https://archive.ph/19Hz4

People 100% aren’t going to pay to access every random website they want to visit. So what you’d end up with in a world without ads is only the big corporations being able to run a website.

I’m not so convinced. I run a website with zero ads or tracking and I’m not a big corporation.

I’ve been sticking with FF proper since it has the sync stuff that’s easily used. But it sounds like it’s about time to set up a sync server and run a FF fork.

I’m the same generation. My flowchart is: known contact, answer. Unknown contact, voicemail. Automatic VM transcriptions are great.

I copied all my stuff out of drive several months ago and canceled my plan. But I only actually deleted the files a couple months ago, and they actually only got deleted about a month ago. And who knows if actually deleting files on Google does anything. I got to assume it’s all part of the data set at this point.

Edit: my chief regret at this point is that I didn’t write mountains of Star Trek porn fanfiction for their AI to consume.

IA is definitely on shaky legal ground here. But as far as I’m concerned, they’re in the right.

It’s about time. I remember finally getting my subscription canceled what must have been 7 years ago by now. That was a happy day. And those were the “good” days of this whole thing!

I have 2000 Saturn with 220,000 on it. It has been amazingly solid and low TCO.

Of course, they don’t make them anymore, so your point stands. They don’t make them like they used to.

I’m on the “OK but keep an eye on it” train, here.

Devs need feedback to know how people are using the product, and opt-out tracking is the best way to do it. In this case, it seems like my personal data is completely unidentifiable.

I was coding in the IE6 era, so I’d really prefer to not end up in a browser engine monoculture again.

Meta has had this feature for years.

On mobile:

1. Long press the Facebook icon.
2. Tap “uninstall”.

After that Facebook won’t control the political content on your feed.

SERP = Search Engine Results Pages

In case you’re like me and didn’t know.

I’m sure it was possible, but I’m also sure my car doesn’t do that.

My 25-year-old car is certainly not transmitting anything.

I just went in there to make a new account, and they want real name and salary before you can do much. (I work for a public university, so my salary is public record, but even so I just quit out. Too invasive.)

In the developer tools in the Network tab. FF sums it up at the bottom of the list when you reload (e.g. for this page “24 requests, 4.74 MB transferred”). Chrome must have something similar. Be sure to check “Disable cache” in the devtools.

My simple home page is 10 KB now. And you might not think that’s such a big deal, but it has more content than Google’s search page and that rings in at a couple MB IIRC. 😁

I agree with you, but there is a greater subtext here that social media has made it easier than ever to make money by driving a wedge harder than ever into that split. Same split, but this makes the old tactics look pretty quaint. IMHO.

Gmail’s easiest to replace if you have your own domain. I moved mine a couple years ago with no issues at all.

There are still various ways to watch YT ad-free and tracking-free. (And you can pay the creators directly on Patreon or through another service, and watch the videos ad-free on Patron. I pay a little more on Patreon than I was paying for YT Premium, but not much more, and I’m happier the creators are getting bigger cut and Google is getting no cut.)

I use FF basically exclusively except for the rare time a site doesn’t work with it. It was also an easy change. Google does degrade their stuff (whether or purpose or through ineptitude) but there are other options for the other main Google services, as well.

The only things I have left on there are photos, contacts, and calendars. Photos will probably be the next to go.

the coveted green bubble messaging

I guess some people just have different priorities than I do. :)

It would be nice if people finally reject the idea that X and FB are “The Internet”.

This is a bummer to hear since I have the 4A and it’s out of support. (Google support terms suck, especially since the phone is still going strong.) I was going to buy a used 6 or 7–but that sounds like not a super-great plan. Or maybe… GrapheneOS?

Potential Microsoft power play if this happens: ban Chrome from Office 365 and gain a pile of market share in a day. 😅

I agree. Even though they’re just going to reconglomerate like Terminator 2/AT&T, we need to keep smashing them before they ruin it all.

Yup! That “interoperability” Doctorow is rightly on about that all these large monopolistic companies hate.

Amen. This was what stopped me from paying Google anything. Canceled premium, moved off drive, off Gmail. It’s unethical to give them money or watch their ads. The company needs to fail.

Holy cow, this sounds like a moderation nightmare–glad I don’t have to do it! There’s no way you’re going to get through it without someone complaining about it.

In my mind, this is definitely something that individuals should address with blocks and filters. If those filters don’t exist, they should be written.

I think it’s just a different beast. He writes:

It’s perhaps not the greatest at finding what you already knew was there. Instead it is designed to help you find some things you didn’t even know you were looking for.

If you are looking for facts you can trust, this is almost certainly the wrong tool. If you are looking for serendipity, you’re on the right track. When was the last time you just stumbled onto something interesting, by the way?

That Doctorow essay seems appropriate: https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

Maybe I just didn’t hit reload enough times. 😅

These piped links just sit on the spinner for me and don’t load. Am I missing something?

I’m guessing conversion of those boosters to electric would be part of the process…? But I don’t know.

User base is the value.

It’s Qatar.

“substantial similarity is a mandatory feature of all copyright-infringement claims”

Is that not a requirement? Time for me to start suing people!

I still go to Reddit subs when something interesting appears in my RSS feed.

As soon as they kill RSS (and honestly I’m pretty surprised they haven’t yet), I’ll never go there again.

Compensations are light years behind whatever’s coming next. 🙂 And I don’t think of them as “core”. They’re practically syntactic sugar. If you can write a comprehension but can’t write a loop with a conditional in Python or FORTRAN, you’re missing the core.

I was taught obsolete things in college in the early 90s. But FORTRAN wasn’t the useful part of the class–problem-solving and broader language exposure was.

People focus on random technologies that are being used in class as being obsolete, but that’s not the point of college. You can learn technologies on your own, and if you have trouble with that, maybe practicing it in college is a good idea.

Basically we’re going to drill on technology-agnostic fundamentals for 4 years, and use a wide variety of technologies and languages as vehicles for that so you get a good breadth of experience.

Ray Bradbury’s Marionettes, Inc. seems like an appropriate story to mention at this point.

Does it support full auto-think?

Seems like three issues.

1. Downloading a pirated copy of the work. Pretty clear cut that this is illegal.

2. Feeding a work into an algorithm. This seems to me like it should be legal. Making it illegal looks like it would open an incredibly shitty can of worms.

3. Generating and distributing a partial copy of a copyrighted work. (“The AI just spat out three paragraphs of my text nearly verbatim!”) It’s unclear if this is even happening.