TheTechnician27

And if you haven’t used it in a while, we recently made a blog post giving a rundown of the changes leading up to our most recent major release.

Damn, and you almost picked the cool, not tankie kind of communism too.

Veganism. I went vegetarian and stayed there for a long time, and I assumed taking the extra step to being vegan would be too difficult relative to what I thought at the time was a marginal benefit. A couple years back, I watched the documentary Dominion (NSFL) and realized pretty quickly that I’d been mistaken. Of course it was more than just Dominion, but it’s such an acutely traumatizing kick in the teeth that it was definitely the last straw.

They’d rather haaaave

Haha, yup, you’re right; had a brain fart.

Parents killing reaping their zombie children was a favorite one of mine.

I made that point short to be pithy, but what I actually take issue with in there being so many streaming services is that:

• Upfront transparency for what shows and movies are actually there, let alone in what state, is often incredibly limited. This isn’t inherent to there being multiple services, but when I haven’t found one whose experience isn’t profoundly shitty, I’m counting it against them.
• Even if you accurately assess which subscriptions you need at first, that can collapse at any time because shows are treated as playing cards, and you often need to put ongoing effort beyond just paying money into maintaining that list. (I often watch shows over months or years instead of binging them, and this is super shitty under a streaming service.)
• Even if you have all those subscriptions and maintain them well, there’s no place to centrally view their content, something which cable TV – for what a piece of shit it was – shockingly made easier than streaming. If I purchase half my games from Steam and half from GOG, I can still access what I buy from a shared location: my desktop. If I purchase a bunch of discs from multiple different vendors, it’s all centralized on my DVD rack. The UI is consistent (and even slightly quicker to access). This isn’t massive, but it’s still objectively a point against them.
• Unlike the PC gaming landscape where games are often available across multiple stores, streaming services are becoming increasingly exclusivity-focused, and this happens because there’s such an oligopoly in the TV and film industry, and basically every member of that oligopoly now runs a streaming service.

I don’t think the point should be that there should be one streaming service to rule them all, but that in their current state, they represent an objectively substantial downgrade to piracy even taking away costs.

Yup, if you present me a side-by-side of the free one and the paid one when the free one is better even disregarding costs, I’m pirating 100% of the time.

• “Oh, you’ll only have access to this as long as our servers remain online or as long as we keep renewing the license.”
• “Sorry, your device needs to phone home to use this.”
• “Don’t you love ads in your paid product?”
• “You’ll need to juggle several different services if you want what you can otherwise get for free on a central hub.”
• “Yes, you can only use this on one or two devices at a time thanks to DRM.”
• “Fuck you, you’ll need an account with us to use this even though you bought it without that account somewhere else.”
• “This thing’s only ongoing cost on our end is version updates you totally need and want, so it’ll be an indefinite subscription (which we’ll make a pain in the ass to cancel).”
• “This game runs noticeably worse because of the shitty DRM we shoehorned in.”
• “You’re saying you don’t like being spied on for ad targeting?”
• “You can only get this bundled with a bunch of other bullshit you don’t want and would never pay for individually.”
• “Our UI that you’re forced to interact with to use this is fucking garbage.”
• “We don’t sell this anymore; ask Scalper4478 on eBay.”
• “We use the money that you pay us to lobby against your rights as a consumer.”
• “We somehow lack QoL features that the free version has.”

By “real-world representation”, I mean “how often the word is actually used in the real world.” There are hundreds of trillions of neutrinos passing through you all the time, but I’d still think “nest” is a better word for kids.

Xylophone: fun, colorful, easy for a kid to remember as a cute little instrument

Xenon: An inert gas used in… MRI scans, I think?

X-ray is probably the only other ‘X’ word with more real-world representation than xylophone, and as pointed out above, that’s not quite representative of how the letter is used phonetically in the rest of the language.

Did you even look at the logs for the bans? Things like telling a real human person (not the bot) to “fuck off” definitely break the rules independent of thoughts on the bot. And the admin’s response was that they would look into it.

Seriously, that’s buck wild. I hope they meant “they support the CCP”, which isn’t a stretch given the various Soviet-era iconography in the profiles of its maintainers (Mao, Castro, Gagarin, etc.), and not “they’re acting on behalf of the CCP”, which is such a ridiculous claim to make with no further substantiation.

Check my comment history. I routinely say many extremely negative things about that stupid MBFC bot in !news and have yet to receive a ban.

Correct. I’ve been here for just a month, but so far I haven’t seen a single slur that’s ableist, homophobic, transphobic, racist, or xenophobic.

… Such as?

My brother in Mācuīltōchtl, lemmy.ml is run by the maintainers of Lemmy and was established years before Lemmy.World.

Lemmy.World has been gaining traction recently, not the other way around.

Absolutely! And what I ran down is just the extent of the features I personally interact with; there are a fair few more, including one that aims to combat clickbait by changing clickbaity titles.

FYI, SponsorBlock isn’t just for skipping sponsored segments. SB gives you granular control over the sorts of sections you can skip, and it only auto-skips sponsors by default. However:

• There are several categories of section, including intro animation/intermission (“an interval without actual content”), preview (i.e. where the information already exists later in the video), sponsor (a segment made in return for payment from a third party), unpaid/self-promotion (e.g. “buy my merch”), interaction reminder (e.g. “remember to like and subscribe”), and endcards/credits. (There’s also “filler tangent/jokes”, but I haven’t tried this one.)
• For each of these categories, you can choose to disable altogether, show in the seek bar, prompt to manually skip, or auto skip.

So even if you would never want to skip a sponsored segment in your life, the extension still saves a ton of time if you have no/limited interest in watching even just one of the above-listed categories.

Yeah, I’m siding with the French government on this one at first blush. E2EE platforms are a necessary tool for combating government overreach and corporate surveillance. But if you willingly make a platform that’s not E2EE, the idea of users being able to share this vile shit being a “necessary evil” toward the greater societal good completely falls apart. If you 1) have this vile content on your platform, 2) know it exists, 3) can trivially combat it in a targeted manner, and 4) choose not to, then you’re complicit in its distribution.

I have no sympathy for a CEO who tries to dupe their userbase into believing their app is private and then not even take advantage of the one single ethical benefit to the platform not being E2EE.

Oh, no, given an actual choice (even if it were exactly the same computer at exactly the same price), Linux would likely win out eventually if MS didn’t massively step up their game. Windows has way too much stupid bullshit that its userbase is noseblind to: driver fuckery, installing applications by finding files on an Internet scavenger hunt, no built-in, centralized updating of applications, having to restart your PC for your OS to update, being consistently slower and more resource-hungry, needing a dedicated antivirus, bare minimum customization, not being able to uninstall completely useless shitware (e.g. Internet Explorer in goddamn 2024) and having the bloatware you can uninstall come back after updates (e.g. Candy Crush), the amount of dark patterns during installation, licensure bullshit, this new scheme of pressuring users into OneDrive by making it the default, ads in your “premium” OS, and I could just keep going.

MS could definitely still gatekeep their Office suite and their Copilot AI (for the few people who actually use the latter), but every other software vendor would start supporting Linux if the userbase moved there, and LibreOffice etc. (already fine for the basic office stuff most people do) would get the funding and contributors to implement more advanced functionalities.