Facebook listening in on your microphone is one of those things that I actually believe to be true. Ever had conversations with people to then realize that you’re being served targeted ads based on these conversations? Seems very coincidental.

Off is the direction in which I would like Microsoft to fuck if they think I’m gonna have a deep learning AI spy on my computer activity.

This just makes me want to switch to Linux.

If you asked me fifteen years ago if I wanted to live in the United States, I would have jumped on the first ship to Staten Island in a heartbeat.

Nowadays I don’t even want to visit the country, and unjust bullshit like this is a big reason why. Y’all have a serious problem with allowing your police forces to do whatever the hell they want and argue “qualified immunity” for things that would land you significant prison time in another developed country.

I really question why there’s still a lifelong waiting list to apply for a visa to work in the US, when the state of the country is actually quite bleak…

Genuine question, is Bluesky worth using in its current state? Can it hold a candle to pre-Musk Twitter?

I’m asking because I feel incredibly burned by the barebones state of Threads and I don’t really want to commit to another platform that doesn’t have its shit together. Threads still doesn’t have trending topics and functional hashtags over a year into its launch, and this is is shit that Mastodon had for years, despite Meta expecting to piggyback off of the ActivityPub protocol and be welcomed into the Fediverse with open arms.

So imagine you’re on PornHub and then out of nowhere, Clippy shows up and says “hmmm looks like you need some help pleasuring yourself”, then starts flicking through similar nude pictures and videos to what you’ve been looking at before. The idle animation of the AI assistant even changes to Clippy morphing into the shape of a penis and shagging a rolled up piece of lined paper is if it were a fleshlight. You can’t tell if Microsoft are mocking you for being a coomer, nor can you tell whether to find Clippy’s sexual deviancy funny or creepy.

Somehow that hypothetical dystopia of Clippy watching you masturbate is only slightly worse than what Microsoft plan to do with Recall. If the mere thought of a machine learning AI taking screenshots of your desktop every few seconds and learning from your computer usage habits isn’t absolutely fucking terrifying… Then imagine that these are likely being uploaded to a server for the perusal of advertisers, intelligence agencies and any hackers skilled enough to break into Microsoft’s servers.

Even if it was stored locally, all it takes is one dodgy web link for you to inadvertently send all your Recall data to a hacker and have it ransomed.

I don’t think the “decentralize and federate everything” strategy is a good idea when it comes to online marketplaces.

We’ve seen how quickly bad actors can wreak havoc on the Fediverse like that one time when Lemmy Shitpost was closed for weeks due to people creating new instances of their own and spamming the community with CSAM. Imagine how much you open the community up to scams or criminal activity when money gets involved.

“Games work on Linux now so you can switch over”

Gaming was at one point a serious hurdle. Back in 2007 when I was forced to switch from Windows XP to Ubuntu due to a former friend’s IT fuck-up, the only Windows game I could legitimately get running was World of Warcraft, and even then the installation process was arduous.

Valve deserves much of the credit for getting Linux into the state where it can play a vast majority of Windows games with comparable or even better performance.

The true hurdle now is with anticheat.

I have friends who work in IT and would probably slam their head against the wall if they had to deal with Control Panel being removed.

Are Microsoft deliberately trying to make the fabled Year of the Linux Desktop finally become a reality? Because I feel like we’re two or three more dumbfuck business moves away from this…

I don’t work in IT, and a lot of bigger companies (my employer included) have restrictions on what employees can install on their work machines. It’s basic security measures to prevent malware infections.

Amazon used to sell products, not Shein-grade self-destructing dropshipped garbage from all-consonant brands.

I knew it wasn’t just my imagination. Amazon has been filled with cheap Chinese knock-off brands in recent years, to the point where I may as well be using Temu or Wish for a bargain.

If you went from the internet’s storefront to an upmarket AliExpress, that’s not a good sign.

Google are the ones who have really gone down the toilet in recent years. They ditched cached pages, soured search results with paid ads and even their image search is as bad as Tineye for reverse image searching these days. Literally the only thing Alphabet really have going for them anymore is Android and YouTube.

It’s baffling that a company which was once so dominant in the web search space that their name was literally used as a verb for looking things up for decades have now enshittified their flagship product so much that they’re making rivals like Bing, Lycos, Duckduckgo, etc look like viable alternatives.

There was a screenshot I once saw of a Chinese netizen’s web browser in the late-2000’s, using Internet Explorer 6 and tonnes of third-party toolbars. I think I saw it back when Digg was still a thing. We’ve now reached the age where major websites are more cluttered with notifications than a malware-infected browser was 15 years ago, and where everybody is tracking everything that you do online.

25 years ago, we legitimately drove RealNetworks into the ground for a lot less than what we’re allowing Google, Microsoft, Meta, X, etc to get away in the modern day.

Google and YouTube are pretty fucking bad without an ad-blocker installed. From someone who has worked in jobs where I may as well have called myself a ‘Professional Googler’ and where I do not have permissions to install an ad-blocker on my work computer, the amount of ads I get buried with really sours the experience.

Also, a lot of news sites (particularly anything owned by Reach PLC such as the Mirror) are now flipping the middle-finger at GDPR by forcing users to pay to reject tracking cookies. Here’s a screengrab from the Daily Mirror website…

Anyone with basic critical thinking skills would have known this whole scandal was bullshit in the first place. Did it not occur to any of these TERFs and transphobes that Algeria (a Muslim nation known for persecuting the LGBTQ community as a whole) is one of the least-likely nations to field a trans candidate?

Barking up the wrong tree, to be honest. Apple are the real monopolistic dickheads here.

EDIT: Someone else (on Reddit, go figure) sent me an invite the day after. This may be a shocker to you but you kinda have to accept friend requests before you can send beta invites.

Accepted. Nothing’s come yet but I will let you know when the invite arrives.

If it’s not too late to ask for an invite…

https://steamcommunity.com/id/clbull

At this point filing a multi-million dollar lawsuit against OceanGate will be like trying to extract blood from a stone.

What tangible assets do OceanGate really have left to pay Nargeolet’s estate? Their CEO (the maverick aerospace engineer who thought he was ‘revolutionizing’ the submarine industry by cutting corners) is dead, their only active submersible imploded, their reputation has been tainted by the fact that they’ve been selling billionaires what is effectively a carbon fiber coffin waiting to implode, and any angel investors have probably pulled out harder than a porn star on the verge of climax.

Even then, they may not even have a case. IANAL but in an age where every single tech and gaming company has been pushing through class action waivers and forced arbitration clauses in their Terms of Service, I get the feeling that any attempts at suing OceanGate will be thrown out of court by the waivers each passenger had to sign.

There is a sense of irony in people celebrating this disaster on social media because it means “five less billionaires in the world.” No, this is potentially a massive L for us commoners, because it shows just how much corporate greed can destroy lives. If the rich can be screwed this badly by an unregulated corporation, imagine what corporate giants can do to people who can’t afford lawyers.

After how horribly they handled the whole hardware defect scandal with their 13th and 14th gen i Series processors, this is 100% deserved.

Intel is a cautionary tale of what happens when you allow bean counters who care more about EBITDA than their customers and staff to run the show.

“Away from the hot steaming water? Oh, I’ll rebuke you in the name of Jesus.” was apparently enough for a white police officer to pull out his gun and shoot an innocent black woman three times.

What the fuck?

This is legitimately worse than what happened to George Floyd. Like… I genuinely feel angry for the relatives of this poor woman after watching that bodycam footage.