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vonbaronhans

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vonbaronhans ,

I wish Democrats were willing to put in the same amount of endless, ceaseless planning and toiling and preparing so when an opportunity arises, you can snatch it up. Republicans did this with the Supreme Court, with religion in schools, etc etc etc. Last time Democrats had both Houses and the Presidency, we got barely anything (to my memory at least).

I wish Democrats had an ounce of Republicans’ ability not just to shape narratives, but to conjure them from thin air and still dominate the news cycle.

I wish Democrats were as willing to bend to the extremists in their own party as the Republicans do. That’s a real monkey’s paw wish right there, but at the moment the extreme right is literal fascists and the extreme left just wants the cool quality of life stuff the Nordic countries already have.

Speaking personally… yeah we ARE divided here in the US. It kind of IS that bad. There are a lot of reasons for it, but in my mind the biggest thing is the legacy of slavery in this country. It’s not a scar… it’s still bleeding because bigots keep picking the scab. There’s been so many knock on effects from it that have gone unexamined and unaddressed because there are enough bigots to be a stupid but effective voting block.

vonbaronhans ,

Reefill.com isn’t even a registered domain. I call horseshit.

vonbaronhans ,

Fair enough. I stand corrected.

vonbaronhans ,

The framing of the article’s headline is bad, but the problem is that because people in starter homes can’t trade up, first time buyers can’t buy starter homes. Ultimately, the problem is that MORE people are stuck renting.

And that’s purely descriptive. The people in the starter homes are not to blame, in any moral sense. But people read blame into it because emotionally resonant headlines get more clicks, so they frame it that way.

vonbaronhans ,

people are lazy have busy lives and want to put their time and energy into things that aren’t learning a whole new technology skill.

FTFY.

vonbaronhans ,

If I had to guess, he’d try to find a business selling enterprise supported distributions of Linux, buy them, then try to expand/convert them to develop “consumer Linux”. He’d advertise it as getting out from under the thumb of evil corps (ie his competitors), then as soon as it gains even a modicum of traction start implementing privacy violating shit, ads, whatever, to enshittify it as quickly as possible for a quick buck.

Google's "Manifest V2" Chrome extension phaseout next month is expected to impact the original uBlock Origin extension, which still uses the V2 framework and has 37 million users (www.theregister.com)

The new MV3 architecture reflects Google’s avowed desire to make browser extensions more performant, private, and secure. But the internet giant’s attempt to do so has been bitterly contested by makers of privacy-protecting and content-blocking extensions, who have argued that the Chocolate Factory’s new software...

vonbaronhans ,

That’s bizarre. I am also on Windows 10 and use Firefox as my primary browser, largely because I can stream DRM’d video sites (Netflix etc) to my friends on discord.

Sounds dumb, but have you tried uninstalling and reinstalling? I might suggest also removing or disabling all extensions to see if that does anything.

vonbaronhans ,

Once Firefox on mobile got extension support, I switched over immediately to use a decent adblocker. Made sure every app that opens a browser opens in Firefox. Has made my mobile browsing experience so much better, of my goodness.

vonbaronhans ,

DDG is just Bing. At least as far as the core search algorithm goes.

Unfortunately, my experience is the opposite. I tried to use DDG for about a month and consistently found myself giving up, Googling instead, and finding a relevant stack overflow page or reddit thread or whatever on the first page of results.

vonbaronhans ,

I used Bing by default for several months just because that’s what my work laptop’s browser had for default.

I never directly compared those results to DDG, but 9/10 times I would get frustrated by the lack of relevant results and go back to Google, where I’d find something useful on the first page of results.

vonbaronhans ,

Not so much, maybe towards the last month of that period defaulting to Bing. I think it was still being constantly rebranded then. It was still pretty new, so I never really trusted it for anything and just went to the sites in the results.

vonbaronhans ,

It’s unfortunately still far more useful than other search engines, in my experience anyway. I haven’t yet tried the paid search engine someone pointed out to me recently, Kagi, I think.

But given the cost of Kagi’s tiers based on number of searches, it would have to be MUCH more useful to me than Google to really make it feel worth it.

vonbaronhans ,

Like it or not, people are interested in celebrities. I wouldn’t call that irrelevant in the attention economy.

vonbaronhans ,

The “people want to hear about celebrities” part is relevant to the fact that interests drive a big part of the audience to the site. Meaning, you and I both want celebrities to be off Twitter because if we can convince them to go elsewhere, that would be an effective way to cripple Twitter.

Complaining that people like celebrities when they’re not “relevant to your daily life” doesn’t really do anything to further your goals. It just makes you sound like an asshole who isn’t relatable to the kind of people that we want to listen to us.

vonbaronhans ,

Inkscape is for vector art, yeah. Great for design, not for like, painting.

Krita is pretty great for a free digital art app. But I used it for about a year and could never quite get used to it. I recently went back to Clip Studio Paint (with my perpetual license they do still honor), and my experience just improved so much. It was like… ah, yes, an art program that clearly paid people to specifically make the UI easier to use for non-programmers, what an underrated feature.

vonbaronhans ,

Cash has an identifier on it, but unlike a check that identifier doesn’t identify you.

vonbaronhans ,

Alum, maybe?

vonbaronhans ,

Yeah, but tax can always be figured into the presented price of things if businesses are required to do so.

That’s pretty much the point of this type of legislation. Of course you need legislators who, y’know, vote to legislate in this way.

vonbaronhans ,

That’s what I was thinking. Wasn’t that the point?

vonbaronhans ,

And that, everybody, is literally not the correct usage of “enshittification”.

Jk, but for real though, it’s not a direct synonym for “degraded” or “gets worse”. It’s more specific than that.

Plus, “literally” now literally has an alternative definition in the dictionary meaning “figuratively”. So y’know, maybe get over the needless linguistic prescriptivism.

vonbaronhans ,

More of a you think, I think. My shorts feed mostly comedy stuff, DND stuff, art stuff, and music stuff. Well, and the odd Christian preacher, which I assume gets wrapped up with the atheism content I also see.

vonbaronhans ,

Because honestly, Office is pretty great for what it does.

I know a lot of folks here can’t get over it being proprietary or all the other anticompetitive stuff Microsoft has done with Office, but once we got M365 at work, a lot of my work life got a lot easier.

Any time I have tried to use LibreOffice or other alternatives, I feel like I’m giving up ten years’ worth of quality of life improvements. That’s generally my experience with 99% of FOSS stuff - fully functional but dogshit to navigate and use.

vonbaronhans ,

I’ve paid for Discord Nitro for at least a few years now. Primarily I wanted to do my part to stave off exactly this sort of thing.

This feels bad. I don’t like this whatsoever.

vonbaronhans ,

I feel the same about Krita. I used it for about a year of hobbyist drawing, and I just never could get comfortable using it.

Clip Studio Paint came out with 3.0, and after some deliberation I decided to pay for the update. Felt like coming home. I’ve done more art in two weeks than I’ve done in nearly a year of using Krita.

vonbaronhans ,

What does a protest non-vote accomplish? There’s moral satisfaction, of course, but that doesn’t stop the genocide. If the goal of the protest non-vote is to ensure Biden loses to teach the Dems a lesson, and it works, Trump becomes president. That’s almost certainly just a continuation of the genocide PLUS all the harm Project 2025 promises to deliver. MAYBE the Dems put up a more progressive candidate next time, but surely we could try to get that power between election cycles?

I guess I just don’t think protest non-votes will accomplish any of the goals of that protest, but they will allow Trump to live his best fascist dictator life.

I dunno, is there something I’m missing from your strategic calculus here?

vonbaronhans ,

If a clot was formed due to a poison or something, is that detectable? Or is this one of those things that will always be shrouded in suspicion because we’ll never know if the clot was ‘natural’ or part of a more intentional plot?

vonbaronhans ,

“what’s the Judge Rotenburg Center?” looks it up“Jesus”

vonbaronhans ,

Intent may not be relevant for your example, but a lot of US law does have different crimes and levels of criminality that depend on intent.

For example, if I kill someone on accident, that’s usually categorized as manslaughter. If I kill someone on purpose, that might be murder. Depending on how much premeditation went into, it might be murder in the first degree, which comes with the most severe punishments.

vonbaronhans ,

To be fair, Lemmy is my reddit replacement.

vonbaronhans ,

I blocked hexbear not because of their political beliefs, but because they would fucking ruin entire content sections by being super annoying.

I’m also glad to see your comment not triggering the same brigading behavior I used to see a lot more often.

vonbaronhans ,

I feel like I’d feel similarly if I had a foldable, but the one guy I know who has one swears he’ll never buy one again. Granted, he got a gen 1 Galaxy Fold, so it’s got some major growing pains.

vonbaronhans ,

Would that work in the case of photographers? I would only think to use Maps for business that are likely to have or must have by necessity some building or office.

vonbaronhans ,

That explains why my DDG searches have been less than helpful… it’s just as unhelpful as Bing. I usually find myself trying other search engines, but run back to Google when I can’t find anything relevant to the problem I’m trying to solve (most of my googling is tech help stuff).

vonbaronhans ,

“rule 34 of Linux desktop configuration”

You… want to fuck Linux desktop configs?

Scientists show how ‘doing your own research’ leads to believing conspiracies — This effect arises because of the quality of information churned out by Google’s search engine (www.vice.com)

Scientists show how ‘doing your own research’ leads to believing conspiracies — This effect arises because of the quality of information churned out by Google’s search engine::Researchers found that people searching misinformation online risk falling into “data voids” that increase belief in conspiracies.

vonbaronhans ,

Curious, but was there ever a time when critical thinking was taught in US public schools above and beyond what is being taught in public schools now?

US public schools are getting underfunded, of course, but curricula themselves have probably improved over time?

I honestly don’t really even know how to begin researching this particular line of inquiry, and I have a background in social science research.

vonbaronhans ,

Vermintide 2 didn’t hook me. But I’ve already got over a hundred hours in Darktide.

Good stuff.

vonbaronhans ,

It doesn’t, but that isn’t their point. They’re simply pointing out that existing net neutrality laws in the US usually only apply to ISPs and telcos, not internet businesses.

vonbaronhans ,

I’ve also felt like YouTube Premium was a pretty good deal, given the sheer amount of YouTube content I consume and how much I detest ads.

That said, I also feel like most of what I really value from YouTube is on Nebula, to which I am also subscribed. I constantly wonder if it would be worth it to drop YouTube altogether, to save some money but also a huge amount of time.

The only other thing really keeping me on YouTube Premium is the included YouTube music. Not like Spotify is much cheaper, and I’m not much into manually managing libraries of my own music files like I did in the days of my 2nd Gen iPod (it had a touch wheel!).

Beeper Mini is back! Now you can text Apple users via iMessage again (blog.beeper.com)

We’ve created an updated version of Beeper Mini that fixes an issue that caused messages not to be sent or received. We even added in a few new feature improvements: chats now open at the last unread message, and we polished the video player a bit!

vonbaronhans ,

True.

But the point is the lock-in is similar from a social perspective, just hardened even further by tying the messaging platform to specific hardware.

“Hey let’s use XYZ instead of iMessage” and “hey let’s use XYZ instead of WhatsApp” will be met with the same typical resistance to any sort of change. But in the case of iMessage, there’s added elitism and othering due to Apple’s using iMessage as a lock-in to their hardware.

I think the big difference in the US is that iMessage was leagues ahead of SMS well before there were any good, popular 3rd party mobile messaging apps. iPhones also dominated here, and still do, largely due to that early market dominance.

vonbaronhans ,

Because teachers are picking up the slack at the expense of their own financial and mental health.

vonbaronhans ,

Millennial - definitely use it.

But I’m basically a boomer at heart, so there’s that.

vonbaronhans ,

“are Jewish people white” is one of those questions where the answer seems to ebb and flow with the tides.

vonbaronhans ,

I suppose community building, detached from geography, is bound to be done primarily by highly motivated advocates.

Maybe that’s pessimistic, I dunno.

vonbaronhans ,

And it wasn’t ever used in lieu of the employee receiving enough of an income at the company they worked at.

Unfortunately that is not true. Restaurants in most states in the US have a law that allows employers to pay tipped employees a much lower wage (about 2 bucks an hour) with the expectation that tips will bring them back up to minimum wage or higher.

vonbaronhans ,

So… I actually really like golf. I think it’s fun. Haven’t played in over a decade, but I look back on my memories playing pretty fondly.

That said, I have zero issue recovering a lot of that lost land and water usage to put them to better use.

I’d be very interested to see a version of golf that is less ecologically destructive and less water intensive.

YouTube is increasing Premium prices in multiple countries, right after an ad-blocker crackdown | You either pay rightfully for the video content you consume, or you live with the ads. (www.androidauthority.com)

YouTube is increasing Premium prices in multiple countries, right after an ad-blocker crackdown | You either pay rightfully for the video content you consume, or you live with the ads.::Google is increasing the prices of YouTube Premium and YouTube Music Premium subscriptions in some regions, right after blocking ad-blockers.

vonbaronhans ,

Enshittification, also called chokepoint capitalism, is a term coined by Corey Doctorow (sp?) that lays out a common pattern with platforms in a capitalist system where:

  1. Platform builds a product to entice users to it for little to no cost to the user (Google search, Facebook, Amazon shopping, etc)
  2. Once users are locked in, make the experience worse in ways that increase profits for business partners (Google ads partners, etc)
  3. Once business partners are locked in, screw them over to rake back as many profits for the platform owner.

What's your Patient Gamer's Unpopular Opinion?

Share your unfiltered, unpopular gaming opinions and let’s dive into some real discussions. If you come across a view you disagree with, feel free to (respectfully) defend your perspective. I don’t want to see anyone say stuff like “we’re all entitled to our own opinions.” Let’s pretend like gaming is a science and...

vonbaronhans ,

This is the line of reasoning I used with my parents as a kid. Dollar per hour entertained.

But I think differently about it these days. I’m looking for maximum value per hour, with an eye towards minimal hours, and with a definite end point if applicable.

And value in this sense could be raw entertainment, but it could be something else, like exposure to new ideas and novel perspectives on life etc.

But I suppose that’s what happens when you get older and you’ve got less and less free time to fill.

vonbaronhans ,

The only thing that applies to me here is the new SAVE IDR plan. But hey, it still lowers my monthly payment a little bit AND let’s payments actually go to principal instead of just shaving off interest. It’s not nothing.

I would still like to see full debt relief, but I think that has to be a matter of legislation if I understand correctly. And I’ll take baby steps over nothing at all.

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