I’m pretty sure Wikipedia isn’t a government entity and thus not subject to whatever their fever dream is. Republicans are the worst, and many of them are quite stupid as well

No. Stop trying to monetize everything.

Switched to linux. No regrets so far.

Of the installs I’ve done in the past year, none were absolutely flawless. One had an error that I just hit “retry” and it worked. One required some serious googling but I found the fix on reddit (rip). One didn’t work at all, and I switched to a different distro that did work.

I’m not going to lie and sugarcoat it, but once I got past the install everything has been fine. Hopefully things will continue to improve

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie

A lie is an assertion that is believed to be false, typically used with the purpose of deceiving or misleading someone.[1][2][3] The practice of communicating lies is called lying. A person who communicates a lie may be termed a liar.

Yeah, more protests that aren’t just like once a month. But I don’t know how to organize that, and most of the platforms that people communicate on are owned by the worst people.

Why does everything have to constantly increase profits?

I think that’s the nature of publicly traded for profit companies. The shareholders don’t care about the product. They just want their portfolio’s value to go up.

The leadership doesn’t care much about the product. Not in the long term. They get paid a big salary, and the higher-ups have equity they want to go up in value. So long as they cash out before the product dies, they’re golden.

The actual labor building the product might care. Some are just working for a paycheck. (I knew a guy who worked at spotify, actually. He didn’t personally care much about music. He was just a database guy). But the ones who do care don’t have any power.

So most of the forces that would push the company towards being long term good don’t have power. The forces that want more profits, now, do.

I don’t trust spotify not to fill those playlists with AI slop, now. I also personally prefer to go deeper on a band, rather than thoughtlessly drift through a bunch of stuff I’ll never hear again.

I do like bandcamp’s “people who bought this also bought this” recommendations, though.

I’ve been telling people for years to buy 1-2 albums a month, and then after a couple years you have a sizable library. Spotify is renting.

But spotify is easy and fast, and some people think they listen to way more music than they do. I wonder how many people are paying spotify $10/month to listen to the same 4 albums for years.

People gotta stop watching slop. But it seems impossible to get people to stop using tiktok, twitter, instagram, et al. They just don’t care enough.

Verbing weirds language, per calvin and hobbes

https://imgur.com/verbing-weirds-language-wHldxoy

I suppose. But have you tried to get people to care about things? It’s stupid hard. I can’t get most of my friends to stop using Twitter, which is a pretty low stakes change. Nevermind something like “eat less meat” or “walk instead of drive sometimes”

If you can make people care, you can solve a lot of problems

You can make that kind of thing illegal. I think “shrink wrap eulas” are dubious. Rule that fine print with a bunch of other stuff doesn’t count as explicit. Like there are rules now about cookie acceptance that has changed how the web works, and most sites don’t try to hide the cookie thing because that’s against the rules.

I think you’re under estimating what the law can do, probably because most of the time it’s used to bolster rich assholes.

You could probably make it illegal to alter people’s videos without their explicit consent. But also the Republicans have shown us that laws mean what the people in charge want

Many people are illiterate. How many of them are trying to run Linux, I don’t know.

Seems like this should be illegal, Google should be broken up, and its leadership imprisoned

and a few of the worst offenders (Google is one that I know does this) add a random string of characters on the element that serve as a unique identifier that periodically changes and so requires me to readd them to my UBO blocklist.

Does ubo accept css selectors? Css has syntax for “match element that starts with, ends with, or contains, this string”

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Attribute_selectors

Half of US adults can’t read at a 6th grade level. This is haunting.

Some strikingly high percentage can’t complete complicated tasks on a computer (eg: find 3 user email addresses and add them to a spreadsheet).

Reading the manual is good advice but I think some people are just left behind

Yeah I noticed that, too. Not sure why. Using apt on the command line is probably an alternative, at least.

Also switched to Linux (popos) this month. It’s been fine. Games work. Browser works. No complaints, really.