My apartment complex wants me to download some third-party app just to pay my rent, instead of using their perfectly serviceable web portal. I assume they’re getting a data harvest kickback that’s buried in several layers of fine-print legalese, which will be used to send me targeted spam and junk mail. And that data will be sold and re-sold to other parties ad infinitum. Whatever they can collect about my personal life, for sale to any asshole with enough cash in their pocket. Fuck that. I shouldn’t have to deal with this bullshit just to keep a roof over my head.

The issue I have with non-Apple laptops is that comparable performance requires an active cooling system that is often distractingly loud. I am willing and able to pay extra for a platform that lets me focus, and lets me watch some Netflix without having to crank the volume to drown out the fans. Then the all-metal exterior is also quite durable, the trackpad and speakers are top-notch, the Pro comes with that XDR screen, and the battery life is hard to beat. Plus I can take it to a nearby Apple store if I’m having a problem with it, instead of having to mail it to a regional support shop and wait potentially for weeks without the device. It’s more than the sum of its parts–and that is reflected in the resale value as well. Some Windows laptops will do specific things better (chiefly game support), but I didn’t find anything that was as good overall as an M1 Macbook Pro, and I say that as someone who had never owned a Mac of any kind, despite using PCs since the early 1980s and building them for the last 25 years.

I would have preferred a laptop that could run Windows or Linux, but I just couldn’t find anything that was a complete package like the M1 MBP.

I almost pulled the trigger on one of these during Amazon’s recent big sale, but there was a trend in the user reviews that troubled me. I went with a Samsung unit instead. No regrets.

I can imagine the conversation.

Elon: “I own this website, and you’re telling me that I’m not allowed to see this person’s profile or activity because they blocked me?”

Good luck getting a massive narcissist like him to understand why every user should have that right.

That reminds me of a Microsoft-branded USB WiFi adapter that I was making heavy use of back in mid-2000s. The MN-510. You could buy it brand-new circa 2006. It had a $75 launch MSRP, about $114 adjusted for inflation. Come 2009, we find out that Windows 7 wasn’t going to support it. And given what we know about OS development cycles, they presumably made that call in '08 or even '07. Looking back on it, I think this was one of the major catalysts for me to reconsider Linux as a drop-in replacement. Because, wouldn’t you know, the adapter kept working just fine when I tried it out in Ubuntu. Support was simply there in the kernel. Plug-and-play. I suddenly had this whole other operating system providing an it-just-works network connection, for free. It was amazing. So I used that adapter for several more years until I could afford a network upgrade. And I’m still using Linux the majority of the time today.

Funny how Firefox can be at least as secure without it having to phone home every time you click on a link.

Usually when this happens, we call it spyware, nuke it from orbit, and find an alternative.

Since when did we need to flip a coin on issues like this? Spoiler: We don’t! There are plenty of resources to go around.

If anything was a waste of time, it was this poll. Go home, Pew Research, you’re drunk.

But do they like Chrome, or do they just use it out of habit, and because it’s the default on Android phones and constantly marketed on Google’s search engine? Perhaps they use it because it’s the “good enough” solution that’s dropped right in front of them?

I used to think that Fedora being ultimately backed by IBM would give them stability. Then Redhat dismissed Tom Cotton, who was a key OSS liaison, and now it seems to be embarrassing itself with this bitterly hostile attitude towards everyone in the RHEL orbit. It’s been so out-of-character that most people initially assumed this was IBM leaning on RHEL. But it apparently was not. Then my Fedora installation choked on what seemed like a pretty ordinary kernel update and stopped booting.

It felt like a signal. I settled on EndeavourOS, and it’s been an all-around improvement. Nvidia drivers are optionally baked in, the AUR (which EOS also bakes in) is ten times what Copr could ever hope to be, and pacman is ridiculously speedy (though I suppose anything is faster than DNF). I know EOS will sometimes break, as is tradition for rolling releases, but I’m confident that Arch will at least keep being Arch for many years to come.

“Misinformation.”

No, call it what it is: propaganda.

And an alternate email service like ProtonMail.

They also have ProtonDrive as an alternative to Google Drive. Apple’s iCloud is also end-to-end encrypted now. pCloud is another popular option. There are a number of choices for secure cloud storage these days.

Web search is a bit more difficult. DuckDuckGo is heavily integrated with Bing. Brave Search is hit-or-miss. Yahoo is just a front-end for Bing.

If you need live document collaboration, you’re probably already in a setting where either Sharepoint or GSuite are mandated. If you’re not, BitAI may be worth looking into.

More than half of Amazon’s sales come from third-party merchants who this year started paying an average of over 50% commission on every sale, up from 35.2% in 2016, the result of it raising Fulfillment by Amazon fees every year and increasing storage fees.

While paying for Amazon’s logistics and advertising services is optional, most merchants consider these, especially advertising, a necessary part of doing business. Moreover, the FTC has reportedly amassed evidence that Amazon disadvantages merchants who don’t use the services by giving them lower placements.

Capitalism at its finest… I still remember when Amazon was just a humble online bookstore. How times have changed.

I’ve had the impression for a while that Twitter upper management wanted monthly active users on the level of Facebook, Tiktok and other social media. To enrich themselves by way of ad revenue, rather than to create opportunities and experiences for the platform and its users. Then when it became apparent that such a potential opportunity had come and gone (if it was ever there in the first place), they did what was in their minds the next-best thing: They cashed out while they could still find a buyer. Elon’s idiotically freewheeling but nevertheless binding offer was basically their winning lottery ticket, so they held his feet to the fire instead of treating it like the thoughtless shitpost it was.