there was a vulernability on the iphone a while back where someone would send you a specific hindu character and it would crash the OS. it can get you no matter what you do really, use or business. the difference is a business has a lot more to lose.

as for the OS talk…

I use MacOS on my macbook & Linux on my desktop at home. I don’t think Mac is intolerably locked down. I have virtually the same experience on both. Mac is a very smooth experience once you set it up how you like. I have the same command line applications, the same config files, the same firefox profile that gets synced in between them, same unix utilities that share folders/files as if they were native, can ssh from one to the other, etc

including windows in that would be a PITA

windows is clunky and the company pushing it is becoming progressively more hostile to its users. apple is greedy but at least with their OS it’s not pushy. it’s the hardware where they stick the knife and twist in terms of price

it’s pretty dangerous not to be getting security updates. probably for regular users won’t be a big deal. i have a feeling really bad vulnerabilities will be patched even if you don’t pay for it just out of a potential PR issue. but i would almost definitely pay this if I were a business who didn’t plan on switching to Win 11 soon

on a personal level i don’t understand why anyone continues to use windows these days

indie OS

it’s the OS that virtually every server uses. even Microsoft servers slowly switched away from Windows roughly a decade ago. Today majority of their servers run Linux

it’s not indie- it’s big and corporate. the difference is there’s a weird serendipitous intersection of OSS and corporate interest that has arisen in a way that allows regular joe schmoe to run software you can actually control. so that your computer actually belongs to you

imagine with your car. would you be OK with ads in your rear view mirror? with your car constantly sending data about how you drive to some nameless corporation? your car randomly turning on and updating itself while you sleep? taking away features you may want or adding features you don’t?

that’s the path we’re going down with cars right now. and it’s partly because people are content to sit on their laurels and cede all of their collective power to companies like Microsoft

at that point it’s not really about the money

everyone needs a purpose. if you take away that purpose, people will start deteriorating.

“journey not the destination”. once you’ve reached something like $50M any more money doesn’t make any real difference in your daily life.

i guess it’s just puppeteer + ai prompting

unless AI gets significantly better in the next year or so I doubt it’s gonna be any better than someone spending an hour writing a puppeteer scraping script

Kids are disadvantaged in a number of ways compared to adults

• the obvious factor is that the prefrontal cortex is not developed. they simply do not have the capacity to make fully informed decisions.
• another factor is the simple lack of experience. when you compare an 8 year old to an adult, that adult has been through a lot of shit in their life. they learned a thing or two and that gives him the ability to sniff out bullshit much more easily than a child. think of it as the bullshit immune system
• kids don’t have the resources that adults do. they typically don’t have access to credit cards so the free things on the internet attract them more easily. websites (really apps these days) prey on this fact.

What do you mean “install as app”?

Around 2009~2011 if I remember correctly. Back then it was either IE or FF. Then Chrome came on the scene with their fancy marketing ads and blew up very quickly to overtake FF.

At the time FF felt bloated compared to Chrome, so Chrome was like the fresh new and faster alternative.

I can’t think of a single example where a web page doesn’t work on FF.

if FF want wider scale take-up outside of geeky niche groups

Lol. I remember when FF was the most popular browser.

They could still remove it if they wanted to.

For example push an update so your console can’t read certain games when they lose license. Or simply break backwards compatibility in specific ways.

I guess the games I really like are all digital. Games like Slay the Spire, Rimworld, Balatro, etc. I know that the data is sitting there in my hard drive. I can copy it, move it, delete it, etc whenever I want.

I honestly haven’t included a disc reader in my PC builds for over a decade. I guess on Xbox it’s different because Microsoft has more control. But again, if they wanted to take away the games they could do it either way.

If that’s main reason, I don’t see the point of continuing disc use

I understand if you don’t have the CD they can remove your access to it arbritarily like when they lose the license but

Nobody ever complains about Steam and they have a similar policy of no physical media going back decades. I have hundreds of gamed accumulated on Steam and no game of mine has ever been removed.

I bought the cheaper Xbox last year to play Overcooked with my girlfriend and it has no physical media. I just download and play games no problem. I actually find it more convenient not to have any physical games.

So I guess the question is- what is the reason for the strong rejection of the digital version? It is the natural evolution of these things.

People believe just because someone interacts with some sort of digital device, it makes you an expert on computers. The thing is, it depends on the type of operating system you are interacting with.

For example when I was young, my father would buy those big old gray computers from yard sales. I would mix and match the pieces inside to build my own PC. I broke a lot of shit but learned a lot.

The operating system was one where you more or less had total control over the computer. By 12~13 I was using CD-Roms to load different Linux distros and play around with all sorts of different things.

This experience basically taught me how operating systems work at a fundamental level. How it needs a kernel, how it loads and maintains services, packages, etc. How file systems work and learning how terminals are useful. Scripting languages, and eventually coding applications.

Compare and contrast that to the young kids of today. What do they get? A phone and a tablet. You can’t open it up. You can’t tinker with it. The OS is closed off and is deliberately made as difficult as possible to modify. No mouse, no keyboard. Streamlined UIs with guard rails.

You get what you get and you don’t get upset. That doesn’t leave nearly as much room for exploration and curiosity. It’s a symptom of our computers becoming more and more railroaded. More and more control by large companies.

It’s really sad, I think. Fairly soon I believe every device will be a “thin device” or essentially a chrome book. Very little local processing power and instead it’ll essentially stream from a server.

Personally I prefer subscription model over ad-based data tracking model. When you get something for free, you are the product being sold. For example Facebook or Reddit. Your content (comments, media) is used to populate the site and your data is sold to advertisers.

When you pay a subscription, you are the customer. There’s more incentive to create a proper service with the actual users in mind when it’s a subscription model.

When advertisers are the primary customer, they will always be a priority in determining policy. So for example YouTube- longer ads and more of them.

Of course, I think Google is guilty of double dipping. We pay for premium but I’m certain they still sell our data to advertisers. For example you watch a lot of carpentry videos, they will sell a list with your name that says “likely tool buyer” or something along those lines.

But generally speaking, I never mind paying a subscription for a service. It’s more honest, more clear what’s going on.

I just pay for premium. I’d rather pay the $25 a month to never have to see an ad.

English Spanish Portuguese

I want to learn Russian and Chinese

I’m guessing there will be some compensation. Something like the streaming model. Company makes $ and gives a cut to user. The most popular ones can make quite a bit. I believe Twitter does this now too if I’m not mistaken. You can get paid based on total impressions to your post

Ideas spread between humans. On systems designed to facilitate communications between people, these ideas will likewise spread. Did AfD exploit TikTok’s algorithm or is right wing populism seeing a large growth worldwide?

When the printing press come out and certain news agencies starting “Yellow Journalism” were they exploiting that system of communication for profit?

Did JFK and Nixon exploit TV for their own political purposes?

I believe wholeheartedly that every social media algorithm should be open source and transparent so the public can analyze what funny business is going on under the hood.

But is it any different from how TV channels pick what shows to play or what ads to run? Which articles get printed and the choice of words for a newspaper?

I think people are quick to jump on TikTok because of some unusual socially acceptable jingoism but I don’t see how at its core is fundamentally different from other forms of media, let alone other popular social media platforms.

It’s sort of legally gray but generally speaking in the US downloading is a civil offense but not a criminal one. You can get sued by the copyright holder for example but you won’t end up in jail over it.

People usually never get sued for it because it’s not worth it for Comcast to pay for lawyers to try and extract any money out of regular people. Not only will they almost certainly be unable to even recoup the lawyer fees, they risk getting a lot of bad PR for no gain.

What’s usually considered an arrestable offense is uploading aka distribution. Once you start hosting seedboxes then you enter the area where you’re liable to go to prison.

I appreciate the list. I’m not saying there aren’t valid concerns, just that in my day to day life it’s one of those items where the steps needed to avoid browser fingerprinting is usually more work than the value I personally get from my perspective.

I’ve looked into this, and I’m not clueless. I’ve developed websites, I’ve done a lot of stuff with Selenium / Puppeteer, and have toyed with Firefox browser extensions.

I understand the tools they use and it’s just very tricky to fully eliminate this type of thing. For example they can even use the browser window size. Are you going to randomly change window size to some novel dimension when you open up a tab?

What about the JS engine you use. For example using Firefox already narrows down your anonymity by like 95% or something because only a small amount of users use the browser. Etc etc

It’s hard to do this correctly, and I feel like VPN + private window usually takes care of the price fixing thing on the list, for example. When I’m searching for flights I usually do this.

I also use JS blockers in order to try and mess up the scripts that Facebook & Google have hidden over the internet to track you. But ironically, doing that again reduces your anonymity. They know that if their scripts don’t work on you, you get narrowed down again to a very small % of users.

It only takes a few of those pieces of data to be reasonably sure that it’s you. Browser fingerprinting is tricky to really avoid. It’s not impossible, of course. Just saying to really do it right it might be more effort than it’s worth.

I remember back in the day everyone used Firefox. Then Chrome came out and there was a nice ad campaign and it was actually way faster.

Then slowly everyone switched to Chrome. At some point in the last 15 years, it switched to Firefox being superior.

I switched back to Firefox maybe like 7~ years ago? But I did it for open source reasons.