Elon Musk is #26 and Tracer is #27. So there are definitely some edgelords fucking around and messing with the stats.

Fakespot was somewhat accurate at catching when Amazon sellers take a well-reviewed item and swap out the product for another, by changing the title, description, and pictures. We’ve probably all read a review on Amazon that feels like the reviewer is posting a review of a completely different product, like a review that seems to be about a kitchen utinsil on a listing for an unusually affordable camera. It’s a pretty common scam that Fakespot was pretty good at catching. It didn’t seem as good at adjusting ratings for legit products and seemed to kind of randomly knock off a a half to one and a half stars on pretty much every listing, even on quality products.

I think hams are still the most likely people to track down and get illegal stations shut down. At what point do we say, “nah, don’t care who you sold our frequencies to, this is our bit of spectrum and we’re not moving.”

I was absolutely on a version of the alt-right pipeline a decade ago. I was raised by far-right, Mike Johnson-style “Christians,” so I was already pretty far down that path before I was drawn into any pipeline.

Luckily, I ended up on a weird libertarian branch of the pipeline (LearnLiberty rather than Prager U), and somehow the YouTube algorithm steered me into Veritasium’s content on climate change, and clips from Adam Ruins Everything. It sounds a bit crazy, but those things started opening my eyes and expanding my worldview. Probably didn’t hurt that my favorite TV show at the time was Leverage, which had plenty of its own anti-corporate-grifting themes.

Eventually, I realized that the Libertarian utopia doesn’t work because greed is an unlimited resource, and that makes regulation important.

Of course, there were other things that helped me escape my upbringing and the alt-right pipeline during gamergate (I wasn’t into gaming at the time, so that probably helped), but looking back and seeing how easily I could have ended up being a January 6 insurrectionist. I’m so thankful for all the little things that nudged me out of that worldview, and helped me see reality.

I wish there was an easy way to show young guys that the people they are listening to are liars and grifters who are manipulating young men into believing that their real pain is somehow the fault of women. But if I look at my own journey, it was a thousand little nudges. I didn’t change overnight, but there was a day during the 2016 election cycle that I remember realizing that even though I had spent almost 8 years despising Obama, that he had been an alright president - especially compared to the Republican nominee, Trump.

But what qualifies as social media? We can all probably agree that Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Reddit, etc. count, but what about say Discord or WhatsApp? How about browsing older forums (like open ones where you don’t need an account to read them)? What about news articles or blogs with a comment section? Is a wiki social media? Depending on how you define it, the majority of the internet could be considered social media.

Plus there are plenty of sites that just won’t ever bother to try to comply. For example, I live in one of the more stupid states in the US that has required age verification for porn sites, PornHub has complied by just blocking their site in the state with a notice that they won’t implement a system like that for privacy reasons. But they and their sister sites are the only ones I’ve seen that have bothered to make any changes. The same will inevitably happen with social media. You’re just going to push kids to shadier corners of the internet that don’t care about laws, and they’re gonna end up radicalized by nazis, or taken advantage of in worse ways.

The whole problem is parents who don’t want to be parents and tell their kids they can’t have a smartphone. And I get that the dumbphone market is kinda limited, and that some parents just don’t care what their kids are exposed to. But trying to fix this problem by changing the internet is never going to work. The only way to fix the problem is to have a spine and make appropriate changes IRL - like banning smartphones for underaged kids in school, or show your full distopian side and prosecute parents who let their kids use social media.

This is the tune I thought of (apologies for linking a YT short, but it was the only version I could find)

There’s also a longer YT Music version here, but I’m not sure if it’s a premium thing or not.

Based on their current management model of “desks on wheels” they’d probably be most comfortable becoming a worker-owned coop. I know I’m in dreamland, but it would be amazing if they could go that direction when Gabe is gone.

Glad they clarified. To me the “selling data being defined broadly” argument made sense in the context of Google paying them to be included as a search provider. Because there is an argument that Google paying Firefox, and then the user entering a search and that being sent to Google’s servers could be legally seen as Mozilla selling data to Google.

When I first got a Bluesky account, back when it was invite-only a whole bunch of the Physicists and Astronomers I used to follow on Twitter were already there. If anything it seemed like scientists were early adopters.

Even as a straight, young boy I was disappointed for her. I vividly remember announcing “but he’s MORE ugly now!” Somehow, none of the conservative, Christian adults in the room liked me saying that.

Boost. It was my preferred Reddit client back before spez Elon-ed Reddit, so when the Lemmy version released, I purchased it to thank the dev for putting in the work to support Lemmy. It made my move to Lemmy super smooth.

I also use Voyager on occasion.

I saw a tiktok of a Brit talking about this with the upcoming ban in the US, and he made an interesting point. The Americans who can afford to travel and take time off work, are more often the ones who have lived privileged lives, and as a result act more entitled than the average American. He commented how interacting with regular Americans on tiktok changed his perception of what they are like, because only interacting with the tourists makes it seem like there’s a higher percentage of entitled a-holes.

If your mail server is configured correctly this generally isn’t that big of an issue. You need a DKIM service on your mail server, and with that add some dns records (SPF records and DMARC) to the domain As long as those are in place and configured properly, you should be able to avoid most spam filters considering your domain invalid.

I kinda want a Grandpa Joe movie starring David Spade. There’s a bit of a physical resemblance these days, and there’s so much weird stuff going on with Grandpa Joe in the movie that you could have a pretty full movie without Charlie, Wonka, or the chocolate factory.

Chromium is to the modern internet what Internet Explorer was in the mid 2000s. It’s not as stagnant (thankfully), but as far as market share and giving one oversized tech giant arguably too much power over the internet, we’ve basically come full circle.

Not sure what I expected them to cost, but $5.70 is somehow less than I expected.

They won’t care, they have the consumerist crowd locked down. The crowd that buys dozens of Stanley Tumblers so they have one that matches any outfit. There might be more of us who care than there used to be, but the average iPhone buyer doesn’t care and Apple knows it.

There are some differences between distros as to whether TRIM is enabled by default or not (I’ve read Ubuntu enables it by default, but Debian does not). That said, depending on what file-system your ssd is formatted with it may be enabled by default at that level. The most-often recommended file-systems for SSDs are Btrfs and F2FS, both of which support and enable TRIM by default (as of Linux 6.2 for Btrfs, so if you are running an older kernel version you might need to manually enable it). I think most distro installers support using Btrfs as the main file-system, but F2FS is a bit more hit and miss I think. Safest bet would be to investigate once you settle on a distro, but support should be pretty standard, even if it’s not enabled by default.