Seems pretty clear now that either Elon is completely incompetent or he’s purposely destroying Twitter. I could go 50/50 on which more is more true. Both could true also.

Thanks I hate it

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 was using Heimdall and it was having some weird corruption(?) issues. Switched to homarr when I saw it the other day and it’s great. It has small icons (for phones) medium (for like tablets) and large (for desktops/laptops) all can be changed independently so you can optimize for mobile and desktop usage. Très bien

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.

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

That 74 is kind of tricky and my vision is “normal”

This reminds me of a time I was taking one of these colorblind tests. The person administering it was flipping (way too fast) through the numbers and I was reading them fine. A trickier one came up which I could very clearly read, like this 71/74 one, and I said (because fucker was flipping way too fast) “71… no, 74 actually.” He marked it wrong. It felt like a real life Seinfeld incident after that where I kind of stopped the whole test and was saying basically, as nicely as I could, “hey. I said 74. Mark that correct.” MFer didn’t even vocalize a response. I can’t remember but I think he did like two more numbers, said I passed with whatever number of tests with one incorrect. I had to get my eyesight examined after that (this was for some pilot shit. Like a physical) and I told the doctor and he kind of shrugged it off too like “you passed it. It doesn’t matter.” IT MATTERS TO ME GODDAMNIT

Thanks for triggering this random traumatic event from over a decade ago.

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.

Gonna be captain obvious here by saying “maybe because the world is spiraling into shit?”

And everything is, absolutely by definition, political. Everything. People who think they can escape politics are delusional and privileged. If you’re reading about some horrible new law banning encryption then yes that’s fucking political. Instead of head in sanding… I dunno. Do something?

This is absolutely not a “this is fine” comment

But the US “intelligence agencies” have been spying on the US and the world for 2 decades now pretty openly. Yes it’s worse that other countries are joining or ramping up spying, but we shouldn’t delude ourselves into believing this is a new development. The evil fuckos who up at the 3 letter agencies and equivalents around the world know where true power resides and they know methods of controlling people. The fact that France is doing this stuff should be a sign to the French (and everyone) that the government fears the people. A government which fears the people demanding that it serve the people is no longer legitimate. If the French ripped apart their shit from the root it would be justified… as an outsider. They’ve done the proper procedure of ask, then demand… now force. But Americans got out shit to sort out which tbh is incredibly more fucked up so I will leave the French alone in that respect

Ah ok. I’ve seen that project before. Might take another look, although I usually just use Firefox or forks of it. Kind of soured on chromium browsers after Google announced for the 800th time, and for real this time (they said), that they would be blocking ad blockers. I just said fuck it, time to blast the past like it’s 2006 again

I goggled it after reading your comment and found the same info. It’s pretty common for small projects to get started and abandoned quickly, but in this one specific case I do want to read a comment from that group of developers years later if it was fear, boredom, whatever else that made them abandon it

Is Brave not open source?

I mean I get why a normie would back down even from a bullshit suit from a company (laws favor capital and they can drag it forever to fuck you… Nintendo loves doing this too with the Switch modding community (most recently))

Assholes either way. Developing using open source code and then crying foul when someone removes you bullshit.

Chromium isn’t available on some OS (most notably iOS for now because Apple sucks shit)

Also last I checked, which was recently, Chromium doesn’t come with adblock built-in. In fact doesn’t basic vanilla chromium not allow addons at all?

So a Brave fork would be all the good parts of it (the ad blocking chiefly) but minus the bad parts like the crypto BS. Maybe that’s an entirely different project, I don’t know. I just use Firefox+ubo on desktop. Doesn’t matter that much to me if someone does it or not, but I was always confused why privacy-centric people seemed to love the crypto browser.

The browser with fuckloads of baked-in crypto was doing shady shit? No way!

No idea why no one made a fork that just follows the original basically but removes all the “BAT” crypto, web3, all that dogshit, bullshit, annoying-ass crypto bro shit.

*not on iOS **but soon will be due to EU laws (blink-based and gecko-based browsers will be available probably next year to comply with the law (yes worldwide, trying to region lock will result in 1) it won’t work anyway and 2) assdestroying fines from the EU for blatant violation)

Lack of privacy and concerns around the government (FBI, CIA, NSA, etc.) spying and private corporations essentially spying too but calling it data harvesting and whatever else has been pretty widely reported on and shared for well over a decade. I’m in my mid 30s and clearly remember the patriot act being proposed and rammed through the first time with constant outcries about the blatant human rights and privacy violations it would lead to which of course Snowden confirmed explicitly years later. This stuff has never been a secret, really, it’s just people legitimately don’t believe it matters to them. They think either “oh it just has to be this way” or “terrorism brother!” or “but why doesn’t Zuck deserve to sell my butthole pics, you commie?” That’s why it’s incumbent upon those who are experts, which I am not for the record, to always be on the look out and propose enforceable laws to prevent private corporations from doing this (with personal liability for executive level officers ie Zuck goes to prison for 50 years) and to strip back and break the reactionary spy networks which existed before 9/11 but became insanely worse post-9/11. All that spying which has resulted in zero prevention of shootings or any type of terror plot. People gave up freedom and gained no security… just a thin veil of theater of security and daily indignities of half stripping at the airport so some Neanderthal can see your junk in the radiation spinny device. Or the knowledge that every thing you say or type online (and offline with phones everywhere) is or has potential to be recorded or monitored and if you stand against some key positions and offer solutions of actual change and intent to enact it… well, it leads to self-censorship. Just ranting now, but I think most people do broadly know about this stuff they also justify it to themselves in the delusion of “well, I gotta use something like Twitter!” when you obviously do not (I’ve never had a proper real Twitter account because the platform has always been dogass and a terrible idea for any real interaction. Useful for quick news updates but worthless and just harmful imo for anything further)