Somehow that got me thinking of Roku’s Basilisk again. If you don’t know that, I’m sorry for mentioning. :) But it’s also a cool thought experiment.

Piracy indicates a service problem. That’s all.

“current gov allows us to do anything so we don’t care anymore because that’s cheaper”

Those parental rules are basically just age dependent.

Late stage capitalism phase. Everything is owned by fewer and fewer companies, which have fewer and fewer regulations, and more and more influence. Politics lies in bed with them. Fascism is the current next step, which is trying to solidify this fusion of megacorps+government for a long time. With this comes fewer and fewer rights for consumers and citizens.

I think that we are now witnessing that capitalism has failed because it got too unregulated and companies grew too powerful. And this systemic collapse will cause a lot of tragedy until it’s replaced in the far future.

As a kid, you have the time but not the money.

As an adult, you have the money but not the time.

It’s not just Russian propaganda anymore. It got adopted more widely in an effort to establish oligarchies in the West as well.

It’s useful for the super-rich because staying on the path of democracy and regulation hurts their profits, and it’s useful for Putin because it destabilizes Europe when European countries turn more isolated and separated with right-wing nationalist leaderships.

Well, fascism doesn’t require skilled people. It just requires loyalists. You can see that in many areas.

Miller is 100% pure Nazi. De-nazification needs to happen soon.

I was a bit disappointed with desktop Linux during the late 90s and early 00s because many applications within the typical ecosystem weren’t great or mature yet (I still shudder when thinking about the amount of time I spent trying to get audio to work nicely across OSS, alsa, artsd, esound, … this was before pulseaudio or pipewire, obviously), and then I temporarily switched back to Windows as a primary OS just because of gaming compatibility. But since the mid-10s or so, Linux grew to become very capable for at least casual gaming as well. So there was no need for Windows anymore and I just wiped it off of every device, leaving Linux as the only OS. This was also during a time where Windows 8, 8.1, 10 and later 11 showed up and this really showed to me that Windows was doomed to die a long-winded death. The last decent version of Windows was 7.

It was funny (and untrue) when desktop Linux was constantly at ~1% market share. But now with desktop Linux slowly but constantly rising, it’s actually true!

They probably reached their goal. It was never about efficiency. That was just the PR spin to sell it to the public. It was about getting rid of pesky regulatory bodies which stood in the way of making more money. Especially those who hindered Musk’s companies.

The USA is currently experiencing the end phase of capitalism: massive corruption turning into open corruption with an economic oligarch class fusing with the government, massive income gaps and problems for regular citizens, class and culture wars plus reappearance of fascism to keep the population busy with culture wars among themselves instead of uniting against the exploiters, and so on. But it just started in USA. It’s already swapping over to other western democratic countries as well.

You becoming a neo-nazi by constantly being served right-wing propaganda on company-controlled social media channels is better for their business than if you were a neutral, critical thinker. It’s why Twitter was worth the 40 billion for Musk. Not because he expects it to ever repay itself. But because he can produce more loyalists by influencing what the algorithm shows and hides for you. Nazis are great for them because they’re busy fighting against other parts of the population while giving the wealthy class a free pass to do what they want. Which is more money, more influence, more exploitation.

I always wonder whether the fall of the Roman Empire also was this stupid and deranged…

What this also means: you cannot have any private conversations with windows users anymore. They all have to be considered fully backdoored. Even if the agent runs locally, you don’t know what it all sends back to MS servers.

For people who have any slice of privacy consciousness left, this is the death of Windows. The difference between this and using a desktop directly from MS’ cloud is negligible - MS can get access to potentially everything that’s visible or readable on your desktop.

Stands for “fear, uncertainty and doubt”. It’s actually a very relevant term. In a lot of contexts. It’s when people influence you to either fear, have uncertainty about, or doubt something. Sometimes this happens without any intent, for example if you’re unsure about some new situation or thing, you tend to first view it more negatively because you have some fear or doubts about it (which might not be warranted). But sometimes, it can have malicious intent (e.g. right-wing extremists spreading FUD about human subgroups they don’t like. Usually the first step before more aggressive behavior happens).

It’s mildly interesting that this claim originated during a time (~ late 70s and 80s) when such claims also originated about rock and metal music. Both D&D and those were somewhat new (or at least newly popular) during that time.

In a way it was the analog equivalent of modern FUD and misinformation spreading on social media. Maybe even disinformation, but probably just misinformation and FUD.

On many websites, the cookies are created no matter what you choose. It’s a dark pattern to get you to accept all, yes, but In the end it’s often meaningless.

Use a decent browser like librewolf which isolates cookies so only the site that created them can access them and clears all cookies on exit - this protects you from bad effects of cookies so you can just accept all. However, you’re still susceptible to other methods of tracking (like IP address or browser fingerprint based tracking) unless you use Tor Browser or something similar.

How to Wagon your Dragon

Not just themed Chrome but with Microsoft’s anti-features (data gathering) and unwanted integrations added on top. Or instead of Google’s. Not sure. Anyway, if you don’t want to freely give away even more of your browsing data to either Microsoft or Google you shouldn’t use any of those.

If you want a Chromium-based browser for the desktop, try Brave but be wary that you need to change lots of settings to make it behave well (but it’s still the least bad Chromium-based browser, when not counting Vanadium for GrapheneOS/Android).

If not, try Librewolf, which already behaves well out of the box and reigns among the top Firefox-based desktop browsers.

If you read “national security” as a reason anywhere, you can read that as “bullshit”. True for any administration.