Yep yep. Was hoping someone would call me out on that. š
Nah. I've been advocating for Linux for decades. For decades I've been trying to convince people to switch on its own merits, but none of that has been effective.
It took Microsoft sabotaging their product for me to see the needle shift. So I'm done trying to convince people with carrots, it's time for Microsoft to convince the masses with sticks.
What's next Microsoft? Replace the windows os loading windows page with a 30s ad? Or have defender uninstall apps if a competitor pays enough? Maybe capture a screenshot of my screen every 3 seconds for AI analysis?
If your goal is to play "Robin Morningwood Adventure - A Gay RPG" from the comfort of your closet without your aunt getting a notification, then you want to mark the game private.
https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/1150-C06F-4D62-4966
Obviously, this is insufficient if you don't want the watchful eye of Valve themselves to be upon your gaming session.
I'll accept that maybe I'm giving Google a pass because of misplaced nostalgia, and while I personally have never used or liked Meta Facebook, I'll concede that for a while it provided a service some people valued.
It's still my opinion that Google and Facebook have a large percentage of engineers that personally try to make them a genuinely good service, at least moreso than compared to TikTok and Temu. But I'm willing to concede it's not as much a practical difference as I would like.
Emphasis on by comparison, as in "molten hot metal is cooler than the surface of the sun, by comparison".
TikTok and Temu actively have code in them that would be considered a virus in other contexts. They exploit your system to gain more access than they should, violating the point of sandboxed access.
By comparison Meta and Google merely take advantage of user ignorance and apathy by making opting out frustrating - but still technically doable.
Both practices are terrible, but that's not the same as saying they're equally bad.
Them too, but lukewarm by comparison.
Obviously NixOS is the way to go for a gaming OS, just use the right flake and you're all set!
/s
Pascal was a famous thinker of their time, particularly in mathematics.
Two of the ideas they're remembered for are Pascals Triangle and Pascals Wager.
Their triangle is a helpful tool for combinations of things. Their wager is a (kinda bad in my opinion) argument for why you should believe in the Christian God.
The xkcd comic is a combination of both ideas
You can review blocked instances here:
As for why? You're absolutely right, this is often over political issues(drama, censorship, values, etc), sometimes technical ones, and there's no guarantee that your instance's mods goals are aligned with yours. In a healthy instance, you can search for the name of a blocked instance and find a relevant post about why it was blocked.
There are also blocklists: https://gardenfence.github.io/ I don't know offhand if Lemmy.world makes use of them.
You can, of course, go to the blocked instance as a guest, to investigate or validate your mods' claims, but a blocked instance will not shoot up on your page.
A demon core was part of early nuclear bomb research. The type of reaction they were studying would emit blue light and a ton of radiation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core
It's been a meme to imagine the demon core as an available weapon in medieval fantasy, since it looks somewhat like a mace.
Me too, but the pessimist in me thinks that the fine will work out to a 0.1% cost of doing business tax. Then publicly pinkie promise that they'll never do it again, while not stopping and showing no signs of stopping. ššš®āšØ
But even that would cover a large percentage of the American workforce, and I imagine over a few years, it will grow to cover all users that don't need personal accountants. Progress is progress.
Personally, I hope this transitions into a system where they email you a proposed return and you do nothing to accept it (only needing to take action if there's an issue).
Impeachment by a future Congress was what I had in mind loosely. But I'm just one(1) person and not an expert on the subject. I suspect there may be options I do not see, but keeping a record is important to any future action on the matter.
A slightly less naive take is that we're getting these statements on public record, so that we can take action on them later (assuming that day ever comes š)
Top comment from the linked page:
"Looks like the book only included the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Those two amendments were not specifically excluded. This is rage bait. "
Not free, but I've found great value with purelymail.com. Cost is $10/year or there's a calculator for advanced pricing (basically AWS costs forwarded).
If you provide your own domain, you can have unlimited email addresses. If you use a provided domain, there's no predefined limit, but abuse will be stressed by the developer.
If you lose the master account's password the admin cannot reset it for you, which indicates a strong commitment to privacy.
Because it's paid, no activity requirements, phone number requirements, or invitations.
It has one of the best terms of service pages I've ever read.
Today is hard. We're at the heart of the conflict - but if we succeed we are free.
