Remember when we could only watch what had recently been on TV and cable companies were trying to lock people in to specific cable boxes that couldn't skip ads and we paid $120 per month for ad supported content and cable companies would attach random fees and everyone had to buy hundreds of channels to only watch 4?

And we'd build movie and music collections of physical media we had to keep in our homes and cars and we'd listen to the same three albums for months and if we were lucky enough to get a TV series box set, it'd set us back many hundreds of dollars and we'd have to remember which disc we were on and navigate arcane and slow menus?

And when we had questions, we had to find the answers ourselves by reading long form content and just be satisfied that there were many questions we couldn't answer at all because the information wasn't available?

Or when we wanted cabs, we'd not know how much a ride would cost until after we got to our destinations and they smelled like rotten farts and were covered in boogers and our only goal was to not touch anything and look out the window because what's a smartphone?

And when we wanted to go somewhere, we had to ask for directions and use atlases to figure out how to get to the general area of the destination, then drive in circles, accidentally drive past a turn 5 times because the street we were supposed to turn onto had two different names and we had been given the wrong one?

I was there and anyone who pines for the old days can just go there. We have cable and encyclopedias and taxis and atlases. Go nuts.

This needs to become illegal. Ads are part of the price you pay for a device or service. If you didn't agree to them at the time of purchase, they can't be sprung on you after you've paid.

I don't like that, "leftist", has become a word used outside conservative circles. It sounds shitty and is as meaningless as, "rightist".

Jesus saves and I'm a soldier for Jesus, but only in the ways that don't cost me money or require me to make any lifestyle changes or acknowledge that I may not be perfect. Now, who's doing something that I can tangentially relate to the Bible that I'm not doing and don't plan to ever do?

Censorship is terrible. Except when I want to do it and pretend like I'm the best politician. Then it's great.

Here's a great article on a site that doesn't force you to register for an account. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/huaweis-new-mystery-7nm-chip-from-chinese-fab-defies-us-sanctions

This is part of what sanctions are about. China has been hacking companies around the world to steal technology to be able to produce stuff like this.

Remember when China told Google to censor web search results and Google said, "No. How about we show those search results with notes that they were censored and why since the sites will be blocked anyway?", and China was like, "You can't show them at all.", and Google said, "Fuck you. We'd rather lose access to the Chinese market than violate our principles.", and instantly shut down any service in China that would require censorship or disclosing private data and closed all Chinese offices working on any of those technologies?

What a time we're living in.

I heard an interview about this new effort. IRS agents used to be rewarded by case count. It's much easier to audit people who earn salaries because you know exactly what they earned from employers' reports. Rich people often have many sources of income that take time to investigate. Agents audit normal folks because it's easy while the rich lie and get away with it.

The goal with this effort has been to change the incentive structure for agents to get the most money.

I'm a really great person. I'm good at everything. My friends are all tools and won't ever be as amazing as me.

Congratulations. I bet those friends are absolutely real.

Thank you.

Ways Lemmy is already feeling like modern reddit: Instead of link to an article, we get screenshot of a post with a screenshot of the article.

I want to make the, "free", moniker illegal. Advertisers have to pay money for ads and they get that money from us when we buy their products. In addition to having to look at ads, we also have to pay money for the privilege of looking at them. Any ad supported service is objectively not free. No thanks.

I like the judge, but 20 hours a week wouldn't teach anyone how hard it is to work in the service industry.

will have to work there 20 hours a week

From the article

Prepandemic, Fleetcor workers in their 20s and 30s took one or two sick days a year, she says. Now, it's more like three to five.

So pandemic taught people how viruses spread and how not to spread them and coming to work sick is shameful, not a badge of honor. Still, 4 days a year isn't enough.

I worked with a guy, Clint, who had been at the company his whole life, worked his way from the factory floor to head of accounting. The thing Clint chose to brag regularly about was that he was 60-something and had never taken a sick day. Instead, he'd roll in obviously sick, sneeze on everyone, everyone he saw that day would get sick, a few of them followed his stellar example and got more people sick. During those times, no actual work got done except Clint lamenting about how everyone was getting sick. "Must be the weather."

I'd rather tax the rich and let the people decide what to do with their money than trust all billionaires to do the right things.

This particular person is on a mission to do to malaria what science and governments did to smallpox, eliminate it from existence forever. You don't spend 80 billion dollars to save on your taxes. He's no perfect saint, but there are rich people who are more selfish.

I believe the post is specifically about long eyelashes, fake eyelashes.

That said, my wife has worn makeup twice in 18 years. I love her for being herself, but I complimented her on how nice she looked those two times her sister did her makeup because I'm not a complete jerk and have some idea of how to be kind when someone has spent an hour trying to look nice. I also attempted to make it clear that I preferred her without makeup, maybe something along the lines of, "I love how naturally beautiful you are."

Just because some women consider men to be ignorant doesn't mean we are.

I heard an anonymous interview with someone who was sickened by their own attraction to children. Hearing that person speak changed my perspective. This person had already decided never to marry or have kids and chose a career to that same end, low likelihood that kids would be around. Clearly, since the alternative was giving up on love and family forever, the attraction wasn't a choice. Child porn that wasn't made with children, comics I guess, was used to fantasize to prevent carrying through on those desires in real life.

I don't get it, why anyone would be attracted to kids. It's gross and hurtful and stupid. If people suffering from this problem have an outlet, though, maybe fewer kids will be hurt.

The article talking about a Cybertruck racing a Porsche

Electric motors accelerate cars faster than ones with internal combustion engines, so this wasn’t a fair fight.

Nobody's permitted to compare electric cars with internal combustion because electric is faster? I don't understand the logic.

Play Store looks pretty specific, an, "in-app system". I don't know how content moderation by administrators could be construed as, "in-app".

As someone who has worked on free Internet services, it used to be easier to make money from ads. A video ad view was worth nearly a dollar US. Audio ads were maybe 7 or 8 cents a listen. Now, a video ad view makes a few cents and audio ads are worthless. They likely did the math about how many audio ads they'd have to play on the phone in your pocket to break even and decided you'd hate it more than they would. Since content owners get just over half of what YouTube makes, they'd probably be pissed about seeing the drop in income too.

Feel free to hate YT. This was an economic decision at around the time when ad revenue had just fallen off of a cliff.

I've pirated content and don't have any issues with it. What has worn me out

• Sites being pirated don't give a shit that pirates aren't going to use them anymore. That's literally why they blocked them.
• Want to consume content without paying? Do it and maybe share with others how you did it, but don't make the millionth post bragging about how you're sticking it to the man. Go rob a Tiffany's and brag about sticking it to that company. And when they install new security measures, post about how unfair it is and you'll never take stuff from them again. Or don't. Really. Don't. I want to see that post about as much as the post about what you had for breakfast this morning.

Have you switched to Firefox for privacy? Sold your gas guzzler and started biking so you aren't climate changing? Canceled Netflix, Facebook, Google, and Xed Twitter so you aren't ripped off? Installed bidets so you aren't killing trees to wipe your shit?

I'm unimpressed.

While Israel has the right to go after Hamas, Netanyahu’s right-wing extremist government does not have the right to wage almost total warfare against the Palestinian people

A nuanced view? Is that allowed?

uses “lightweight and robust” composite materials to cut weight

Pretty great as an experiment. I wonder how this would fare in crash tests, whether there's a way to make composites work in practical scenarios.

From the article

even if some users stop using YouTube, there won't be a loss of revenue because those users weren't watching ads anyway.

Guys, YouTube doesn't give a flying fuck that you aren't going to consume their content without paying. That's the point. They're only rolling this out slowly to be sure they aren't impacting their actual customers.

Lemmy felt like classic reddit for about a week, actual content that I wanted to see, discussions at an adult level. The amount of bandwagoning and "me too", "fuck corporations" comments has me signing on less and less.

Some machines use scales to measure the weight of items, scan one item, put it in the "bagging area" (scale), repeat. Many stores have disabled scales because they're buggy and don't catch thieves, who learn that to steal, don't put items on the scale. Now, stores have employees watch and offer "technical support". "Oh, ma'am, I think this item may have been missed. Let's check. Do you need help with how to scan items?" I don't try to steal, so don't find the machines to be a problem.

The craziest part of the article is just how much effort the author put into collecting data and filing feedback and really really hoping that Tesla could pull the videos (they can), then went on to actively try and succeeded in recreating the problem at high speed next to another car.

I agree for inline code comments, like, "# Save the sprocket", right above the line that saves the sprocket. Does this include documentation? Because when I see a prepareForSave function that references 10 other functions and I just want to know, "Is this mutating and how is it preparing for save and when should I call it?", having the author spend 15 seconds telling me is less time consuming than me spending 5 minutes reading code to find out. Anyone who has read API docs has benefited from documentation.

This shows me a never ending stream of CAPTCHAs.

Last I checked, Firefox had also been switching to Manifest v3 because they're also combating the tide of add-ons that pretend to do something useful, but actually steal your information. They asked uBlock at least a few times how they could build Manifest v3 in a way that'd be compatible. Instead of the browser asking about each URL, thereby giving the add-on access to personal information, uBlock could tell the browser what to block. uBlock's answer was always, "No. That's not good enough. Give the add-on access to URLs." It seemed to me like every time uBlock was approached, they turned to news sites to complain and IIR, the feature that would have given uBlock some functionality was removed from v3 because if nobody's going to use it, why build it?

I wonder, now that uBlock has conflated the discussion of, "How much should extensions be able to see and modify URLs you're visiting?", with, "v3 is a war on ad blockers!", how quickly Firefox will move forward with v3, if at all.

I haven't been in a plant where management tells everyone to go crazy and ignore safety because 1. they aren't monsters and 2. lawsuits. They're financially motivated to do the right thing. When I saw the article, my first thought was this person disabled mandatory lockouts because it's convenient.

This is kind of necessary. You could open a store just selling Steam keys. You get Steam's software distribution, installed user base, networking for free and pay nothing to them. Steam is selling all of those services for a 30% cut. Since your overhead is $0, you can take just a 1% fee and still turn a profit because Valve is covering 99% of your costs.

Steam could disable keys or start charging fees for them. As long as they're being this ridiculously generous and permitting publishers to have them for free, some limitation makes sense.

I'm dubious, though. There must be a provision for promotional pricing. I've definitely bought keys for less than Steam prices.

Journalist: Read a press release. Write it in my own words. See some Tweets. Put them together in a page padded with my commentary. Learn from, reference, and quote copyrighted material everywhere.

AI

I do that too.

Journalists

How dare AI learn! Especially from copyrighted material!

• Google employee 1: We made podcasts in Play Music better and adoption went up again.

• Google manager: Oh, that's neat. I'll make a bullet point on this week's team meeting.

• Google employee 2: We spent many millions on a new podcast app and servers, engineering, data migration, PR, integrations and adoption is lower. Actually, nobody wanted it or cares or likes it.

• Google VP: Everyone this can't fail. Pick the best looking metrics, prepare a series of announcements and get ready for a wave of promotions and it's all thanks to this superstar manager who's definitely getting a huge bonus and double promotion so I can spin this like it was a win. The best part? Get ready for a repeat when we replace this again in 2 to 3 years.

An mRNA vaccine works like a special set of instructions that tells your body how to make a pretend piece of a germ, but without using any real germ parts. Your body makes, then sees this pretend piece and learns how to protect you against the real germ. It's like teaching your body to recognize and fight the germ without ever having to meet it for real.

Remember the COVID spike proteins? That's what the vaccine is teaching your body about, not any actual viruses.

I can't believe that a company that puts out a device running Linux that gives you access to the OS in a few clicks and provides guides for how to install competing distribution platforms is more anticompetitive than Sony, Apple, Nintendo, Microsoft, Google. Valve and Steam aren't perfect. It's difficult to accept that having a store and charging for it is worse than, for example, Sony buying studios and paying millions of dollars for some games to be exclusive on their platform.

The part of the poster that says, "Time to install your update", as in, "inject you with microchips from Microsoft and here's a picture of Bill Gates in case what I'm saying isn't clear"? Is that the believable one?

I wonder what the motivation would be to inject people with salt water. We'll go to the expense of getting needles, people trained on how to use them, rent sites, sanitation, and I guess all of that so people can feel like their governments are doing good jobs and hope nobody involved tells anyone.

Tik-Tok's only problem is capitalism. /s

I'd bet I'm not the first person to write that sentence on Lemmy, Hexbear and elsewhere. The problem is right here and everywhere.

Jaringly, Jave jid jeclare,
jreadfully jaft to jare
To jub 'jragon' with 'J',
jiminishing its jisplay!
joesn't jecency in jialogue care?

Yeah, if these were Kenyan or Chinese or Indian babies and we made the same disparaging joke, nobody would mind or declare racism or xenophobia. It would still be laugh out loud hilarious.

Yeah, the simplest the answer is usually correct. Is this a conspiracy involving hundreds of Google employees intentionally building features to slow the app down on Firefox or is it incompetence because they don't test their product on multiple browsers?

Edit: https://www.404media.co/youtube-says-new-5-second-video-load-delay-is-supposed-to-punish-ad-blockers-not-firefox-users/