I’m thinking the API protests would have been more effective if y’all just stopped moderating entirely instead of locking down subreddits.

Let the site turn into an absolute cesspool.

What puts me off is the lack of games this generation. I’m not spending £700 on a console where the only worthwhile exclusive that isn’t already on PC is Astro Bot.

If that’s the best thing that Sony and Microsoft can give us after three years of releasing their current consoles, then we’re well and truly on the verge of another market crash.

I used to work for a major business outsourcer. One of their contingency plans in case an office burned down or had to be evacuated was literally to make everybody work in another office 50 miles away.

It was so bad that they weren’t even willing to reimburse travel costs. It was either get there or be fired.

I’ve heard Iraqi Kurdistan is a nice place to visit and is relatively safe compared to the rest of the country.

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It’s easy to avoid buying things from Amazon

I mean… Yes but also no.

Amazon have gone to crap in recent years and has become a more upmarket Wish or Temu. Much of their storefront is full of Chinese knock-off brands these days.

What Amazon does offer is somewhat reliable next (and sometimes same) day delivery. The only way you can get something faster is by travelling to a brick & mortar shop and buying in person.

As for AWS, aren’t we forgetting that Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Google, even Alibaba and Huawei have their own cloud solutions?

I’m in the first camp. Instagram is flooded with spam accounts posting links to illicit Telegram channels where actual CSAM is being distributed. The owner of Telegram was also arrested recently for failing to safeguard his platform from such highly illegal activity. Children having easy and often unrestricted access to social media is probably the reason why things have gotten so bad.

Every major social network should be asking for ID verification, but there should be strict safeguards on how that information is used and stored, with hefty fines for failures to safeguard.

Gab tried to pull the same thing with their Dissenter plugin. It was such a bad idea that Mozilla and Google banded together to remove the extensions from their stores for ToS violations.

Now imagine what a nightmare it would be to moderate the ability to comment on anything online with actual standards and decency.

Anybody who legitimately gets giddy-as-fuck over the thought of a Muslim woman being stoned to death for adultery should not be trusted with dating advice. Yet somehow this asshole has a social media following of millions, has indoctornated a lot of young people into misogynistic views (I know secondary school teachers who have seen pupils gobble up lots of Andrew Tate content), has eluded bans from mainstream social media (his shit is still all over YouTube), and still has a following despite facing rape and human trafficking charges and being on EUROPOL’s wanted list.

Isn’t this at all concerning, and a big sign that society is failing men?

He looks like the Stonks meme guy. No seriously…

Facebook listening in on your microphone is one of those things that I actually believe to be true. Ever had conversations with people to then realize that you’re being served targeted ads based on these conversations? Seems very coincidental.

Off is the direction in which I would like Microsoft to fuck if they think I’m gonna have a deep learning AI spy on my computer activity.

This just makes me want to switch to Linux.

Genuine question, is Bluesky worth using in its current state? Can it hold a candle to pre-Musk Twitter?

I’m asking because I feel incredibly burned by the barebones state of Threads and I don’t really want to commit to another platform that doesn’t have its shit together. Threads still doesn’t have trending topics and functional hashtags over a year into its launch, and this is is shit that Mastodon had for years, despite Meta expecting to piggyback off of the ActivityPub protocol and be welcomed into the Fediverse with open arms.

To be totally honest you have nothing to apologize for. Dogs and cats are metabolically different to humans and cannot survive on a vegan diet unlike us. Forcing obligate carnivore pets on vegan diets is certainly animal abuse.

I remember when there was a growing campaign to ban r/nonewnormal on Reddit due to it being a hub of medical disinformation and conspiracy theories surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, and that this led to a blackout much like the later API protests.

Rather than read the room and introduce a new rule banning medical disinformation, Reddit’s Tintin-looking moron of a CEO instead threw out tonnes of BS statistics on brigading likely plucked out of his own sphincter, and banned the subreddit because their activity exceeded this arbitrary percentage he made up.

And before you tell me this guy’s figures were legit, aren’t we forgetting that he pathologically lied about his interactions with the Sync developer? Spez is a snake.

So imagine you’re on PornHub and then out of nowhere, Clippy shows up and says “hmmm looks like you need some help pleasuring yourself”, then starts flicking through similar nude pictures and videos to what you’ve been looking at before. The idle animation of the AI assistant even changes to Clippy morphing into the shape of a penis and shagging a rolled up piece of lined paper is if it were a fleshlight. You can’t tell if Microsoft are mocking you for being a coomer, nor can you tell whether to find Clippy’s sexual deviancy funny or creepy.

Somehow that hypothetical dystopia of Clippy watching you masturbate is only slightly worse than what Microsoft plan to do with Recall. If the mere thought of a machine learning AI taking screenshots of your desktop every few seconds and learning from your computer usage habits isn’t absolutely fucking terrifying… Then imagine that these are likely being uploaded to a server for the perusal of advertisers, intelligence agencies and any hackers skilled enough to break into Microsoft’s servers.

Even if it was stored locally, all it takes is one dodgy web link for you to inadvertently send all your Recall data to a hacker and have it ransomed.

Everyone would likely defederate from them, much in the same way that you all rushed to close the shutters upon Threads.

I also don’t ever see this happening, unless Spez fucks up with Reddit so badly that it sparks a mass user exodus, much in the same way that Digg v4 sank any hopes of Kevin Rose remaining a successful tech entrepreneur.

“Games work on Linux now so you can switch over”

Gaming was at one point a serious hurdle. Back in 2007 when I was forced to switch from Windows XP to Ubuntu due to a former friend’s IT fuck-up, the only Windows game I could legitimately get running was World of Warcraft, and even then the installation process was arduous.

Valve deserves much of the credit for getting Linux into the state where it can play a vast majority of Windows games with comparable or even better performance.

The true hurdle now is with anticheat.

I have friends who work in IT and would probably slam their head against the wall if they had to deal with Control Panel being removed.

Are Microsoft deliberately trying to make the fabled Year of the Linux Desktop finally become a reality? Because I feel like we’re two or three more dumbfuck business moves away from this…

I think it says a lot more about how much recent versions of Windows have bogged down the whole gaming experience.

Microsoft seems to have forgotten that people want an operating system that works, not something bloated with bullshit like telemetry, advertisements, tracking cookies and artificial intelligence. The only reason they even have a market lead in the desktop space is due to marketing and monopolistic practices.

I used to work for a small PPI claims management company. Our accounts team had a WhatsApp group for social discussion outside of work.

All of our internal work comms were handled through Slack.