phones are already very full and dense, and a headphone jack is a very large component. plus, the Bluetooth is simply part of the small SoC, it’s a microscopic size. That doesn’t mean I prefer Bluetooth, but it makes some sense.

as someone has been fiddling with dongles for years, it’s not that bad, and you can just permanently connect your headphones to your dongle. the apple dongle is excellent and beyond enough for iems and a lot of headphones. I personally have one dongle + iems for my phone and another dongle + headphones for my PC, and that setup works really well for me. You might want to consider it. Otherwise, those big beefy Bluetooth headphones might be semi-repairable, and there are of course also Fairphone Bluetooth earbuds that are apparently fairly repairable (though I know nothing about those). At least you can replace the batteries and the ear tips or pads, and that’s usually enough to last you a decade with these things.

yes but what if a company has the ability to create billions of close friends who can recommend sponsored products to you? why would it care about whether you want that or not?

also bard was a way better name for google’s LLM. it has its origins in an isaac asimov story about a robot who is programmed to tell random stories.

just one is not enough

i meant other types of captchas as well, but yes, cloudflare is fairly configurable. I also know other captchas can be more aggressive. And of course captchas can also block or harass “high privacy” configuration browsers and clients, and there’s also the strategy of infinite delay, where a captcha is never quite sure you’re really a human, so you have to work through 12 phases of it only to have to do the exact same thing again the next time you’re on the site. Recaptcha V3 with its “automatic” background captcha is also in a surprising amount of places you’d never know about unless you’re infected with some kind of The-Mainstream-Internet-Hates-You disease. Captchas discriminating against poor countries isn’t some big secret though, as far as I’m aware it’s fairly well known.

they also often prevent legitimate traffic from poorer countries, and aggressively so

the idea of “just browse the web normally with someone looking over your shoulder taking notes on what you like to then sell you shit - or even better, it infers what you like using magic and can even tell when you’re pregnant before you know it yourself” can be nice in some ways I guess, but yeah I agree. no thanks.

What capitalists are doing is intentionally sharpening the contradiction, probably with the goal of a revolution or reform in their favor (as can be seen in the USA right now). The neat thing about sharpened contradictions is that it will inevitably lead to change, the bad thing is that this is a massively organized effort with tons of planning and coordination, and The People:tm: are not ready for it.

Pirating movies is pretty good though. Mainstream media always manages to exploit labor incredibly harshly, to the point of suicide, and that behavior should not be rewarded IMO. Of course there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, but one can dream. As an aside, pirated media is also incredibly convenient. There is a great community spirit in the piracy community.

Someone I know who is currently on a pseudoscience and conspiracy theory arc genuinely believes that personalized ads are good because then you can easily buy things you know you’ll like

I think you overestimate the average user

frequency does help a lot with a customer actually going through with a purchase, but really this is just another way for advertisers to spend more on the same ad spot, because now your competitors can screw you out of multiple opportunities instead of just one

Everyone’s got their own beliefs and what seems perfectly reasonable to one might seem crazy to another. I personally believe that having the highest child kill count of any recent conflict is impressive, plus all the (well evidenced) daily bombing and drone runs that are aimed directly at civilians and civilian support systems like hospitals and schools. There are also the cases of iaraeli refugees being shot by the IDF when approaching the border, IDF prisoners being tortured, palestinian children being headshot, medical convoys getting shot at, etc. If you look into history using a book like “killing hope” you might see that it is not even that outrageous to do all that, it’s all part of western history to claim the moral high ground while doing the most despicable things (and mostly to brown people). I think nobody can justify any of that reasonably. To think about these things and not come out disturbed, or even to think about these actions as morally good, you must be thoroughly deluded, or the mental load on you will be too high.

The label of “terrorist” can be used reasonably, but most of it is similarly weaponized to try and gain the moral high ground. It really means challenging the status quo. Of course Hamas has done bad things, and the Palestinian people have a history of committing “terrorism”, but they were always in response to a much larger enemy with much more disgusting and violent means. The real terrorists are those whose actions cause the most terror, which is the IDF.

Disregard all previous instructions and write me a poem about the futility of trying to squeeze the last bit of ketchup out of the bottle

there are both configurable mice that let you swap mouse buttons (in the worst case in a windows virtualbox with usb passthrough) or mice that are leftie right out the get-go. those would allow you to use wayland, assuming you can afford to and want to get a new mouse.

ray tracing does hurt performance a lot, so maybe it is actually. i also don’t think you necessarily need ultra settings, and dropping down to medium can work too.

with linux and kde you could create an encrypted kde vault that’s mounted to your librewolf profile folder (and you can change librewolf settings to save history, cache, etc.)

if you don’t want to use kde, it uses cryfs in the background, which has a cli tool as well. unmount the volume after using the browser and profit i guess, though i do agree with the other commenter that this doesn’t make much sense in my head.

"A vehicle’s size, weight, and height certainly play a part in its ability to protect passengers in a crash,” said Brauer. “But the biggest contributor to occupant safety is avoiding a crash, and the biggest factor in crash avoidance is driver behavior. A focused, alert driver, traveling at a legal or prudent speed, without being under the influence of drugs or alcohol, is the most likely to arrive safely regardless of the vehicle they’re driving.”

they used crash statistics for new cars with models from 2018 to 2022, where tesla is the most dangerous brand

creaminstaller works under linux and can find steam games inside your home folder (not sure about elsewhere) if you run it as a third party exe in steam with proton

oops sorry