their former selves. more importantly - most importantly - do what you can to keep your retirement investments away from quartly-profit mills who couldnt care less about workers or customers beyond raw sales numbers. and definitely, definitely never agree to work for them.

one of my absolute favs. it’s a co-op where one player is randomly, secretly a cylon, sabotaging the groups efforts.

you can toss people in the brig. theyll protest “Im not the cylon!!!” and if youre wrong (youre often wrong), the group suffers by losing the jailed character’s special ability, while trying to fight off an attack until managing to jump.

best part? half way through, you draw new loyalty cards. sleeper cylon activated!!!

its genuinely hard not to run out of food, or water, or just get overrun by a boarding party. some of the best fun losing Ive ever had

remember, it’s not just about making up the difference per user in advertising, it’s about getting and keeping as many people into their ecosystem as possible.

then they make some cash from selling data, and having more data to scrape to train their models and such. proton isnt making any off your data

it’d be great to be able to easily compare cost and expense, but companies obscure so much in the backend. rental car companies buy discounted in bulk, then sell the cars tens of thousands of miles later at a profit, and that’s before any income from rental

This is similar to to how the two major US political parties fail at effectively creating constant, essential evolution of laws in the name of representing ideals.

Candidates that can not, by the very foundational nature of their stated goals and beliefs, form coalitions with other candidates in order to ensure constant progress, create disfunctional governments that fail their citizens. Systems of choice should tend towards the choices that best represent the most widely agreed upon ideas. If those systems are in place, citizens who willingly choose extreme idelogical candidates that denounce compromise and coalitions are getting exactly what they voted for- a government that is doomed to fail.

We need moderate candidates focused on representing the majority of their constituents, and we need voting systems in place that favor moderate candidates. Any system that favors moderate candidates - say candidates that, while maybe not any majority’s first choice, but the second choice of a majority of the same people - is favorable to first-past-the-post, which has allowed exteremism and obstructionism to thrive in our legislative bodies.

The question becomes, do the citizens have that system in place, a system where moderate voices can thrive? If they do, are there those in positions of extreme wealth and power who would benefit from convincing the rest of us that voting for extreme, obstructionist candidates is best? Are those people possibly exploiting the system to create disfuntional governments that protect their wealth and power?

That’s whats happening in the US. Regulatory capture and mass media control, for example, are tools used to convince citizens the war is between us, distracting us from their benefitting from our disfunctional government. These few push the idea that obstructionism and extremism is our only choice, lest you be seen as the enemy. The true enemy is clearly those that care more about themselves and/or their espoused ideals than society at large, a society doomed without a constantly evolving goverment keeping corruption and consolodation of wealth and power in check.

can’t labels and artists pay for some kind of premium placement in discover weekly, release radar, and playlist recs?

ok, after some research, found this:

In some cases, commercial considerations, such as the cost of content or whether we can monetize it, may influence our recommendations. For example, Discovery Mode gives artists and labels the opportunity to identify songs that are a priority for them, and our system will add that signal to the algorithms that determine the content of personalized listening sessions. When an artist or label turns on Discovery Mode for a song, Spotify charges a commission on streams of that song in areas of the platform where Discovery Mode is active (Discovery Mode is not active in our editorial playlists). This signal increases the likelihood of the selected songs being recommended, but does not guarantee it.

so, at the very least, the recs you get are definitely not organic, and favor major labels, rich folks, and if Spotify can make any money off streaming the track in the first place

not saying the algorithm doesn’t get it right most of the time (they’d be shooting themselves in the foot if it was all sponsored), but if it’s favoring big labels and drowning out everyone else in the name of revenue for Spotify, I prefer to choose other ways to find new stuff. if Spotify needs more money to pay the bills, imho they should plainly be asking the consumers up front

whoops. maybe I should read the entire thing next time

downvotes are not to express disagreement!

so many comments here about adding regulations and “this should be illegal” and, yes, those may be a valid way to curb this behavior

but customers willing to leave a company for bad behavior, customers wary of new products without asdurances they wont just become useless, non-reusable e-waste could also effectively curb this behavior

just because you want to outsource all of your product and company research to a law or regulation, and want to be able to blindly buy products and just hope the company doesn’t make bad choices in every regard but quartly profits doesn’t mean it is the only effective check & balance