and it’s a multi-billion dollar corporation, that already makes more money than you or I will ever see in our lifetimes, that actively strives to make the user experience worse for people who don’t pay, when they’ve got a practical monopoly in the “free video sharing platform” market. And you’re whiteknighting for them. 🤡

“If you just give them your wallet right away, the mugging isn’t so bad, really. They didn’t even kick my teeth in!” 🤓

we’ve been in the dumbest timeline for a good, long while now – you’re just now figuring this out?

golly gee whiz it sure looks like I’m finally getting around to getting off the stock android on my Pixel, I’ve been lazy and dragging my feet for some time. Thanks, Google, this is just the kick in the pants I needed!

if say, Spotify or YouTube complain about them.

… who owns YouTube?

Yeah, they’re going to block ReVanced.

I’m not saying you can’t do that, but booking.com or Expedia could just as easily be hacked. They might invest more in security, but they also have a much larger attack surface. Furthermore, when you use a third party site, your credit card details usually won’t be passed on to the hotel directly, that’s true – but then, when you arrive, third party reservations (which only have a virtual card on file from the third party site) usually need you to provide a credit card for incidentals. So one way or another your card details will end up in the hotels system.

Travel credit cards are always a good idea, or pay in cash, just be prepared to have to leave a deposit with the front desk for damages (that you’ll get back if you don’t trash the place) if you choose to pay with cash. Dealing with the hotel directly, though, will almost always drastically reduce your headaches. Need a refund? Just talk to the front desk or management. Need to change your stay dates? Call the front desk directly. No waiting in a queue for an available operator in a call center in India, no “well the hotel has to approve of it before we can […]”, no bullshit.

I am legitimately trying to save you the headaches I watched probably hundreds of different people go through for five years on night audit, and almost every time it was a problem I couldn’t solve, it was because it was a problem created by a third party site.

okay I don’t know who needs to hear this but as someone who has actually worked at hotels:

Stop. Using. Third. Party. Sites.

They do not care. Booking.com, Expedia, Trivago, Travelocity, whatever fucking stupid ass third party site out there – they only cause more problems than they solve. You want a good deal? Hell – you want a straight-up better experience? Call the hotel directly, explain the price that the third party site is showing you, and ask them to match it. 99 times out of 100, they will, because when you book directly with the hotel, the hotel doesn’t have to pay the third party site jack shit. The way third party sites make their money in the first place is by telling hotels charging a rack rate of $200/night “we’ll promote your hotel to guests in the area for $175/night, but you’ll only be charging us $150”. The guest pays Expedia or whoever $175, Expedia pockets $25 as a fee for promoting the hotel and passes on $150 to the hotel. In other words, they can either lose out on $25 by price matching, or lose $50.

Every hotel would prefer you book directly, and will happily price match, so they don’t lose any money to a third party site. More than that, if there are any problems with your booking – wrong days, wrong room type, want to cancel, whatever – you would have to go through the third party site again to do any of that. And waiting on or talking to customer support staff with thick accents at 3AM while your kids are wailing and you just want to go to sleep to fix a problem with your booking that, had you not gone through a third party site, the front desk agent standing in front of you could fix right now, is not fun.

Please stop using third party sites. For the love of God and all that is holy, use them to get discounts but do not book with them.

Like, yes, this wouldn’t have done anything about the bedbug problem this hostel had, but the point remains that any issue is much easier to deal with when you don’t have to play a game of telephone with a middleman corporation that does not give a shit about you as a guest.

That’s some good bait, right there.

A compelling argument. However, counterpoint:

Sailor Boy by Fernando Botero
“That boy ain’t right.”

I rest my case.

Sounds to me like you need to update your blu-ray collection to 4K during your stay.

I got accused of being an LLM for the first time just a few days ago. Was pretty funny.

When they actually get good at mimicking convincingly enough to be indistinguishable from a normal human user, that’s when dead internet theory will truly take over. This could’ve already happened, but I’ve seen enough stupid shit vomited by LLMs to know it probably hasn’t happened yet. Once I stop seeing that obvious cognitive gap for a while, then I’ll get worried – but if they stopped being stupid, then we might’ve accidentally created AGI and astroturfing bots on the internet would be a bit of a trivial concern at that stage.

My worry is “what happens when they run out of trans people and immigrants to harass, and they need another new distraction? What was the last culture war the fascists in this country lost, that they bitterly still remember?”

The Nazis didn’t stop at Jews just because they hated them the most. Eventually they got around to the other “undesirables”.

at this point I think my faith in other people is too damaged to accept such a thing from anyone I don’t know personally – (and alas, I have no friends up north), but I do hope you rescue someone worth saving. Not all of us didn’t see this coming. Nobody deserves that fate, not a migrant, not someone trans or someone poor or who jaywalked while black or anybody who stepped on that orange rapists bone-spurred toes.

Having said that, you should probably get rid of this comment, as I doubt Canada’s immigration authorities are very keen on marriage fraud, no matter how nice a gesture it may be.

Currently shit scared as a gay guy with autism. I studied this, on my own, out of curiosity – how a relatively modern society can commit atrocities upon its own citizens that it deems “lesser”.

In high school, where we had entire chapters of our history books that we focused on for weeks dedicated to things like the civil war and the war of 1812, WWI and WWII were (in my recollection) split between a single chapter titled “The World Wars” or something like that, and anything later was usually glossed over in even briefer fashion (Korea, Vietnam, and the Cold War all shared a single chapter. I’m not even sure the Cuban Missile Crisis was given a sentence. But holy fuck did they want you to recount in great detail all the facts and figures of the revolutionary war and civil war, down to excruciatingly painful detail. – I digress, it just irked me then and it still does now).

My point is, nobody chased me down and beat me over the head with a textbook to research the Holocaust and how it happened, nobody made me learn the finer points of going from an economic crisis to an angry little egomaniac getting elected to gas chambers and piles of bodies. We were taught what happened, in the driest fashion, but they never taught us how it happened. For me, nobody had to. I wanted to learn, so that I’d hopefully recognize the signs if they ever happened again. And now I can’t afford to leave on my own, while watching them slowly follow the exact same playbook in almost the exact same way. You start with the most vulnerable people and expand that over time to “everyone you don’t like”, and I have no illusions about being a friend to republicans.

Also, hey, sidebar: anyone else finding the combination of “gutting NOAA funding”, “open air cages”, and “located in Florida, where devastating hurricanes regularly sweep through”, to be something Eichmann would’ve called genius? “Oops, we didn’t have any warning! Awww, shucks, shame about all those un-people we wanted to be rid of!” And the gators take care of the bodies. It’s brilliant, in a way.

my last hope is Canada opens their borders to unskilled/disabled refugees, but I don’t hold out a lot of hope.

Sure, they could pull a Nintendo and do that; but then you’ve got a handheld running Linux. Linux that’s trying to tell the user how they should use it/how they’re not allowed to use it. And thus if they do it is guaranteed that there will be a dedicated, pissed-off Linux nerd somewhere who spends hours a day doing everything in their power to revert or circumvent whatever bullshit they pull.

In fact, if they did a “Nintendo move”, a workaround would probably be integrated into Bazzite within days or weeks.

remember, if you had fun while wasting time, it wasn’t a waste of time at all.

you’re entitled to your own opinion, but I’ve never had anything but good experiences with my own Brother laser printer. I was the one who picked it out and bought it since my family needed to print a lot of stuff and I didn’t want to deal with troubleshooting it for them, and it has been by far the most reliable, easy to use printer any of us have ever dealt with. We used to have shitty HP inkjets, and those can all die in a fire along with HP.

[Me, firing up AdNauseam, Bypass Paywalls Clean, PopUpOFF, CanvasBlocker and more:]

right? This goes so far beyond typical “not the onion” fodder, it belongs in a community named I Can’t Believe It’s Not The Onion.

Two can play at that game: you can always see your nose. Always. Your brain just ignores it, but now you can’t.

:^)