And a train can even be greener than his silly cars with direct electrification via 3rd rail or overhead catenary.

Oh good, I thought this was about the Linux distro.

Dumb. Federation is how we escape from every cloud-based service being a dictatorship of the person who owns the platform. That includes federating with privately own orgs to provide them an exit.

By all means make good tools to allow individual users to block Threads (or other private instances ruled by amoral coporations), but doing it at instance level is just dumb.

edit: also, number of instances doesn't matter. Number of daily active users matters. Most users are on mastodon.social, mastodon.cloud, lemmy.world, hachyderm.io, lemmy.world, etc. And all of those are federating. The only large instance that is not federating with threads is mas.to

I can't help but notice Amazon is facing a big lawsuit over hurting other corporations.

Selling an infinite catalogue of shoddy, fraudulent, and outright dangerous goods like leaden toys, phone-melting power-equipment, house-destroying incendiary batteries, and data-erasing empty data storage? No, that's fine, that's not Amazon's fault, that was XZBBK's fault. We kicked them off the store. No, I don't think they're related to that new company XBZZK, why would you say that? They sell legitimate USB cables that according to the listing used to be cutting board, a drying rack, a canopy for a kids bed, and an espresso machine.

Okay, Samsung is the party with some credibility here. It's a lot harder to hear Google whine about messaging standards when their churn in messaging has been hilarious and embarrassing.

How did we end up in a future where robots create the art and tell the stories while I still have to fold my own laundry?

... We're gonna get another cookie click-through, aren't we?

My favorite enshittification of Amazon is how you can filter products by manufacturer, but only if the manufacturer is a reputable company like JOOGEE or XZzy or GoodTime and not those weird no-name companies like Anker or Samsung.

Fun bit of context: if I, an individual, found a way to remote into Sony Playstation and hack them in such a way that they disconnected from their controllers?

I would be in prison. For years. Remember what happened to Aaron Schwartz? Kevin Mitnick? They do not fuck around on computer crimes.

But when a corporation does it to their customers and competitors? Pay the fine and get back to business as usual.

Yes. I'm quite tired of hearing "it's not our fault that toys full of lead were sold on our storefront and stored, fulfilled, and shipped from our warehouse in boxes bearing our logo! When we said that we 'recommend' the product, we meant, like, algorithmically, not for realsies. We had nothing to do with these products! It's all XGZDoo, a company we kicked off the store. And now would you like to buy any products from XGZDee, our latest new seller?".

I've run into antiviruses blocking code I've written just because I pulled in certain cryptographic libs. Literally pulling in some Microsoft cryptography libraries in c# made it think I was writing a crypto locker.

Desiring drugs isn't what killed her any more than snapchat did. She wanted drugs that were comparatively safe, and instead she got poison.

Why was somebody selling poison? Because buying drugs is illegal, and so consumer protection rules don't apply.

The war on drugs makes drugs more dangerous. Let her go to the drug store and buy some regular-ass methylphenidate over the counter if she wants a stimulant. The pharmacist ain't going to screw up and give her fent.

It's incredibly frustrating from an ideological perspective that the whole PC gaming industry runs on a benevolent dictatorship by Valve.

I mean they have near total control not just over sales, but over the gaming software installed on our PCs. They have the power to do whatever, whenever, to whoever.

But at the same time, they're cool people with good products who have good stewardship of this role.

So we uncritically give them all the power.

The problem is that the painfully earnest people went to Mastodon, the funny people went to BlueSky, the celebs went to Threads, and the mid-tier YouTubers and Streamers and Podcasters who have to be Internet Famous every damned day or they don't get to eat stayed on Twitter.

Personally I'm pulling for Mastodon because I'm a painfully earnest person.

I keep saying: none of this will end until we get a clean, cryptographically secure, government-backed way to ID who is sending us something, and it becomes an expectation to use it all the time for anything important. Which is why I have conspiracy theories about the conspiracy theories about government ID.

Never turn on remote admin. You don't need to admin your router from outside of your house.

Is this like the previous theory that Windows 12 would be subscription based?

“The Copilot is like the Start button,” Nadella explains. “It becomes the orchestrator of all your app experiences. So for example, I just go there and express my intent and it either navigates me to an application or it brings the application to the Copilot, so it helps me learn, query and create — and completely changes, I think, the user habits.”

Saying "copilot is like the start button" is not saying "copilot will replace the start button", the article is dishonest clickbait and stupid.

This is just MS taking another kick at Cortana, this time powered by LLM generative AI.

Authentication servers do not run themselves, they need babysitting and patching and upgrading because this is users' passwords and secrets. Microsoft obviously does not want to keep managing this old login system because it's miserable unrewarding janitorial work for a sysadmin or a developer.

Honestly, I have trouble seeing these "sequels" as new games. I mean Overwatch 2 was mostly a heavy balance patch, graphical patch, and pivot to F2P.

These are just large updates where they incremented a number in the name. With that in mind, this isn't a "trend", it's been going on for as long as these service-style games have existed. Fortnite's pivot from Save the World into Battle Royale, for example. Or going further back: Remember Star Wars Galaxies?

Yes, these mega-updates are often regressions... again, that's not news. The only thing "new" is realizing "oh, we should increment the number to get some hype going".

Honestly, as somebody who really loved the early era of Android gaming, I'm really disappointed how ephemeral it all was between the Play Store delistings and the absolutely atrocious approach to backwards compatibility in the Android OS.

People switching to Unreal are like the ex-Twitter users who went to Tumblr and Threads.

ITT:

"Nobody understands fedipact, Jabber, activitypub, Ruby, embrace/extend/extinguish, mastodon, lemmy, Java, federation, Kubernetes, XMPP, Docker, architecture, carburetors, Ikebana, midwifery, Filipino stickfighting, Zoroastrianism, hegelian philosophy, or XML but me, and therefore you're all morons with nothing to contribute to this conversation".

We all have hundreds of games that are $0, it's called "all the games in your steam account you already own that you haven't played yet".

There's a huge discrepency between the scary warnings about Q* calling it the lead-up to artificial superintelligence, and the actual discussion of the capabilities of Q* (it is good-enough at logic to solve some math problems).

My theory: the actual capabilities of Q* are perfectly nice and useful and unfrightening... but somebody pointed out the obvious: Q* can write code.

Either

1. "Q* is gonna take my job!"

2. "As we enhance Q*, it's going to get better at writing code... and we'll use Q* to write our AI code. This thing might not be our hypothetical digital God, but it might make it."

I honestly didn't know they still had Google Play Movies and TV still, I'd assumed they'd folded it completely into the YouTube movies brand already.

As a Google Play Music user, I'm retroactively angry. I would've loved that many years of GPM while they worked a couple (not enough) of the kinks out of YTM. And I wish I still had access to Google's music store, since Amazon doesn't sell in Canada and I hate having to install a desktop application to shop at Apple.

Uh I'll stick to Firefox thanks.

Other way around. Musk's backers wanted the state media label gone, so he applied it to legit sources so it would be destroyed by the outcry.

God damn. Bandcamp is where I get my music wherever possible - they're an amazing platform and product and I like the fact that my purchases are going to support the actual artists instead of vanishing into the Google or Spotify machinery.

I knew it was possible after the Epic sale that they'd get screwed, but this worse than I expected.

And here in Canada, their main competitors for buying online music are Apple and 7digital. Not great options, considering that 7digital is also owned by Songtradr now.

Part of it is just today's polarized political climate, especially since the popularity of the Fediverse is partially a backlash to reactionaries taking over Twitter and the corporate enshittification of Facebook and Reddit.

Everything is a war now, and solidarity and boycotts are basically the only weapons that small, independent actors have. So people apply "don't cross the picket line" thinking to everything, even where it doesn't make sense.

Want to act properly? Contribute money and labour towards your instances. Help them build better moderation tools so they can handle the flood of crap from Threads, and onboarding tools and better UX so they can steal away the Threads users.

Sony's excuse is bullshit. If they really were convinced these were counterfeit 3rd party controllers, they should've popped up an on-screen message "defective counterfeit controller detected, please only use properly supported hardware". That would've made the error clear. But random disconnects are just sabotage.

I disagree that fediverse is inherently libertarian/anarchist. In fact, a big selling point is that you can find an instance the administration agrees with your politics and will implement moderation policy accordingly.

For well over 20 years, yes.

HP practically invented the concept of "destroy the brand name of your high end professional equipment with the worst consumer garbage ever." Their inkjets are infamous

They were early pioneers in the art of enshittification.

Who wanted this? Who asked for this?

Like, ytm has boneheaded problems like "wear os client only lists your first 99 albums". The fact that you can't sort albums by artist is bonkers. But they're adding comments? What???

Glass backs are the dumbest idea in the history of stupid.

The only way things like that could be defensible if they were easy to replace (bring back Moto-Z style magnetic backs!), but since phones are all held together with glue now, that's not a thing.

That's cool and all but they could've just made sure the regular-ass search indexer was consistently aware of the video transcripts.

Many times I've searched for a video I'd seen using a specific quote I remembered from the vid... And got nothing, and had to painstakingly find the video manually.

Fortunately when they killed the podcasts out of Google Play Music I switched to Podcast Addict and never looked back.

I honestly feel bad for the guys assigned to work on this dead-end project.

And considering the buggy, infuriating mess that YTM is and that team is being rewarded with expanded scope, I wonder what dirt they have on Sundar.

This is a problem with the US news in general because it uses the words "raid" and "execute search warrant on" as synonyms, when the former conjures up images of guys in body-armor with carbines and the latter a couple of cops and a bunch of specialized investigators. Like, various layers of US government have "raided" many of Trump's properties, and obviously it was the latter and not the former, it's not like Trump is gonna get the Breonna Taylor service.

Honestly I'm wondering what Google's long term plan for securing their productivity suite is. The amount of spam I get through Google drive share requests is shocking.

Normally I'm all about "yes they should be paid" but in this case it's particularly ironic - modest ads used to be able to support newspapers. Now they need paywalls.

Title of article: internet is worse

QED.

Except there isn't much of a Google stealing their thunder. Bing isn't better. DDG isn't better.