It’s ethical because it runs on donations and has a non-profit business model.

Meta likely spends at least $1 billion a year running WhatsApp.

Please donate to Signal if you use it.

I understand what you’re saying, but AOL had the opposite problem. The internet at that time was hard to use in general, so it was more about trying to provide enough of anything to get commercial viability for regular people. At one point, AOL was 30% of the entire internet. Seriously, it hosted almost a third of everything online. The alternatives were CompuServe or Prodigy or simply not being online at all. But you paid for it up front as an ISP. AOL didn’t provide anything for free up front.

The Web 2.0 walled garden approach is about preventing you from wandering out onto the wide open spaces of the rest of the internet out there and not seeing the content curated to make the platform provider money. And making the 10% of daily internet content composed of idiotic FB comments and posts seem like it’s worth all your time when you can easily use one of 5 or 6 search engines to find alternative content. Making staying in the garden so cost effective and frictionless that even using a search engine seems “hard” to do.

The day I wiped all partitions from my dual boot and started fresh with no windows on the machine was a revelation. My heart sang and my soul wept with joy. Windows lives in a caged state now, a neutered monster I rarely demand dance for me because it is ugly and awkward and on an external drive I don’t care about.

Not the only one, but it’s the walled garden platform approach.

The idea (from around 2010ish) was that every platform is an app and every app is everything. A company buys up other smaller companies until you have a payment system, a marketplace, a VOIP system, advertising, job posting boards, 4 different waya to share media, etc. etc.

While the tech world sold this as, and actually viewed this as, some organic online super village, it wasn’t. It was a series of shit stripmalls adjacent to a Walmart in a shitberg town on a big freeway linking other shiberg towns with Walmarts. Sterile, restrictive, one size fits all dipshits kind of garbage. There’s a kind of person that thrives in the parking lots of Walmarts and stripmalls in shitberg towns, and they thrive on social media, too.

Lemmy reminds me more of early internet as well, but also refined by the common language of those platforms as a common starting point. It’s a niche, and it’s not for everyone. But it is for you, welcome.

Still to this day I hum Black Sabbath when I drive fast or do any fancy weaving.

FS?

As in “F’ing Shit”?

TIL there’s an arcade version of Ghosts n Goblins

Thanks for the links!

I feel it. I feel the cosmos!

Earthworm Jim

Atomic Robokid (Genesis)

Tempest (Atari 2600 version)

Ghosts and Goblins (NES)

The game where it’s a rich guy that sends a trained assassin out onto a island with nothing and hunts him for 24 hours, and if the assassin kills the rich guy he gets his freedom and like $20K.

Rock n Roll Racing (SNES)

Beyond All Reason/Planetary Annihilation

It’s not quite what I’m saying, but it’s a starting point. It also isn’t really a thing yet. They’re expected to be available in 2027, so with EV incentives being eliminated, the now $27,500 basic model is already 30%+ more expensive before even appearing IRL.

Yes and no. There’s a YT video of some guy fixing anything on any car. The catch is that for components for easy things are getting harder and harder to reach. I always used to change my oil myself because it takes 20 minutes and I know the filter got replaced. Harder and harder to do every car I have. So even basic maintenance I can’t do myself anymore.

Modular components could be workable in terms of you pick frame 1, 2, or 3 with batteries. Then you pick wheels/motors packs A, B, or C. Then you pick more and more options. If you own the A and C options, it’s a 45 minute swap out with a system that confirms things are plugged in right. Not every configuration would work together. Toyota uses a lot of interchangeable parts between cars. I mean do this with a whole back end or front end. So like 5 swappable zones that work in maybe 15 possible configurations per frame.

Maybe you want a battle wagon. And want to grow out of that to a pickup. Or start with compact car and expand to a compact SUV.

100%. They all look the same.

instead they will do it by making some tech execs part-time lieutenant colonels…

This is to shield them and their actions when the people their system target get called “enemy combatants.” It’s literally a tech Gestapo.

Holy shit, this is absurdly shocking. I can’t believe this isn’t bigger news. The CEO of freaking Palantir is a Lt. Col. not just for “no reason” ?

Headline should read “Websites have been tracking you by browser fingerprinting for a while. Google publicly doing it for 6 months.”

Test your footprint: https://abrahamjuliot.github.io/creepjs/

https://www.amiunique.org/

Yeah, has that gotten off the ground yet? Or is it still just investor stage pipe dream?

I just want an electric car that can do exactly this.

Modular components on an option of 3 frames. Reparable to a degree. Bare bones functionality. Physical buttons, no screens. Open source software. Upgrade not the whole car, but components as you go. Literally what video games taught us.

If I had Mark Cuban money, it’s the first thing I would do.

Doing OSINT is exactly what converted me into a privacy advocate.

I saw some retiree earlier today trying to take a pic of something. Opened his phone holding it up for all to see, and has only stock Android and bloatware apps. Like he just set it up yesterday. Worn cover and screen indicates, nope, not a new phone. I sighed a heavy sigh of sadness. Old guy has no idea. And would be pissed if he actually knew how much data he sprays all over.

Here’s an idea for a “distraction free” phone:

Any android phone.

In a work profile use a primary launcher app that only shows 3 or 4 important apps. Disable everything else.

Lock all the rest in the normal profile with a password that is a randomized 32 or longer character string that you can’t possibly memorize.

Write it down in glaze on a plate, which you smash and store in a bag with some super glue.

Funny how it had to happen in that order.

I 100% agree with you about Clearview and Palantir. Really, 1,000%.

Putin, on the other hand, has passed his peak unless he’s gong to get the nukes out. His potential at this point is simply how much longer he is around to keep perpetuating his “3 day war.” Which is not nothing. The guy needs to go the fuck away, and the US justification for using nukes in Japan was that forcing a surrender via attack against civilian targets prevented a years-long slog and invasion. Well, here we are again. Justify whatever is needed to ensure he falls out a window one day this week. The power vacuum without Prighozin around is just going to revert to 1992 style robber barons anyway. It always would. There’s never been an alternative to that.