And then you have monstrosities like these. Don't ever trust a word they preach.
And then you have monstrosities like these. Don't ever trust a word they preach.
YouTube started nearly (or completely?) ad-free and stayed that way till all of their competition was dead, people were addicted to it and there was no alternative. Then they started turning up the ad knob - gradually to avoid people leaving for something newer, until it was so obnoxious that ad blockers became common among even nontechnical users. Now they're gas lighting ad block users as if they are committing a crime.
YouTube wouldn't be in a position to make these unfair demands if they didn't use their enormous wealth to create a video hosting monopoly and subjecting their users to bait and switch. F*** Google and their pretend morality. F*** them for destroying the web experience. F*** them for destroying web access and livelihood for many by banning their accounts and neglecting all appeals. I'm sure not going to create revenue for a very abusive, unethical and evil corporation.
If content creators want to get paid, start a patreon account or something. Or join a paid subscription service like nebula. I'm open to all those. I just don't want a disgusting leech in between.
The return of investment on crypto doesn't come from any value it generates. It comes from other people who made bad bets and lost their money on the same. That makes investing in crypto the same as participating in a Pyramid. Your argument, if taken for face value, can easily be extended to defend pyramid schemes.
Ooh! I would like to hear from all those who were fervently vouching for Discord as a support channel for FOSS projects.
Perhaps the same might happen to a web forum or matrix channel. But at least you get an opportunity to backup and migrate.
And they're investing in the customers in what sense? It's the customers who make the investment in their products and get their dignity challenged in return.
I have a need for a printer and HP is solidly in the don't-touch list. Companies that treat their customers so indignantly as HP should simply be raided and closed for good. Or perhaps, HP should realize that morons like this scumbag are a bad investment as a CEO.
It's easy to belittle their suffering like this, saying they should have left earlier. But there is always a back story to how people getting bullied end up getting victimized longer than they should. If you gave Madison's story more than a cursory look, you would realize that all the classic elements of abusive entrapment were there.
When she accepted the job at LMG, she had jeopardized her visa status in the US and was more or less starting from scratch in a very expensive city in Canada. You would expect the employer to be considerate and supportive of such employees. But LMG insisted that she cancel her patreon account and on representing her (which she says they didn't do at all). They insisted on taking a cut from her earnings too.
And like many other sexual harassment victims, she wasn't in a position to walk away like you say. LMG apparently gaslighted her and made vague threats. They certainly had the power to ruin her life with their somewhat mindless fanbase - and she was right to fear it. Leaving the company without another job would have probably ended her up in the streets - forget lawyering up. I honestly don't think employees in her situation can afford to hire lawyers.
I don't want to completely believe her words because it's still hearsay. That said, the evidence in the public is pointing more to the possibility that she may be telling the truth. But it doesn't help when people just dismiss her saying that she should have stood up for herself. You simply don't understand the position a victim of a vitriolic workplace finds themselves in.
You don't get to ask questions like that to a free speech absolutist.
While I agree that many FOSS devs/maintainers would find donations and other monetary support very useful, please remember that money isn't the solution for everything. This is especially the case for mental and emotional wellbeing. Funding might increase the entitlement and demands of the users on the maintainer's time. What the maintainer really needs might be some time off or reduction on their workloads.
I'm all for donating to these projects. But don't let that be an excuse to treat them badly and make unreasonable demands on them.
One of the main factors contributing to this problem is how customers simply give up their rights for convenience. Pro-customer options don't disappear. They die a slow painful death.
Take the example of DRM in books. All the easy options like from Amazon are DRM encumbered. But the DRM-free options are still available if you are willing to search a bit. They don't cost much extra either. But people don't care. And direct sellers providing DRM-free books wither away in neglect. Similar examples are still around for reparable devices, DRM-free multimedia, etc.
Consumers rights are not a given. Like any rights, those are the ones you have to defend. You have to put at least a little bit of effort to protect it. When I suggested this recently, I was accused of 'victim-blaming'. What escape is there when the victims are not ready to fight back?
Ah! Nothing like millennia old scriptures to convince people that a genocide is necessary!
Don't ever buy HP printers. Their customer abuse is getting egregious by the day. Though, I wish there was more competition in the printer market.
Mastodon has no privacy at all. Even if you host your own instance. People use Mastodon for freedom and to get away from manipulation by corporate social media.
I don't know what people are expecting to happen with the Linux desktop. If there was ever a year of the Linux desktop, it was probably in the mid-2000s, when Ubuntu made the Linux desktop usable for regular people and promoted it with free installation CDs.
I don't think they have any religious basis for this.
The same applies to Russia. You can say something similar about ultra conservative Catholics, since the Pope has called for tolerance. Yet, they would rather denounce the Pope than tolerate LGBTQ+.
The key idea is that bigotry is not driven by religious affiliation, but rather by authoritarian attitudes. That's what's common between China, Russia and the ultra conservatives in the US. Tolerance of LGBTQ indicates freedom and liberalism in some sense. And both are challenges to the stakeholders of authoritarianism. They want a world where people live within the framework they dictate - and thus the bigotry.
Abstaining from alcohol is one of 75 different activities and behaviors identified by the Chinese government as a sign of potential religious extremism. It is listed in brochures distributed in some parts of Xinjiang to educate the public on how to identify extreme religious activities.
What next? Breathing air?
Mechanical CAD. Something like SolidWorks or Fusion 360.
FreeCAD just isn't there yet. They're still struggling with the topological naming problem. However, Blender was like this in the field of 3D animations. Now it's the standard. That gives me hope for FreeCAD. Anyway, MCAD is very important. I'm learning modern C++ and the FreeCAD code base in order to contribute.
I also wish there was a better CAD kernel than OpenCASCADE.
I'm starting to think that Kurzgesagt is either paid media and/or propaganda. I really liked their well researched approach. But this one is straight out in your face. They outright deny the filter bubble that each one of us have experienced firsthand on corporate social media - and then blame you for the ill effects. Also, if you look at the imagery - the emoticons and especially the thumbs up symbol, they are trying to invoke memories of specific social media. It feels very much like they're trying to garner sympathy for those antisocial-media.
BTW, this isn't the first time their motives have been called into question. They have in the past, taken money from bigphrama to paint them as benevolent superheroes.
I don't understand who the US is trying to convince with their anti-genocide statements when all their actions indicate their full fledged and willing participation in it.
At this point, the US has a big role in so many post-wwii genocides that it's almost as if they enjoy killing off large populations like a psychopathic serial killer.
Just a reminder. Technology isn't apolitical.
Articles like these are the proof - Americans wouldn't know fascism if it hit them in the face. And they need reminders that water is wet. After all that has happened and is going on, does anybody need to be told that the US is under serious threat from an exceptionally out-of-control domestic terrorism problem?
Nope. It's getting integrated into Android WebView.
You ought to send those emails to the FTC, since Amazon has deleted their own communications despite instructions against it.
That suggestion is because the attack took years of ground work, psyops, multiple disciplines and several levels of obfuscations. It needs the kind of effort that only a well paid and dedicated team can pull off. But that need not necessarily be a state actor. It could also be some spying/malware company (like NSO), any of the big corporates or a criminal group with lots of money.
But don't lose hope. All it took to uncover all of that was just one engineer who was annoyed by SSH slowing down from 0.3s to 0.8s. The effort needed to uncover it is only a fraction of what's needed to hide it. This is also a vindication of the FOSS philosophy. Imagine uncovering this if the source wasn't available.
Covid demonstrated that the physical presence of the staff in the office is not necessary for many types of jobs. WFH is shown to be economic, time saving and improving the work-life balance of those workers, without sacrificing productivity. It's not like any of these companies are willing to compensate the workers for the hours lost in the commute.
If you still refuse to return to the office, then you're just being lazy at that point.
That is classic gaslighting. What matches the current situation better is that the corporate overlords are being greedy AF. They are worried more about the returns on their real estate investments than about employee wellbeing, practicality and sustainability.
Could it be confirmation bias? Regardless, physical kill switches for microphone, camera and gyros/accelerometers is a necessity.
I'm not a very religious person. But if Jesus (the human being) could see what his followers have become, he would be disgusted. I don't know how they can read the bible and say that Trump is the sort of person it heralded. There is a major cognitive dissonance in the miswired brains of these 'evangelicals'.
Having switched Linux for over two decades now, I find the current state of Windows to be extremely weird. Why do people tolerate such abuse? Is it that the gradual degradation conditioned people to accept it? Sort of like the proverbial frog in the boiling water?
There are still people around who believe that he's the tech messiah sent to deliver them to Mars.
Either the Americans have very weird ideas about transportation or they're completely controlled by auto companies. I don't understand how they think that cars or this stupidloop is better than high speed rail. Traveling by train is far more relaxing, way less infuriating and leaves time for you to do something else meaningful. US is probably the only country that went back on rail transport. Every other country is taking it as far as they possibly can.
George Orwell would be shocked. We're truly in the post-1984 era.
They're not addicted to work. Just money. In exploiting regular people - both workers and customers - by robbing their wealth. Do you think their pay is proportional to their work? How do you think they get time to socialize and scheme against plebs if they are addicted to work?
In this particular context, they insist on return to office because WFH represents a loss of returns on the investments they made on corporate real estate.
While their addiction to money is a disorder, it's as bad to the general public as people with antisocial and criminal tendencies. The only difference is that these rich sociopaths have enough capital to buy their way out of being held responsible. They won't seek help because they enjoy the harm they inflict - just like how criminals don't consider their sadism as a mental disorder. They need to be treated the same way as any other criminal - as a threat to society. And measures should be taken to prevent them from inflicting harm on normal people. Something like locking them in a cell and throwing the key away.
At this stage it's starting to look like a Ponzi scheme. Squeeze out as much as possible before it sinks?
The same technique is being studied for assisted suicides where the terminal patient gets to administer or even withdraw it themselves. That is likely to have a better ethical standing since it's about dying with dignity if they can't live with dignity. It's likely to confirm if nitrogen asphyxiation is as painless as they claim.
That aside, some meds say that hypoxia is painless as long as carbon dioxide content in the blood remains low. Even carbon monoxide poisoning victims seem to die in sleep. That sounds way better than any of the other methods of execution. Not that I support the death penalty.
Yes it's Nintendo. But it wouldn't be this bad without Discord's design that emphasizes centralization and corporate ownership of user data. Forums can at least be backed up and migrated elsewhere.
I'm not an antivaxxer and certainly won't recommend going unvaccinated against such preventable diseases. But IMO, it's wrong to just brush off antivaxxers as stupid. There are two reasons for this. The first is that vaccination rates are dropping. That would mean that wise people are turning stupid. No - there has to be a different explanation, which we will get into later. The second reason is that we need everyone (except those who can't for medical reasons) onboard for vaccinations to work. Herd immunity is an important thing in vaccination.
Antivax sentiments, like any conspiracy theory, comes from a distrust in authority - be that the government or the bigpharma. One reason could be religious beliefs - religion always has something to mislead people. But another reason could be that these authorities are genuinely untrustworthy. In the US for example, you could be forgiven for thinking that the big pharma is out to make money from your ailments - sometimes getting you sick in the first place. The nexus between big pharma, hospitals and medical insurance companies are genuinely out to squeeze people. Big pharma gets rich out of other people's misery and the government just doesn't do enough to stop it.
In such cases, a healthy skepticism of big pharma and government is actually warranted. But there's no clear definition of what's healthy. And people often stray into the unhealthy territory, ending up with antivax and other conspiracy theories. Antivax is just a symptom of public and private institutions losing the trust of ordinary people. And while the doctors are often on the people's side, they're also part of the system. People's trust in them depends on their personal experience.
The main problem with Matrix is that the protocol is too big. There's no server and client that's feature complete, other than Synapse and Element.
The lack of good support for MS Office formats in FOSS tools is Microsoft's fault. Office itself often creates files that are slightly incompatible with their own published OOXML standard. FOSS tools are left chasing these inconsistencies. I wish the world had settled on ODF instead of OOXML for documents.
The US is a case study in how becoming a developed nation is not a guarantee to staying like that. All it takes is a bunch of God peddlers are their sick twisted logic to drag everyone back to the dark ages.
Discord hosted the community, not the code. And that community is now destroyed without even a chance to backup. And Discord can absolutely be blamed because people were warning that this would happen. This is as much a result of Discord's centralized design as it is of Nintendo's greed. Now the community has to be reestablished on a new platform from scratch.
Bordering on dark patterns? Windows is riddled with ads and makes countless unknown connections when online. It's literally a Trojan OS. I don't understand how far ms has to push before its users realize that they are being mugged.