YouTube first spoke about pause ads last year when it started trialing them in select regions. At the time, the company said that when you pause a video, it will shrink, and an ad will appear next to it....
Wtf… Cops in riot gear arresting students before 10pm, and fucking SNIPERS intimidating in a peaceful one night protest on a college campus. And a university spokesperson saying “demonstrators exercised their first amendment right for several hours and then were instructed to disperse” like yeah, that’s enough first amendment right for you guys, go be quiet now.
Nope. Just nope. You are not free. Burn it all to the ground before it’s too late or we’re actually fucked.
That’s what inevitably happens when you give a mega corp like Google all of that power over you, your life, and your data by simply using their products. Ultimately, they then get to decide who you are and how you act. And it’s in their benefit to shape everything, including you, in their corporate image.
People don’t notice how much they’re getting fucked on an individual basis until the consequences of the actions of millions or billions of people adds up and comes back around in the form of something stupid and obvious like Manifest V3, SEO everywhere, WEI, or the doublespeak “privacy sandbox” comes to bite you in the ass. Enshittification everywhere and even then most people still don’t care.
We’re their cattle and we’re choosing to walk into a slaughterhouse with our eyes wide open. In more ways than one. As fun as the game is, I really do not want to actually live in Cyberpunk.
I live in Canada. My girlfriend is Chinese (also living in Canada), and while we are able to communicate via SMS, her mobile carrier isn’t the best, and so there have often been issues for us with regular texting. She expressed a strong preference to use WeChat, at least as a backup option for when texting fails us. While I...
I’m just trying to use independent search engines with their own index/crawler. I used DDG for many years but the fact that it’s basically a front end for Bing and Microsoft started to bother me, particularly since they put ChatGPT into Bing.
I only know of Brave Search, Mojeek, and Kagi to be independent and private at this point. I don’t want to pay for Kagi, Mojeek has its uses but I wouldn’t use it as my main engine, so that left Brave Search. The company and CEO is sus, I don’t use their chromium browser, and their search results seem to emulate and optimize ranking based on the big guys (Google and Bing) but in 2024 search is hard to come by and it’s more important to me to be fully independent of big tech.
Tldr: I like your ranking algo. Feels like a breath of fresh air reminiscent of the old days of search and internet
Long version: When I want to get results for a query, not for an intent per se, I use Mojeek.
It works best for certain types of queries. When I want to get out of the commercialized, centralized, sanitized, SEO-ridden bubble that is every other search engine, Mojeek let’s me find way more potentially obscure, unique, and satisfying results per query that likely wouldn’t rank favorably with the modern page quality criteria used by Google. Plus, compared to the same 5 websites you’ll see for every query on other engines because of that very criteria, Mojeek has way more diversity in sources.
With all these corporations incentivized to further commercialize and consolidate the internet and with the rise of AI as a source of knowledge, Mojeek is one of the places I hang onto to explore a web of humans instead of a web of reputation and money.
I hate Google as much as the next fedizen but I think this one might just not have a catch. It’s nothing crazy, just that if you’re sending more than 5000 bulk emails/day to gmail users, you have to set up proper DNS records, which if you’re managing a private email server you should probably have done anyways.
Maybe unpopular opinion but I like connected stuff. I like what you can do with modern tech. I think it’s cool to have a coffee maker or something hooked up to Home Assistant so you can start a brew from your phone when you wake up.
What I don’t like is when I can’t control the tech. The only way I’d ever allow smart appliances is if the data never left my network and I took reasonable steps to ensure the IOT devices are isolated and secured.
That’s not how you’re supposed to think about it. I’m paraphrasing, but ✅️ means “safe” and ❌️ is the shape of your asshole when a known evil corpo entity comes to fuck you.
i think we need Cracked-style articles back. desperately. or like, a guy doing a weird thing and writing a piece on it. sites like those are declining faster than the glaciers.
being able to find random people’s crappy html sites on search engines, despite not meeting the modern strict ranking criteria or being bloated with SEO
being able to read fun, and sometimes unique and interesting ideas on said crappy html sites
less DRM everywhere
less commercialization and people trying to sell you crap (not saying less ads specifically because pop-up ads were everywhere)
more people just sharing things for the sake of sharing even if it sucks
anonymity
just generally the more raw and people oriented feel and less of the corpo ridden EEE/data-sucking/cloud-for-everything/enshittification bullshit we have to deal with on a constant basis these years
Dummy accounts work for something like Lemmy but when you’re playing with big tech corpos in 2024, it doesn’t matter how dummy you make it, they will know it’s you.
YouTube Tests Showing Ads When You Pause a Video, Calls it ''Pause Ads'' (www.androidauthority.com)
YouTube first spoke about pause ads last year when it started trialing them in select regions. At the time, the company said that when you pause a video, it will shrink, and an ad will appear next to it....
Possible snipers seen at OSU. Administration says they're not snipers but should be treated like they are. (midwest.social)
Update, yes there are snipers:...
A web search tip to avoid AI generated SEO junk (lemmy.world)
Scientists push new paradigm of animal consciousness, saying even insects may be sentient (www.nbcnews.com)
Safest way of using WeChat
I live in Canada. My girlfriend is Chinese (also living in Canada), and while we are able to communicate via SMS, her mobile carrier isn’t the best, and so there have often been issues for us with regular texting. She expressed a strong preference to use WeChat, at least as a backup option for when texting fails us. While I...
How the Media Treat Linux (www.youtube.com)
Just sharing this really well produced video on Linux’s public perception (since this channel has suprisingly not a lot of subscribers)
YouTube puts third-party clients on notice: Show ads or get blocked (arstechnica.com)
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The whole internet loves Kagi, a lovely paid search engine that can find things! *5 seconds later* We regret to inform you the CEO is an unhinged narcissist who will harangue you in email (hackers.town)
Florida woman shoots interstate drivers, says God told her to because of the eclipse, police say (abcnews.go.com)
Google now blocks spoofed emails for better phishing protection (www.bleepingcomputer.com)
Homeowner baffled after washing machine uses 3.6GB of internet data a day (www.newsweek.com)
Battlefield V now broken on Steam Deck / Linux with EA anticheat live (www.gamingonlinux.com)
Defederating with Threads overview (fedipact.veganism.social)
social.growyourown.services/…/112174670147908804
Twitch bans turning butts and boobs into green screens (www.theverge.com)
What do you miss from the old internet?
i think we need Cracked-style articles back. desperately. or like, a guy doing a weird thing and writing a piece on it. sites like those are declining faster than the glaciers.
What lesser known free and open source software do you use daily to improve your life?
For me it is the note taking/PKMS tool SilverBullet.
Mullvad ads on local subway (lemm.ee)
Meta Drops Quest 2 Price Below $200 (www.cnet.com)
What discontinued foods do you miss?
Join Lemmy! (sh.itjust.works)
Usage Of Elon Musk’s X Dropped 30% In The Last Year, Study Suggests (www.forbes.com)
Ecologists (mander.xyz)