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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Most obvious monopoly since Ma Bell. Even worse than Microsoft which was also obviously a monopoly. Break them all up. Microsoft, ATT (for the… 4th time? Maybe just abolish them at this point…), Comcast, Verizon, Google, Apple, the list goes on. All those food corps that end up being 3 parent companies owning everything else. Break it all up. Force unionization also while going through the legal processes.


  • What if I told you… that’s a feature, not a bug?

    It’s far too much to type and way too philosophical for anyone to give a shit about, but, tldr: the US (and arguably the world) is on a freight train speeding at absolute destruction. No one in power is pushing the stop button. (In the US) one party is (sometimes) pushing a slowdown button but the other party is always slamming any button they can find that doesn’t say stop on it. They know where it leads, and this is what they want. Everyone “knows” the current institutions and systems are failing, but the only politically relevant (so, in the US, not the actual left) force with power is the far right wingers who desire destruction and their only resistance is the left and right wing liberals in the middle going “noooo the institutions!” but no one actually cares about the institutions, besides other liberals. They lack any ability though, due to their political ideology, to actually fight for the beloved institutions. They can only rely on the powerful far right to “come to their senses” and stop pushing the death button. Unfortunately for them, the far right will not stop without someone stopping them- forcefully. And since the far right and liberals effectively eliminated the far left and even the center left for the most part… there’s no one to counter that far right fascistic death drive.

    But you don’t even need that accurate assessment of things to understand the situation. Just know they want to abolish public education, medicine, doctors, anything related to “science” broadly, any non-Christian religions, non-white people, LGBTQ+ people and anything tangentially related to gay stuff (imagined or real), etc. pretty much infinitely.

    These people are the proto-Nazis of our time. Not everything will align perfectly, but it doesn’t have to. They want to burn medical information, they want to destroy what they see as “perverted secular society” burn it all away and cleanse the land for some great rebirth of a Christian Nationalist theocracy where white men are elevated above everyone and your white male status plus property owning status is all that matters. I know this all sounds cliche and overstated at this point… but they keep proving it true every chance they get.

    The worst part is that ultimately they’re the only side making progress towards their goal because their goal is aligned with the way things are going and must go. But the difference is we can arrive at that destructive moment, whenever it is, and come out the other side in some Christian theocracy nightmare world or something much better than we can currently imagine possible. As it stands right now, that nightmare vision seems to be the only viable conclusion. Which is rather depressing…



  • I think it’s just the ease of GUI for people. This isn’t to shit on anyone, btw. A lot of people don’t like dealing with the keys and IPs involved, few as there may be, with setting up wireguard.

    If someone else has a compelling difference or reason to use tailscale then I’d be happy to hear it. I tried it once and it worked fine enough. But wireguard works just as fine and takes the same time to setup if you already know what to do. Like wireguard seriously takes 2 minutes.


  • Use Firefox on desktop

    Use Firefox (or Mull or Fennec- both are forks) on Android. I have Bromite too for times Firefox is being fucky.

    On iOS unfortunately due to Apple’s (soon to be lifted) browser restrictions, the default Safari browser is basically as good as any other since Apple forces other browsers to basically just be reskins of Safari (forces webkit usage). I do recommend Firefox Focus if you want stronger, Brave-like adblocking without using Brave obviously. Focus seems to block close to the same level as ublock origin + Firefox on a desktop. It’s barebones by design though, so not ideal for everyone. I know Google/Mozilla are working on non-webkit Apple App Store approved browsers for next year when that law goes into effect (might not be available officially for NA users, not sure how that is gonna play out yet. Hopefully EU sues Apple for $100B for doing that if they do.) Hopefully that means official actual gecko based Firefox is coming fucking finally. Firefox with ublock is all I ever asked for. I’d even take Safari with actual ublock but unfortunately Apple is Apple, the annoying little fuckers.


  • What extensions does chrome have which are useful that Firefox doesn’t?

    My only recurring issue with Firefox, which may have been fixed I dunno, is it for some reason it “isn’t officially supported” or whatever exact wording to use hardware security keys (like yubikey, which I use on every account that allows it). It’s only certain websites that don’t want to work though. Like google, Microsoft and many others were fine but I think paypal didn’t want to work properly but it does work on Edge, Chrome, probably Brave. Overall annoying as fuck at times but I deal with it to be out of Google’s-world


  • See my problem with stories like this is everyone walks away thinking “the good thing happened.” But this isn’t a resolution. It’s halfway there. In a sane society if you make an obviously insane request like this for a bullshit and insane reason you should face consequences for even trying. And I know that makes people uncomfortable and “but the legal system!” comes up a lot. I don’t care. Change it. The CEO and every lawyer that ok’d this request from the court towards reddit should bare minimum be fired and probably fined/face their own criminal charges for even trying this shit.

    To me this is effectively the same as finding a diary on the ground that says “I smoked crack and sold a gram to my sister in 10th grade” and some overzealous insane person tries to have a court force somebody who saw them drop the diary to reveal the identity so they can be prosecuted for a “crime” far in the past which very well may never have happened. I mean, if we’re going to have a dogshit legal system, and we do, the least we can ask from the multibillion dollar thieves (the capitalist corporations) is they do their own goddamn detective work. No, don’t find hypothetical posts. I can post that I shot JFK. I time traveled over 2 decades before I was born and I did it. Is the problem with trying to use anonymous “confessions” not surface level obvious? There is no evidence beyond the confession! And I’m no lawyer, but generally speaking a confession alone won’t convict anyone. Actual evidence is required. Assuming this shit was actually done, piracy occured, the ISP won’t keep any sort of logs that long and the odds of their harddrives containing that specific media years later? Doubtful. Maybe the judge breaks the law and allows a more broad warrant not just limited to specific movies. I think a skilled attorney gets that evidence tossed anyway since it was gathered illegitimately. Basically it SHOULD BE goddamn nearly impossible for them to ever prove anyone ever did anything like this without the person walking down to the local FBI office with their harddrives in hand, ISP logs and a written confession of all the shit they pirated since middle school. Maybe mention the time they stole gummy bears from their cousin in 3rd grade too.

    I dunno, this shit just pisses me off because it’s so brazen and also just so fucking lazy. Like, put some fucking effort into being assholes for fuck’s sake. Trolling through decade-old reddit posts where some dude vaguely referred to his ISP letting him pirate is the best a billion dollar studio can do? It’s just sad really. The CEO and lawyers should voluntarily resign, go home into a dark room, and commit seppuku. We should really bring that tradition of failed higher-ups having at least the dignity to fall on their own sword (literally) back.



  • I don’t live in VA, let’s say nearby, but my ISP sometimes incorrectly shows VA. A couple sites started popping up saying I had to make an account to which I obviously immediately said suck my dick and started VPNing, which I should be using anyway probably.

    Fuck these Christian fascist weirdos. Everyone knows their intent here is to lightly ban porn because no one trusts or even wants to upload their personal identifying information to sketchy companies.

    And I know we all know you can use a vpn. For now. While there’s no criminal liability for you. What happens when these weirdos get Jesus’ wiener deep in their brains and decide these laws aren’t good enough… they want to make porn outright illegal. Who has faith the Supreme Court will stop them? Not fucking me. They should already be stopping these laws, but there’s zero indication that’s gonna happen. Crazy to me people still defend any of this.



  • I do use it use linux for most things and especially for light usage such as web browsing/chatting. Many games also work now thanks for new interest due to the steam deck, which is cool. Gone are the days, it seems, where you gotta read 14 forum pages on why your specific distro won’t boot this specific game. It’s honestly in the hands of the software devs at this point though. They gotta break from the standard for the last 20 or so years of catering only to Windows. I’m hoping the steam deck pushes more teams to embrace the Linux world. I’d also love for Valve to officially release a standalone desktop version of steamOS (or whatever their name is for their distro). I know people have kinda made hacky versions, but an officially supported version with real support for stuff like nvidia drivers (which is another thing… nvidia needs to get away from that shit) would be very cool and would certainly push other companies outside the steam universe to get on board too. It just seems like a matter of time thing now which is certainly better than “this will never happen” that it felt like a decade ago


  • Jesus Christ, just reading about Microsoft developing something called Moments made me nope out of that article.

    Obv there’s worse things in this world, but goddamn it if Microsoft isn’t reclaiming its crown slowly. I think people forget/zoomers never knew, but Microsoft was once, rightly, one of the most hated corporations on earth. They were taken to court, in the United States!, for monopolistic practices. You gotta be doing some insaaaaane shit to get hit with that type of case in the US post-Reagan administration.

    Microsoft’s name was basically equivalent to dogshit from the mid-90s until maybe the mid 2000s. Maybe 2010? Hard to put a finger on it. Windows 7 certainly did a lot to get people to calm down from a steady hate-boner.

    I just wish, I fucking WISH, that if MS is gonna do this weird “make your pc your phone too! Dur hrr!” shit that they’d offer a Windows Lite ™️ edition where you can opt out of the little stupid assistant thing. No, Clippy, I don’t need help, fuck you very much. Let me opt out completely, without having to fuck with reg editor and CLI, from all types of ads, tracking, “offers for free shit,” all that shit. Just provide a barebones OS, let me add the programs I want, stop popping up telling me the .exe is a trojan sent to murder my dog just because you want me to download shit from your precious proprietary store, just stop all that shit. Something akin to Windows XP or Windows 7 type era. Neither OS was perfect and certainly many features in modern OSes are nice, but the simplicity found in them just because at the time they kind of HAD to be simple in order to function, is something I’d love for MS (and Apple too for that matter) to embrace.

    But since none of that will happen, the next best thing I can hope is developers start making more and more programs run natively on Linux distro. Linux has come very far in my lifetime and I’m honestly excited that I can now use Linux basically for everything and only keep Windows installed as dual boot for a few specific tasks. I just hope it keeps growing in coming years. Hopefully demand from gamers for the steam deck and such drives more and more support for Linux. I can you one thing though… if my Windows updated and tells me “set up Moments! Click here!” I’m nuking that shit from orbit immediately. I don’t care what it does, I will never use any of that shit Microsoft packs into Windows. Probably sounds grump old man or whatever, but I just refuse. Stop adding dogshit no one asked for! This goes for basically all devs! Rant over, but I’m still pissed!


  • I recommend replacing the default launcher. Google has packed so many fucking ads into their paid-for devices that it blows the mind to see. A good replacement launcher removes all that junk and the device runs faster too as a result. I did it on my nvidia shield pro (runs Android TV) and a google tv/chromecast I have too. Made the shield basically flawless and the best entertainment experience and the google tv it made much more useable.

    The launcher I’ve been using is called “projectivy launcher” for the google tv. There’s a giant post over on XDA with specifics if interested. It’s made my google tv much better and I’d recommend the small asspain to try it. (I’m not affiliated with the launcher team or anything I just like it a lot)


  • “Your honor, my defense rests on one simple principle: you can’t defame the dead. Elon Musk killed Twitter last week. That is all.”

    But on a serious note, Elon is a fucking baby however these cases typically get tossed out basically instantly for being baseless. His intent is likely to make future researchers or just non-anonymous people everywhere never speak the MEAN truth about his stupidity or suffer bullshit law suits. He has the infinite money, it’s not like he cares if a court orders he pay all the fees for wasting time. Normal people can’t accept that risk though or the time off work to deal with it. Basically, he should face imprisonment for a long fucking time to deter HIM from this bullshit. Or, I dunno, seize all his ill gotten capital, I dunno.


  • Bro just came in and made a bunch of shit up. Jesus.

    I choose to read this as what it actually is: some sort of dark comedy attempt.

    The Tibet thing is the only slim shred of truth in there EXCEPT all the weird shit about raping (are you ok bro?). China “liberated” take that how you will Tibet from a H O R R I F I C fascist-like regime basically built around systematic rape of children. And no they didn’t fucking rape or randomly murder. You probably listened to some weirdo 2nd generation ultra right wing fascist “refugee” from the Tibetan region who believed all of his dad/grandpa’s bullshit and then YOU believed. Guess what: right wingers and their kids who “flee” China/USSR/Cuba, etc. all have massive incentives to lie their fucking asses off about what happened in any of those countries. There’s a reason only the most fascist disgusting worms “flee” and end up teaching their kids these lies which they parrot for you to believe. Stop listening to these liars. Look into their claims. They are basically ALWAYS fucking lies. That Tibetan anecdote is a perfect encapsulation of the amazing bullshit liberals will gobble up.

    The African thing is fucking hilarious. I’ve not heard that right wing talking point yet, but I’ll look it up later and see what’s going on. And to be clear it’s hilarious that liberals just randomly make this type of shit up and attribute meaning to it without a single shred of proof. And it bears extreme repeating- anything you ever want to throw out on China or rather Chinese citizens abroad doing crimes I will happily say (if it’s true, which obviously SOME people do bad shit, no shit) “yes that’s bad. Here’s a list of 10 worse American crimes” for every one you can list. It’s not a dick measuring contest, but nothing happens within a bubble and if you choose to lie or sometimes point out truth in China you goddamn better be ready to spend 10hours shitting on America for every 2 minutes you spent on China because the difference in scale is, yes, that fucking huge. You are pointing at the ant when you live with the bear and acting like the ant is as scary or deadly. You live in the fourth fucking reich. The only stone are you allowed to cast is at yourself or your establishments. I don’t give a shit. No. Not a single fucking word against any other country until you are actively pursuing the destruction of the US military and all of its intelligence agencies. THEN you can shit on China or whoever. Until then you are squishing the ant and the bear is mauling the village and you think you’re in the right. Jesus Christ. Also stop fucking lying about China. Please. Fuck. It’s embarrassing as fuck.


  • Wikipedia……… sigh

    I’m only typing this for people who actually want to, I dunno, look into stuff and not just suck the garbage shoveled directly from the CIA/state dept/etc. into their mouths/assholes. It’s not for this lost child.

    I already did TWO of my “i will allow myself to rot my brain with morons for their benefit, not mine” posts today. My allotment is one. I’m not giving a third. So you get the short, “feel free to google” version. No apologies.

    1. Wikipedia is dogshit. Not for the reasons your university professor told you, but yes also those, but because it caters almost nearly exclusively to… a western/US/EU audience. That is not good when the majority of the world is… not. Who edits wikipedia? Who is allowed? Yes, you guessed correctly. In an effort to appear “fair” they just allow basically anything which can be “”””””””””””””””””””””sourced””””””””””””””””””””” ie some Nazi in his basement slammed out an article on killthechineseusinglemmy.net (a website you’d surely enjoy if it existed)

    2. second and I’m just not typing more after this. Again, google, bing, duckduckgo your way to knowing more shit if you want. I’ll be kind enough to tell you what NOT to read/watch if you want to ask. Hint: if it bangs on about a omega total genocide! in China, then, you know… move on. Very Long story very short since you lack the ability to read (but a little bit of a story for not-you). It has been investigated. Yes. It has. The findings were, in short summary as I already fucking said, the Chinese gov spied on, arrested, harassed, etc. members of the Muslim population that I already wrote about, once again, but you cannot read apparently and monkey smash BHHUUUJHAHAHAH GENOCIDE CHINA TANKIE IMANAZI.com into google and got the Wikipedia full of bullshit. Did you read any of it? No. You wouldn’t be fucking posting about it if you did. Is arresting someone for no apparently good reason a good thing? Sure isn’t! Is it…… genocide? SURE IS NOT! The findings were, in short, that Z E R O people were killed! Zero. Read the shit! Z E R O! Not a genocide already. “But the culture!” Ok. So if you just want to make up words and phrases which normal people call “being a dickbag” “being racist (more of an ethnic thing, but point stands)” and whatever else, I mean go ahead, but also, no. Do not go ahead. Genocide means something specific. Purposeful targeted eradication of a group of people for their ethnicity, race, religion, etc. This was certainly targeted and WOULD BE a genocide if the Chinese government were arresting and then killing them. There isn’t a single shred of evidence for that happening though. Not even evidence of, like, bussing them en masse from the area. Some people got arrested WHICH WAS BAD BUT NOT GENOCIDE for no apparent reason besides being Muslim/not going along with Chinese policy. That was bad! But guess what? The gov stopped as soon as this shit hit the world. They literally fucking stopped all of it due to external but mostly due to internal pressures. I can’t claim, no one can, that everything there is perfect now. But what everyone who can read can claim is: there was never a genocide. There was some bad shit like targetted arrests. And then it ended once people objected outside the targeted community. And that’s basically the end of it.

    (Since you love Wikipedia so much google the rates of black people imprisoned and murdered by United States authorities every day/year. Is that a genocide? (Yes). It FAR worse than anything done by China outside of, hey, one time a very long time ago when a shitty horrible kid raping cult got subjected to their authority. One bad thing China definitely did do though was fucking with Vietnam. But even there the US was INSANELY far worse. And which country do you live in again? Where do you vote? Who can you influence? Is the answer China? No? Then fix your own fucking country you Sinophobic disgusting ape.)


  • ………genocides? That requires a fuckassload of elaboration. To my knowledge, which is an unfortunate amount, the modern Chinese state hasn’t engaged in anything which could be labled a genocide. The US state, however, is currently sanctioning (a lighter form but still a form/method of genocide) multiple nations for no reasons they can explain properly. Cuba being chief among them. Support of Israel and Saudi Arabia (and others) is also supporting genocide (of the Palestinians and the Yemenis respectively).

    China on the other hand, in the last couple decades, has been “accused” of “cultural genocide” an important word to note is cultural… they then made changes to the tactics of imprisoning Uyghurs, which is debatable how much/how bad it was to begin with, and basically all the stuff anyone could complain about in that respect has either been disproven or corrected. The US has absolutely no moral ground to stand on here though considering the historic and ongoing treatment of black and indigenous peoples in the US which are treated insanely far worse than anything ever accused of China in regards to the Uyghurs, which again, they stopped doing the spying and arresting/harassment shit once people complained. That’s kind of the difference between the US and China… China usually stops doing shitty shit when people call them out on it (if it was ever even shitty or real to begin with- many stories the US state dept tries to push (remember that balloon thing? Lmao) are straight up lies based on Sinophobia).

    It’s incredibly odd to criticize China, admit western nations have and are fucking you harder, but then still rail against China so hard. My advice: change what you can change. That means change the laws and the actions of the western government you live under. Once that is done THEN you can perhaps criticize foreign governments. Further advice: do so on things they’ve actually done, not made up or super exaggerated projections from the western state departments/media (same thing).



  • Is this the landlord and city that Musk is currently having his asshole drilled into for illegally (without permit and using unlicensed workers for commercial work) modifying a bunch of shit? I remember he asked some dude to add a toilet near his office. Not like to hire a plumber or get estimates or ideas and shit. Just like, “hey. Put a toilet here.” That was my favorite story and where I really went like “oooook duuuuude” uncontrollably out loud. I’ve had a fuckton of “trade” jobs like HVAC, electrical work (mostly related to the HVAC), did some industrial scale backup power generator installs/maintenance, did some plumbing stuff. Kinda touched all over and all around in the world of building and adding on shit. So when I heard about him modifying electrical circuits without a permit… ok. I can see that if you get the right dude who knows what to do but isn’t legally certified. Of course you shouldn’t do that, especially with a business and a place you don’t own, but I get it. Adding a fucking bathroom though is absolutely bonkers to ask a regular dude (not even a guy who considers himself “handy”) to do. Like I think with all the shit I’ve done over 15 years or so, yeah, I could add a bathroom somewhere. But it would probably suck ass. And I’m not an engineer nor have I dabbled at all. And adding a giant, heavy object filled with water, ventilation to suck your shit smells out, a sink, lighting and all that stuff is gonna obviously require some demolition and then doing the whole thing. It’s an insane job to ask of someone who isn’t presenting themselves as a professional in that field. If it was replacing a toilet or sink, ok, again, not correct but I get that. Building a full whole new shitter is insane. It just shows his complete detachment from reality too because I don’t think most “normal” people would even think to ask anyone BUT contractors/plumbers whatever to do such a job. Definitely not a personal assistant.