My apartment complex wants me to download some third-party app just to pay my rent, instead of using their perfectly serviceable web portal. I assume they’re getting a data harvest kickback that’s buried in several layers of fine-print legalese, which will be used to send me targeted spam and junk mail. And that data will be sold and re-sold to other parties ad infinitum. Whatever they can collect about my personal life, for sale to any asshole with enough cash in their pocket. Fuck that. I shouldn’t have to deal with this bullshit just to keep a roof over my head.

I almost pulled the trigger on one of these during Amazon’s recent big sale, but there was a trend in the user reviews that troubled me. I went with a Samsung unit instead. No regrets.

I can imagine the conversation.

Elon: “I own this website, and you’re telling me that I’m not allowed to see this person’s profile or activity because they blocked me?”

Good luck getting a massive narcissist like him to understand why every user should have that right.

Founded in 1973. It’s not a coincidence that we started to see establishment pushback organizations popping up in this time frame. Because in the 60s, people of color started voting en masse after generations of systematic suppression. The civil rights movement empowered them to express their political views like never before. The word “Heritage” in this context means “white people.” When they say “traditional American values,” they mean “no gays or mixing of the races.” When they say “limited government,” they mean “weak regulation.” When they say “individual freedom,” they mean “freedom from consequences,” specifically for white males. When they say “the war on drugs,” they mean “the war on black people and liberals.” And so on. They’re speaking in code, and their very name is a code. But it’s easily cracked if you’ve been paying attention.

Be careful, most cheap NVMe drives have low endurance. Llike, not “Oh, you’re just hand wringing about nothing,” endurance ratings but an actually and relevantly low number of terabytes that can be written before the drive becomes failure-prone. They also usually lack a DRAM cache, so certain operations can be as slow as a mechanical hard drive, thereby negating the major advantage of opting for solid-state storage.

That reminds me of a Microsoft-branded USB WiFi adapter that I was making heavy use of back in mid-2000s. The MN-510. You could buy it brand-new circa 2006. It had a $75 launch MSRP, about $114 adjusted for inflation. Come 2009, we find out that Windows 7 wasn’t going to support it. And given what we know about OS development cycles, they presumably made that call in '08 or even '07. Looking back on it, I think this was one of the major catalysts for me to reconsider Linux as a drop-in replacement. Because, wouldn’t you know, the adapter kept working just fine when I tried it out in Ubuntu. Support was simply there in the kernel. Plug-and-play. I suddenly had this whole other operating system providing an it-just-works network connection, for free. It was amazing. So I used that adapter for several more years until I could afford a network upgrade. And I’m still using Linux the majority of the time today.

Looks like someone is in denial…

This is such an absurd distortion of the evidence I have provided that you surely have a vested interest in trying to gaslight people about a standard business operation.

Spoiler: The gaslighting isn’t working. That was actually pretty embarrassing.

Why would that be considered outrageous?

This has been reported on for years.

Example 1, Example 2.

I’m sorry, I don’t follow. What did I say that would be considered an outrageous claim?

I’m saddened by the phenomenon because there’s plenty of evidence that the audiences for these most of these games hate the experience, but they can’t stop playing because they’ve become victims of predatory psychological tactics designed to keep them addicted and their wallets wide open. These publishers and studios literally hire psychologists who specialize in generating this addiction, using models optimized to prey on their own users as much as humanly possible. It’s sickening. The sports games are especially shameless about this. Ruining people’s finances and their core sense of financial responsibility to fatten their pockets. I don’t know how they sleep at night. Sociopaths, the lot of them.

You sure are going to unusual lengths to (poorly) defend this behavior. Maybe there’s something you should be disclosing about who you really are.

Funny how Firefox can be at least as secure without it having to phone home every time you click on a link.

Usually when this happens, we call it spyware, nuke it from orbit, and find an alternative.

Since when did we need to flip a coin on issues like this? Spoiler: We don’t! There are plenty of resources to go around.

If anything was a waste of time, it was this poll. Go home, Pew Research, you’re drunk.

But do they like Chrome, or do they just use it out of habit, and because it’s the default on Android phones and constantly marketed on Google’s search engine? Perhaps they use it because it’s the “good enough” solution that’s dropped right in front of them?

I used to think that Fedora being ultimately backed by IBM would give them stability. Then Redhat dismissed Tom Cotton, who was a key OSS liaison, and now it seems to be embarrassing itself with this bitterly hostile attitude towards everyone in the RHEL orbit. It’s been so out-of-character that most people initially assumed this was IBM leaning on RHEL. But it apparently was not. Then my Fedora installation choked on what seemed like a pretty ordinary kernel update and stopped booting.

It felt like a signal. I settled on EndeavourOS, and it’s been an all-around improvement. Nvidia drivers are optionally baked in, the AUR (which EOS also bakes in) is ten times what Copr could ever hope to be, and pacman is ridiculously speedy (though I suppose anything is faster than DNF). I know EOS will sometimes break, as is tradition for rolling releases, but I’m confident that Arch will at least keep being Arch for many years to come.

“Misinformation.”

No, call it what it is: propaganda.

And an alternate email service like ProtonMail.

They also have ProtonDrive as an alternative to Google Drive. Apple’s iCloud is also end-to-end encrypted now. pCloud is another popular option. There are a number of choices for secure cloud storage these days.

Web search is a bit more difficult. DuckDuckGo is heavily integrated with Bing. Brave Search is hit-or-miss. Yahoo is just a front-end for Bing.

If you need live document collaboration, you’re probably already in a setting where either Sharepoint or GSuite are mandated. If you’re not, BitAI may be worth looking into.

More than half of Amazon’s sales come from third-party merchants who this year started paying an average of over 50% commission on every sale, up from 35.2% in 2016, the result of it raising Fulfillment by Amazon fees every year and increasing storage fees.

While paying for Amazon’s logistics and advertising services is optional, most merchants consider these, especially advertising, a necessary part of doing business. Moreover, the FTC has reportedly amassed evidence that Amazon disadvantages merchants who don’t use the services by giving them lower placements.

Capitalism at its finest… I still remember when Amazon was just a humble online bookstore. How times have changed.

I’ve had the impression for a while that Twitter upper management wanted monthly active users on the level of Facebook, Tiktok and other social media. To enrich themselves by way of ad revenue, rather than to create opportunities and experiences for the platform and its users. Then when it became apparent that such a potential opportunity had come and gone (if it was ever there in the first place), they did what was in their minds the next-best thing: They cashed out while they could still find a buyer. Elon’s idiotically freewheeling but nevertheless binding offer was basically their winning lottery ticket, so they held his feet to the fire instead of treating it like the thoughtless shitpost it was.