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what would you choose to replace mailing lists with? e-mail is accessible, easy to archive, and archives are also accessible and easily searched

genuinely curious

had youtube open in a new private window on a vpn connection the other day after clicking a link to a video about the new raspberry pi compute module

was scrolling down thru one of the top comment threads and noticed, sandwiched between relevant tech videos on the right? some talking head, designed to enrage (as opposed to inform) fox news video about nothing related.

I think Im just done with youtube for the forseeable future. if your profit model requires inducing engagement like that, your product isnt good enough to stand on its own, and/or you’re ok with being shitty to make more money. either way, I want nothing to do with you at that point.

unfortunately we’ve entered an era where not wanting to condone/support/endorse/encourage shitty corporate behavior requires the sacrifice of not getting to enjoy most products and conveniences that are available. theyre often enjoyed by many other folks who just shrug and say “everyone else is doing it”

I find most companies that undercut their competitors’ prices are cutting corners somewhere I don’t want to be involved in. quality and customer service has a price. I try as hard as I can to pay that price, or just do without.

just try your best, pick your battles; it’s all anyone can do without going insane and/or full modernity-hermit

(reminds me of the cattle “rancher” in ‘king corn’ who says theyd love to go back to selling grass fed, grass finished beef, but all anyone wants to buy is cheapass, corn sileage-stuffed feed lot crap, so it’s either sell that, or go out of business. producers cant just choose their market; there has to be a demand for it.)

email. email is federated. literally everyone has an email address and understands they might be on a different service, but its all email, and you just use their account name and the service part with the @ in between.

it’s not a complicated subject at all, and a good chunk of the humans on earth have no experience being alive without a federated service being a part of their daily life. (lets not mention telephones, or national postal services)

the issue isn’t perceived complexity, it’s that the negatives of using a centralized service are outweighed by the benefits. people don’t see it as a personal liberty issue, or a free speech issue, or a propaganda issue, or a billionaire oligarchs ability to control the flow of information between citizens issue. they just want it to be easy to use. and the more people that do it, the less personal responsibility they feel about the choice.

learning from history is for suckers, I guess

I played around with old iPads for a bit and then gave up. successful vendor lock for sure. I just wanted a home assistant front end without having to sign in to apple or use safari

etckeeper, and borg/vorta for /home

I try to be good about everything being installed in packages, even if Im the one that made the package. that means I only have to worry about backing up my local package archive. but Ive never actualy recreated a personal system from a backup, and usually end up starting from a fresh install, slowly adding back things from the backup if I missed them. this tends to cut down on cruft and no longer needed hacks and fixes. also makes for a good way to be exposed to new paradigms (desktop environments, shells, etc)

something that helps is daily notes. one file for any day Im working on my system and want to remember what a custom file, confg edit, or downloaded/created package does and why. these get saved separately and I try to remember to grep them before asking the internet

i see the benefit to snapshots, but disk space is expensive, and Im (usually) careful (enough) not to lock myself out or prevent boots. anything catastophic I have to fix is usually seen as a fun, stressful learning experience! that rarely happens anymore, for better or for worse

remember, it’s not just about making up the difference per user in advertising, it’s about getting and keeping as many people into their ecosystem as possible.

then they make some cash from selling data, and having more data to scrape to train their models and such. proton isnt making any off your data

it’d be great to be able to easily compare cost and expense, but companies obscure so much in the backend. rental car companies buy discounted in bulk, then sell the cars tens of thousands of miles later at a profit, and that’s before any income from rental

whoops. maybe I should read the entire thing next time

downvotes are not to express disagreement!

so many comments here about adding regulations and “this should be illegal” and, yes, those may be a valid way to curb this behavior

but customers willing to leave a company for bad behavior, customers wary of new products without asdurances they wont just become useless, non-reusable e-waste could also effectively curb this behavior

just because you want to outsource all of your product and company research to a law or regulation, and want to be able to blindly buy products and just hope the company doesn’t make bad choices in every regard but quartly profits doesn’t mean it is the only effective check & balance

The way I understood it is a commercial for McD in the US isnt required to have real food; a commercial for McD’s “whatever” has to have the actual item being advertised, but can be so meticulously crafted, you’d never see one like that in the wild. A commercial for a grocery chain, for example- most/all of of the food you see is props made to look like the most appetizing food youve ever dreamed of.

Who knows if this is enforced. NPR and PBS stations are specifically prohibited from “sponsorship” messages mentioning a specific product or service, and they’ve been ignoring that for decades.

Nothing I ever do is a failure, it’s just some shit I did.

amazing. I’m stealing this

the economy is a circle. people choose where they buy from and what they buy, and producers and stores don’t just make money from thin air.

people often choose convenience and lower price, indirectly choosing to be part of something “big” by supporting the big business. there is a disconnect in thinking choosing higher inconvenience and cost in the name of supporting smaller businesses “does anything” - except youre already doing something, youre supporting the big business and literally responsible for its success

same thing happens when a mutual fund rewards a company for profits while ignoring how it got them. nevermind we are simultaneously the customers and employees these companies poorly treat, extort and squeeze for every penny.

until people decide individually to make decisions and sacrifices for everyones future, rather than spouting the obvious propaganda that individual action doesn’t matter, therefore why bother? it can’t.

also, late stage capitalism doesnt do stability- you get yours while you can and get out because the next crash is coming soon

america is a country full of people who can’t wait for the next new thing they’ll be able to point to their neighbors also doing and shrug, while whatever it is further burns their world to the ground. lately that thing is ditching pensions and low yield investments to make retirement dependent on the profits of giant, horrible companies. I honestly think it’ll be the one of a thousand papercuts as everyone shirks responsibility because, hey, this bread and these circuses aren’t that bad…

edit tl;dr americans have a serious disconnect between their actions and the consequences of them at scale. until that changes, we all lose

for debian based systems, there is a PPA with nightly builds. I use a quick and dirty python script via systemd to schedule nightly builds from the PPA’s source pkg on both debian and popOS with good results. worst case you can roll back to a prevous build of the pkg, tho Ive never had to