Every once in awhile it crosses my mind that if I just gave up my morals I could make so much fucking money.
The difference between me being a middle-class American and me being filthy fucking rich is every day I wake up and I choose not to defraud every single person I possibly can of their money.
I feel like I should get a little thank you now and again, because I could be the greatest monster you've ever seen but instead I'm just a nobody and I don't think I get nearly enough appreciation for my service.
You're thinking like you are the customer and the customer is always right, so if you pay for a service it should provide you what you want, right?
This is not that scenario.
You are not the customer. You are a product that is being sold to advertisers. It does not matter if you also pay them money, you are still the product. If you pay them money on top of being sold then you are just an especially profitable product.
Paying them money will not cause you to cease being a product, no matter how much money you are willing to pay.
If you use a different company's product that starts off with you being the customer, eventually, they will learn that they can make more money by selling you to other people, and they will.
I would take the +3 charm and groundhog Day for a year. It would be really awesome to have 3 charm instead of 0, and if I could repeat Tuesday for an entire year then I could learn skills and practice things and read a bunch of books and memorize and establish a plan to purchase a winning lottery ticket, not excessive but maybe like the mega millions I don't know, and come out of the year into Wednesday with nine figures in my bank account and a clear plan of action.
I don't know if you're from the states but if you are purchasing mega millions or Powerball tickets, they stop sales at about 6:45 p.m. Pacific time and then do the drawing sometime after 7:00 of the same day.
I interpreted it as you would repeat the exact same day 365 times, not that you would repeat the exact same year over and over again.
Like sometimes I'll make a post and I go back and I reread it and I'm like somebody way smarter than me wrote this, and sometimes I'll go back and reread it and wonder how the fuck was I so stupid as to write this?...
I also think a lot of people who grew up on the internet have completely and totally forgotten about how bad it really was. They had ads that would take over your computer, ads that would download viruses, ads that would use your modem to dial 1-900 numbers, ads that would open 800 uncloseable web pages full of porn and start playing loud screaming music and moaning sounds to gather the interest of every other person in the house just a shame you for using the internet.
And dear Jesus don't forget about the fucking toolbars. Dozens upon dozens of toolbars installed in every browser, everything from bonzi buddy to AOL email, detecting that a picture would be loaded on your screen and replacing it with one of theirs as an ad link.
Ad blockers have been necessary to use the internet for the last 20 freaking years.
If you're not the kind of person who would go to the STD clinic and fuck every person there without a condom, you should never use the internet without an ad block.
I think the last really big hurdle to an actually democratized internet is that we need to make it easier to host at home.
Asymmetrical download upload is such a fucking pain. I would rather have 100 down and 100 up then 400 down and 5 up like I currently do.
On top of that, there aren't a lot of good systems in place to enable me to host a website from home. If IPv6 were common it would be easy for me to secure a static IP address and to point that to my DNS resolver and attach my domain, but since I've got to be on an ipv4 system since no provider in my area provides an on-ramp to IPv6 and even if they did the Grand majority of Internet users cannot resolve IPv6 addresses, it's dead in the water.
If every person in America had symmetrical upload download and a static IPv6 address for their home, we could get rid of the grand majority of the content provider and hosts and instead use democratized systems like bluesky and Kbin and Mastodon and free tube without having to worry about these multi trillion dollar companies' bottom lines.
That would definitely be fair. Like even limit the ratio between tears just give me the option to have the internet that I want at my house without paying for business internet prices.
I'm not asking for symmetrical gigabit with a static ipv4 address on a fiber line with unlimited bandwidth. I just want a decent amount of bandwidth, 50-100mb up, a static IP address that is IPv6, and I'm okay with a ipv4 address that changes.
They've had a really long time to simply flip the switch in the routers that they use to also transmit IPv6 addresses and they are not doing it.
Their hardware is not old enough in most cases to not have IPv6 available by default in the hardware and firmware, they are just intentionally choosing not to activate it.
Yeah, I didn't mind an ad on the side of the screen when all of the content was front and center. But the problem is is that when you make it so that a company's livelihood depends on forcing users to do things they don't want to do, and there's no regulation on that whatsoever, it's just going to go downhill very quickly and if you think this is bad it can get much much worse.
I'm kind of surprised that isps are not injecting ads into your browsing and forcing you to watch ads just to use the internet that you paid for.
They could even charge you like a $10 a month up charge fee for ad-free internet and say that we're not going to block the ads on the rest of the internet you just won't get additional ads from us.
The only use or reason for having a static IP is to have a domain name that resolves to that IP and knowing that the domain register can set the IP address and it's good until everything falls apart for lack of payment.
The other use of having a static IP is for a VPN, to remote back into your home network. Technically you can use both of these services with non-static vpns because most people's home internet does not change their IP addresses that often and there are services called dynamic DNS resolvers that you can get to constantly update your rotating IP address to a specific domain name.
You will not see any speed increases or throughput increases from having a set ip, it just simplifies running a home domain or home network because then you don't have to worry about ddns.
This isn’t about immediately filtered content, like the disgusting DuffMan George Floyd meme, or Holocaust denial. That’s pretty well kept in check by mod tools. I’m also not talking about cogent or even pointed political discussion....
Don't forget, there is a large and worldwide vested interest in maintaining online divisiveness.
The internet has become our global hearth. The grand majority of humanity participate in the internet to communicate with each other for conversation, connectedness, and social expression.
This is very bad for authoritarian regimes, whether they are currently in power or attempting to enter into power or attempting to expand their power.
Should someone do something that is considered "bad", information about that will spread around the world as fast as a lie ever could.
To prevent that from hampering their schemes, the smart thing to do would be to poison the source. If you hate everyone on the internet because you have been effectively compromised by psychological poison, then you will not trust the people on the internet that you communicate with when they tell you something bad has happened.
Therefore, the mote of power you could add to collective action is rendered ineffective.
And, the interesting thing is they don't have to fool everybody. They only have to fool enough of us that our own internal division prevents effective action.
I never really believed in a devil growing up, but if I did believe in a devil now, I would definitely say that this is one of his activities.
A product you were just talking about pops up in an online ad. How? Advertising algorithms are so good that they may know what you want even before you do. C...
You are right, but it is very simple for phones to convert spoken word to text and sending text information back and forth is very lightweight on data usage. So it's not happening, but it could happen.
Conservative cell carrier Patriot Mobile hit by data breach (techcrunch.com)
Amazon plans to give Alexa an AI overhaul — and a monthly subscription price (www.cnbc.com)
Pills (Take Two) (lemmy.zip)
Do you ever go back and reread your own posts and find yourself wondering how the hell you managed to say the words that you said?
Like sometimes I'll make a post and I go back and I reread it and I'm like somebody way smarter than me wrote this, and sometimes I'll go back and reread it and wonder how the fuck was I so stupid as to write this?...
Seriously, why aren't most people using adblock these days (lemmy.world)
Like magic (lemm.ee)
18+ Humanity and AI, a match made in the 9th circle of hell (lemmy.world)
Has anyone else noticed a large influx of Trolls lately?
This isn’t about immediately filtered content, like the disgusting DuffMan George Floyd meme, or Holocaust denial. That’s pretty well kept in check by mod tools. I’m also not talking about cogent or even pointed political discussion....