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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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    1. You should use a VPN or an tracker blocker like DuckduckGo. This is the only way to slow down the information you are sending out. You might not be able to completely stop Google and Samsung from tracking you, but there’s no reason to share yourself with all other data harvesting services.

    2. You have to obfuscate the info that makes it through by using multiple, unlinked Google accounts that let you put separate components of your life into separate silos.







  • Google says Manifest v3 is being done “for security reasons” but what they don’t say is that it’s not for your security.

    It’s a Judge Dredd situation.

    Google is vertically integrating the roles of content provider (ads) and content server so that web pages load exactly the way the page’s developer expects them to. This necessarily excludes things that selectively filter content, like blockers.

    They’re essentially taking an open framefork for the web and replacing it with interactive pdfs, that show exactly what the web developer wants, and collects exactly the information the developer wants to know about you.

    If you think you should have more control, use Firefox. Anyone using Chrome is complict at this point.








  • You say that like a specific technology is inevitable, but it never is. The general march of tech will continue on, but no one thing is ever guaranteed.

    e.g. 20 years ago everyone needed custom browser toolbars and now it’s not even possible to add one on major browsers. We eliminated the need for browser features by cramming 99% of what we need into a handful of websites that are constantly refreshed.

    e.g. 10 years ago blockchain was surging and today it still doesn’t have a usable application. Turns out spreadsheets don’t really need to be distributed.

    Machine learning is just an algorithm nobody understands. If I needed something to give me wrong answers to questions I’ll ask my dog.



  • Republican energy policy is to let oil barons do whatever they want, destroy whatever they want for new drilling and pay as little taxes as possible.

    Democrat energy strategy is to regulate oil, preserve delicate ecosystems by banning oil/gas exploration wells and fracking in those areas and investing in expanded green energy policy.

    The political problem for Dems is that ballooning prices at the gas pump are very unpopular with moderate/undecided voters (reality is that almost everyone in this country has to fill up their car tank regularly) and the oil barons can manipulate their output, control the messaging and change these people’s votes (especially in an election year).

    Dumping some of our strategic reserves when prices get too high is a strategy that counters this machination.

    And if the world supply is in a high producing state, dumping some of these reserves can sink prices low enough we can refill those reserves for cheaper than we initially bought the reserves that we dumped.

    Republicans then get on the horn and claim this is risky, helps nobody but democrat politics, etc, etc. They’re not wrong, but the entire thing is political brinkmanship, so… who cares? 😄



  • Well, it is on Android…

    But the main app is tightly integrated into the win32 api–moving it to linux would basically require a complete rewrite. DEADBEEF is an example of something like this. Parallel values and ideals, but open source.

    There are wine-bottled versions out there. Of course, whether or not output is bit perfect would depend on the wine settings. Bottling it, of course, defeats the point of the program being highly modular/extensible.

    Also, you have to remember that a lot of proprietary formats have proprietary encoders/decoders that are incompatible with the GPL.

    Shipping Windows binaries are much less of a hassle for the dev than than trying to reverse-engineer everything they need or figuring out how to manage dependencies with different licenses across different package managers and distros with different goals.

    tl;dl foobar2000 is an excellent sum of its parts; like Winamp was back-in-the-day. You start changing parts and you get a different sum.