This tracks. I get Starbucks giftcards (as gifts, not for myself) and typically load them into the app so I can order ahead and spend less time waiting at the store. It pisses me off to no end that when I get to the last dollar or two, I can’t use it without reloading like $20 onto the app. I refuse to do that and lose the money.

Good. Now they need to start enforcing bans on corporate facial recognition technology use everywhere.

I wanted to like Mastodon but couldn’t. The only reason I used microblogging services like Twitter was to shitpost about Vampire: The Masquerade. Said game includes lots of death, blood, and other topics that make some folks uncomfortable. On Twitter, the atmosphere was very “don’t like, don’t read”, but Mastodon has an intense culture about using content warnings on anything that might make someone marginally uncomfortable. I’m cool with that, but I can’t do it on my shitposting or it sort of ruins the joke. Bluesky doesn’t have that atmosphere.

Am I off base in seeing some similarities between this and the genocide of the Rohingya in Myanmar?

It already is outlawed in the US. The US bans all depictions precisely because of this. The courts anticipated that there would come a time when people could create images which are indistinguishable from reality so allowing any content to be produced wasn’t permissible.

Yeah, I spend half as much time just endlessly scrolling anymore. Phone use is down and the time I spend on my PC feels more productive too.

I got mine through Amazon. Samsung makes the cheapest ones I’ve found. Just search for something like “samsung commercial TV”. They’re generally a little more expensive than your ad/data harvesting-supported TVs but if you value your privacy and longevity of your devices, it’s worth it.

I got a display signage TV. Totally dumb. The only app it has is YouTube and that’s optional. I don’t even have the internet hooked up to it. Works fine for gaming and occasionally streaming via other devices.

There’s a number of takeout coffee places near me that will let you bring your own cup and give you a discount on it. You just need to know how many ounces it contains. I have an insulated stainless steel mug that I always bring. Most places that wouldn’t accept them during the pandemic are back to allowing it again.

Last week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation published an opinion piece arguing that Tier 1 ISPs should not bow to pressure to drop Kiwi Farms, calling the move “a dangerous step” toward censorship.

It’s all fun and games for the EFF until someone on that site starts publishing their employee’s SSNs and home addresses.

Worse, people making AI CSAM will wind up causing police to waste resources investigating abuse that didn’t happen, meaning those resource won’t be used to save real children in actual danger.

Yeah, I got into a disagreement with someone in a thread once and for a year or two, they’d just message me at random times to yell at me and accuse me of making them suicidal. I eventually blocked them and should have done it sooner. Aside from that, most other messages were just people sharing in game names for multiplayer stuff and Animal Crossing dodo codes.

In a fight between a corporation and a bunch of people very determined to get content for free, history shows the corporation always loses.

That’s why Sansar not allowing it really surprised me. SL has a decent grip on moderating and working with sexual content, something most companies don’t have. The fear of sexual content and how to manage it shouldn’t be something Linden Lab grapples with. I guess they wanted to test whether their product was appealing without it and ultimately the answer was no.

A substantial chunk of the reason why it flopped was because they banned sex. SL continues to thrive in good part due to its liberal embrace of sexual content. It would have died out years ago without that. Companies that want to make virtual worlds never learn that lesson.

Nah, unalived was being used by gaming YouTubers years before TikTok. YouTube does the same kind of censorship shit.

I’m now calling getting demodded “de-snooment” forever

My friends refuse to use anything else for our group chats so I’m stuck with it if I want to keep in touch. I don’t use it much outside of that. 🤷

Fuck Meta and all they stand for.

OP, thanks for being the sacrificial lamb here. Now I know never to ask a question about Windows if I don’t want to hear irrelevant opinions from Linux snobs. Sorry you didn’t get a lot of real answers.