Okay, and?

The voting laws in Alaska are already upheld by the Alaskan supreme court, and Republicans love to play the “well, this isn’t technically against the rules” when they pull stunts, so I’m all outta fucks.

As a man with two daughters, I’ll never forget Republican hypocrisy about timing to nominate judges WRT Merrick Garland and Amy Coney Barrett.

The alt-right playbook says rules only matter when they can be used against your opponents.

The thing people actually get angry about is the predictive ad which feel like it removes their autonomy.

Negative, it is the farther reaching effects of this data-mining hellscape that bothers me.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/

It’s not a matter of my autonomy being removed, it’s a matter of privacy. Full stop. This is the very first time in human history where people’s lives aren’t private. Your attention is a commodity traded on the open market, whether you want to be or not. And that’s the part I have a problem with.

Today, it’s being too aggressive marketing to pregnant teens. Tomorrow, it’s your insurance company buying your advertising profile, analyzing your past shopping habits to determine that you’re at a high risk for Chron’s Disease, and jacking your rates up over it.

You said it yourself, the line must go up. It’s not just about charging fair prices for goods and services, it’s about separating people from as much money as possible, by any means necessary.

Data aggregation can be weaponized against you. How many times do you think people struggling to make ends meet get shown ads for predatory loans? Or gambling addicts getting shown sports betting ads?

It’s like the guy today complaining that his TV is always listening to him. Yes, because Samsung can make a few cents for putting a Domino’s ad on the TV when the word pizza is said. Of people talking in front of their TV. Of Hundreds of thousands of people.

In the days of AI chatbots, is this really a far fetched idea? Just pipe the data into an AI and tease anything useful you possibly can out of it. The computers handle the raw data processing, you just collect what comes out the other end.

After all, the line must go up.

You don’t like personalised advertising not because it feels invasive, but because you’re scared of being predictable and\or manipulable.

No, I specifically don’t like targeted advertising because it’s invasive.

If it was an individual following you around learning what you do and what you like/want, you could charge them with stalking. But because it’s not just one person, it’s a multi-billion dollar company working for a privacy invading industry, it’s suddenly OK?

Go fuck yourself.

Let’s say for a moment that AI really is as capable as AI bros want you to believe it is. Having used some AI models at my work (network engineer), I’m not so convinced, but I’ll put that aside for a moment.

The pinch of the AI vise is going to be the cost. All the AI companies are running at loss to try and capture the market, and they’ll need to charge a lot more for access to AI once a winner is determined.

Are you willing to pay 10x what you pay right now for access to an AI agent? Because that’s looking like what they’ll have to do in order to turn these companies profitable.

I’ll be the first one to say that the current Democratic party needs replacing, but they’re not wrong.

Or did everyone forget that you need a supermajority in the Senate to get past the Presidential veto?

Is anyone truly naive enough to think that Donald Trump would sign anything the Democrats put forward? The man who told Republicans to tank legislation with things they wanted in it to avoid giving Democrats a win?

Unless you’re advocating for a revolution, you have to work within the system. And it’s not the Democrats fault that is easier to break a thing than to fix it.

It’s always easy to point out a problem. Solutions are what we need, and all this kind of post does is discourage left-leaning people from voting, which is what the Republicans want.

So unless you have something resembling an actual solution, this just seems like virtue signaling to me.

It wasn’t because it was facing destruction, but because it was at the heart of it’s power source.

At the precipice in Mt Doom, nobody could resist the temptations of the Ring. It’s why Gollum was necessary.

A theme in the books is doing good only because it’s the right thing to do, and another theme is evil often hurts itself trying to be selfish.

Frodo and Gandalf have that talk about Gollum, and Frodo says it’s a pity Bilbo didn’t slay him when he had a chance (in the books, it’s before he leaves the Shire, in the movies, it’s in Moria):

‘But this is terrible!’ cried Frodo. ‘Far worse than the worst that I imagined from your hints and warnings. O Gandalf, best of friends, what am I to do? For now I am really afraid. What am I to do? What a pity that Bilbo did not stab that vile creature, when he had a chance!’*

‘Pity? It was Pity that stayed his hand. Pity, and Mercy: not to strike without need. And he has been well rewarded, Frodo. Be sure that he took so little hurt from the evil, and escaped in the end, because he began his ownership of the Ring so. With Pity.’

‘I am sorry,’ said Frodo. ‘But I am frightened; and I do not feel any pity for Gollum.’

‘You have not seen him,’ Gandalf broke in.

‘No, and I don’t want to,’ said Frodo. I can’t understand you. Do you mean to say that you, and the Elves, have let him live on after all those horrible deeds? Now at any rate he is as bad as an Orc, and just an enemy. He deserves death.’

'Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends. I have not much hope that Gollum can be cured before he dies, but there is a chance of it.

That’s my favorite quote from Gandalf.

I’ve used a VPN based ad filter for years.

It was called dns66, but has been replaced by DNSnet on F-Droid.

It creates a loopback VPN connection and forwards all traffic through it, when can then be filtered.

Too bad it’s paywalled.

What a weird way to spell nano

Can confirm. It’s the only game I play at this point.

Finally got to Fulgora. I want that mech suit.

I’m not disagreeing with anything you’ve said?

I’m saying that just adding Mozilla’s PPA to your sources won’t change apt’s behavior when installing Firefox unless you tell apt to prefer the package offered by the Mozilla PPA.

As someone who uses Kubuntu as a daily driver, I’m well aware of the snap drama and have worked around it using the method I pasted above.

Even though it’s an underhanded move by Cannonical, I’m still glad the OS is open source since it makes the workaround so trivial.

It takes a little more than just adding a different repository to your package manager, you have to tell apt which to prefer:

echo ’
Package: *
Pin: origin packages.mozilla.org
Pin-Priority: 1000

Package: firefox*
Pin: release o=Ubuntu
Pin-Priority: -1’ | sudo tee /etc/apt/preferences.d/mozilla

‘Bricked’ in this sense meaning not that you’d just trash your OS and need a reinstall, but that it could actually stop your computer from booting at all. So the system32 analogy doesn’t exactly fit.

It’s because some motherboards implement UEFI in a way that allows important variables to be overwritten by I/O processes. Executing sudo rm -rf /* would recursively go into the EFI parameters folder where the kernel mounts EFI variables and attempt to delete things. Some motherboards allowed these delete operations to remove things in the motherboard’s firmware it needs to complete POST, thus rendering the motherboard useless.

But that’s a problem with the motherboard, not with Linux or Windows. The same damage can be caused by Windows.

I don’t think anyone is advocating for turning a blind eye to Mozilla. I think the argument being made is that a monoculture for browsers is a concern that can outweigh some blunders Mozilla makes.

I’m old enough to remember what a shit show ActiveX was for web security.

The tenants are able to live in a house that they can’t afford to buy because they don’t have credit and credentials that satisfy the bank.

So they should pay the same expenses, PLUS extra to support the landlord who could meet the bank’s criteria for a loan?

The tenants are able to move out with a couple months notice if they get a job elsewhere. They don’t have to worry about selling the house or finding a way to pay double mortgages when they move elsewhere…

They also don’t have to worry about cashing in on the appreciated value of the house since they moved in…

The tenants money is not tied up in a property, they are able to invest it in the stock market which has a higher rate of return than home ownership (which only keeps pace with inflation on average, per Case Schiller).

Funny joke. My parents bought a house for $90,000 in 1993 that is worth ~$400,000+ today. What percentage of investments could offer such a yield in the same time-frame?

The tenants don’t get constant calls from scammers claiming they want to pay your property for CASH TODAY.

I still get those same scam calls despite not being a homeowner.

Got anything else?

I’d say there’s a difference between renting out a portion of a house the landlord also lives in and purchasing whole other homes and renting them out.

Besides, no matter how nice the multi-home-owning landlord is, the reality is they don’t purchase homes and rent them out without making a profit on all expected costs, maintenance included. The better deal for the renter renting a whole home would be to own the home and maintain it, because then they’re saving the profit the landlord charges.

A nice polite leech is still a leech.

Sure, everything you purchase in a capitalistic society has profit added to it, but normally there’s also added value. You pay more in the brick and mortar store vs buying online because the added value is getting the item immediately. You pay more for the car part at the mechanics shop vs doing it yourself because having a professional install it adds value.

What value does Jim-bob owning 5 homes and renting them out to make a living add to the tenants?

Betty and Bob are in an unfortunate situation, but they’re taking a thing of value and charging money to cover all costs, and make a profit. The tenant is therefore paying the mortgage and all repair costs, and then even more to support what amounts to a leech.

It might be a good arrangement for Betty and Bob, but it makes living somewhere more expensive.

Which is the general point. I can be sympathetic to Betty and Bob, but landlords buying houses leaves less houses for everyone else for a ‘job’ that doesn’t add any real value to society. It just props up someone with the economic means to buy multiple houses and make them a living while hanging the rest of us out to dry.