Nice to know I can finally cancel Prime though. The entire value proposition has now gone. Free shipping is hugely conditional (and prices are artificially jacked to cover it in the first place), and now they want to put the worst thing on the internet (ads) into the only component of Prime I still sorta kinda use sometimes. I’d rather keep the $140 a year or whatever.

I think you know very well I would never engage with this possibility as a means of self preservation. Good day sir!

Forgive me, sire; I hadn’t $80,000 to spend on a luxury truck.

You fuck.

Then I mean a later year because my girlfriend and I each own X1s from around that time which we bought on eBay. Mine, I believe, was listed as a 2018. Hers is a year newer. So those figures might need budged but I do not mean a T480.

Unless you’re just recommending a T480 over an X1, in which case, I apologize for stepping all over your punchline.

Preowned ThinkPad. You can get a 2018 or so X1 Carbon for $400 or less on eBay.

“Threatening”.

Threatening to make that place a lot cooler, sounds like.

Researching the situation regarding work visas…

Objectivity in reporting is a nice goal when you’re trying to write objective journalism. But this dude clearly wrote an opinion piece. It literally says “you shouldn’t” in the headline. That sort of thing can’t be objective, and it would look embarrassing if it tried. Objectivity for objectivity’s sake regardless of context is not really sensible. What you’re asking for is a fact sheet, not something written by a person because that person believes a thing.

That being said, I’ll give it to you: it wasn’t an especially good op-ed piece. It would’ve been better if he elaborated some of the stuff he said. But that just means he’s got some work to do as a writer, not that his crime was ‘not being objective enough’.

Something that trips me up a bit about federation and instances is the overlap of identical communities from different instances.

So for example, I’m an atheist, but it’s be years since that was a part of my identity that moved me to care about atheist memes or patting myself on the back for not being religious, which (sorry guys), is what I feel like happens in those communities. So I get them out of my feed by blocking them the way I block plenty of other communities I’m not interested in. In Apollo I was spoiled by the ‘hide subreddit’ feature that I don’t believe existed in Reddit itself, but which was crucial to my enjoyment of that particular app. But since there are multiple instances hosting a version of any given community, I must’ve blocked at least three ‘atheist’ and two or three ‘atheistmemes’ communities, which look the same to me, but are hosted on different instances.

Is my All feed destined to continue having different instance versions of all the topics I don’t want to see, no matter how many times I block them, as long as there are more and more instances hosting those communities? I don’t want to sound unimpressed by this new technology or ungrateful for the amazing service you all are building, but this feels like either a pretty big flaw in the federated user experience or a pretty big gap in my knowledge of how to work the platform. I’m entirely receptive to the idea I may just be doing something wrong.

Just curious. Thank you for everything you do.

Just speculating here. And building off some half-remembered On The Media pieces. But as (for any number of reasons) the faith in a social platform collapses (and often the safeguards against toxic stuff go down too, a la Twitter), people with a low tolerance for that shit are likeliest to bail and the ‘call people the N word on Xbox’ folks are likeliest to stay behind. People who could watch what Reddit did and stay behind aren’t bad, I’m not saying that, but their tolerance for unethical stuff is way higher than the tolerance of those who decided to find a new home. Self-selection, ya know.

I still type shitty things. But then I stop and rephrase in a more human way.

What a useless headline. They could write it hundreds more times for the hundreds of other subs still in revolt.

Sucks for me. I use iOS (I’m sorry) and that’s the original reason I got YouTube Red (back then): they make iOS users pay for background playback. Most of my YT consumption is documentary / essay / spoken word stuff so I need that feature to treat it like a podcast player, basically. Most of the rest of my YT consumption is in my living room, where ad blocking isn’t an option (and I hear even if it was, they’re catching up fighting ad blockers).

I hate the Web 2.0 “enshitification” of platforms, and I hate advertisements, and I’m willing to pay for a good, useful service. But this is a mixed bag. It’s still ‘enshitified’ because most of what it serves me is algorithmic and nothing to do with the hundreds of channels I’ve subscribed to over the 13 years I’ve had this particular account. It’s still chock full of ads because videos do sponsor blocks these days.

And the worst of it is they’ve got you by the balls and there’s really nothing stopping them from being Netflix and just continuing to raise and raise the price. I was an OG Netflix Instant Streaming for Xbox 360 user…years later when they finally booted me off my own family plan, we were paying like…$23 a month? For what had at that point become the worst video service? What stops YouTube from bumping up to $19.99/mo a couple years from now? It’s the only game in town.

OH and they’re also selling all your metrics. That’s the other thing. If I’m paying (through the nose) for a service, it shouldn’t be double-fucking me by selling predictive measures of who I am and what I care about to filthy fucking “advertisers” (for-profit behavior manipulators).

YouTube (like every last piece of Web 2.0) was fun while it lasted. But it is now barely better than worthless.

Spotify has higher bitrate files than YT Music.

Sometimes I open up the home page to see what’s up, then I see what’s up is less interesting than it used to be and less interesting than what’s happening here. And I close it pretty quickly. I’m still using it as part of my Google searches when I need quick human answers. It’s gonna continue to be a historical resource in that regard. No getting around that. But my account only exists so that I can access those resources without too much fuss. It’s not something I use to post or contribute. I used the Sign In With Apple feature to just generate a throwaway anonymous account after I deleted my 11 year old account.

It’s good for reviewing and giving high marks for searchability, but right now I’m having a better time with the beta version due to the absolutely insane rate of progress the dev makes every day.

Enshittification.

Right like how you can’t copy images from Pinterest, a site that populates all your Google Image searches. Like you fuckers didn’t create this content. You just got people to upload it to your site then blocked anyone else from accessing it without a membership and a share link.