Now is the time for Europe to rally behind Ukraine. We really should have upped military funding and arms production in preparation for this outcome.

I’ll wait and see what comes of it. Valve have been singlehandedly responsible for evolving Linux gaming by leaps and bounds, to the point where the only real hurdle right now is anti-cheat compatibility.

Their direct collaboration with Arch is massive for that reason alone

I’m thinking the API protests would have been more effective if y’all just stopped moderating entirely instead of locking down subreddits.

Let the site turn into an absolute cesspool.

I used to work for a major business outsourcer. One of their contingency plans in case an office burned down or had to be evacuated was literally to make everybody work in another office 50 miles away.

It was so bad that they weren’t even willing to reimburse travel costs. It was either get there or be fired.

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It’s easy to avoid buying things from Amazon

I mean… Yes but also no.

Amazon have gone to crap in recent years and has become a more upmarket Wish or Temu. Much of their storefront is full of Chinese knock-off brands these days.

What Amazon does offer is somewhat reliable next (and sometimes same) day delivery. The only way you can get something faster is by travelling to a brick & mortar shop and buying in person.

As for AWS, aren’t we forgetting that Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Google, even Alibaba and Huawei have their own cloud solutions?

I’m in the first camp. Instagram is flooded with spam accounts posting links to illicit Telegram channels where actual CSAM is being distributed. The owner of Telegram was also arrested recently for failing to safeguard his platform from such highly illegal activity. Children having easy and often unrestricted access to social media is probably the reason why things have gotten so bad.

Every major social network should be asking for ID verification, but there should be strict safeguards on how that information is used and stored, with hefty fines for failures to safeguard.

Gab tried to pull the same thing with their Dissenter plugin. It was such a bad idea that Mozilla and Google banded together to remove the extensions from their stores for ToS violations.

Now imagine what a nightmare it would be to moderate the ability to comment on anything online with actual standards and decency.

Facebook listening in on your microphone is one of those things that I actually believe to be true. Ever had conversations with people to then realize that you’re being served targeted ads based on these conversations? Seems very coincidental.

Off is the direction in which I would like Microsoft to fuck if they think I’m gonna have a deep learning AI spy on my computer activity.

This just makes me want to switch to Linux.

Genuine question, is Bluesky worth using in its current state? Can it hold a candle to pre-Musk Twitter?

I’m asking because I feel incredibly burned by the barebones state of Threads and I don’t really want to commit to another platform that doesn’t have its shit together. Threads still doesn’t have trending topics and functional hashtags over a year into its launch, and this is is shit that Mastodon had for years, despite Meta expecting to piggyback off of the ActivityPub protocol and be welcomed into the Fediverse with open arms.

So imagine you’re on PornHub and then out of nowhere, Clippy shows up and says “hmmm looks like you need some help pleasuring yourself”, then starts flicking through similar nude pictures and videos to what you’ve been looking at before. The idle animation of the AI assistant even changes to Clippy morphing into the shape of a penis and shagging a rolled up piece of lined paper is if it were a fleshlight. You can’t tell if Microsoft are mocking you for being a coomer, nor can you tell whether to find Clippy’s sexual deviancy funny or creepy.

Somehow that hypothetical dystopia of Clippy watching you masturbate is only slightly worse than what Microsoft plan to do with Recall. If the mere thought of a machine learning AI taking screenshots of your desktop every few seconds and learning from your computer usage habits isn’t absolutely fucking terrifying… Then imagine that these are likely being uploaded to a server for the perusal of advertisers, intelligence agencies and any hackers skilled enough to break into Microsoft’s servers.

Even if it was stored locally, all it takes is one dodgy web link for you to inadvertently send all your Recall data to a hacker and have it ransomed.

I don’t think the “decentralize and federate everything” strategy is a good idea when it comes to online marketplaces.

We’ve seen how quickly bad actors can wreak havoc on the Fediverse like that one time when Lemmy Shitpost was closed for weeks due to people creating new instances of their own and spamming the community with CSAM. Imagine how much you open the community up to scams or criminal activity when money gets involved.

“Games work on Linux now so you can switch over”

Gaming was at one point a serious hurdle. Back in 2007 when I was forced to switch from Windows XP to Ubuntu due to a former friend’s IT fuck-up, the only Windows game I could legitimately get running was World of Warcraft, and even then the installation process was arduous.

Valve deserves much of the credit for getting Linux into the state where it can play a vast majority of Windows games with comparable or even better performance.

The true hurdle now is with anticheat.

I have friends who work in IT and would probably slam their head against the wall if they had to deal with Control Panel being removed.

Are Microsoft deliberately trying to make the fabled Year of the Linux Desktop finally become a reality? Because I feel like we’re two or three more dumbfuck business moves away from this…

I don’t work in IT, and a lot of bigger companies (my employer included) have restrictions on what employees can install on their work machines. It’s basic security measures to prevent malware infections.

Amazon used to sell products, not Shein-grade self-destructing dropshipped garbage from all-consonant brands.

I knew it wasn’t just my imagination. Amazon has been filled with cheap Chinese knock-off brands in recent years, to the point where I may as well be using Temu or Wish for a bargain.

If you went from the internet’s storefront to an upmarket AliExpress, that’s not a good sign.

Google are the ones who have really gone down the toilet in recent years. They ditched cached pages, soured search results with paid ads and even their image search is as bad as Tineye for reverse image searching these days. Literally the only thing Alphabet really have going for them anymore is Android and YouTube.

It’s baffling that a company which was once so dominant in the web search space that their name was literally used as a verb for looking things up for decades have now enshittified their flagship product so much that they’re making rivals like Bing, Lycos, Duckduckgo, etc look like viable alternatives.

There was a screenshot I once saw of a Chinese netizen’s web browser in the late-2000’s, using Internet Explorer 6 and tonnes of third-party toolbars. I think I saw it back when Digg was still a thing. We’ve now reached the age where major websites are more cluttered with notifications than a malware-infected browser was 15 years ago, and where everybody is tracking everything that you do online.

25 years ago, we legitimately drove RealNetworks into the ground for a lot less than what we’re allowing Google, Microsoft, Meta, X, etc to get away in the modern day.

Google and YouTube are pretty fucking bad without an ad-blocker installed. From someone who has worked in jobs where I may as well have called myself a ‘Professional Googler’ and where I do not have permissions to install an ad-blocker on my work computer, the amount of ads I get buried with really sours the experience.

Also, a lot of news sites (particularly anything owned by Reach PLC such as the Mirror) are now flipping the middle-finger at GDPR by forcing users to pay to reject tracking cookies. Here’s a screengrab from the Daily Mirror website…