It could be a deepfake. A whole new class of conspiracy theory is now actually plausible.

I mean, I fully expect an administration as corrupt and dishonest as this one to spend the minimal time and money required to do such a thing for as long as they can get away with it.

Looks cool!

But I gotta ask: what is the deal with your font making all the I’s and L’s bold? :(

I’m not sure that would make much difference. When you control the media companies (including social media), you control what people see and hear. When you control what people see and here, you control what they believe and how they act, to a large extent.

Which is not to say that it wouldn’t be an improvement, just that it wouldn’t solve that particular problem. At least not directly. Perhaps it would make it easier to implement systemic changes we’d need to truly address it.

Jeff Bezos didn’t buy the Washington Post out of a love for journalism, that’s for damned sure.

King Of Ink Land King Body Art The Extreme Ink-Ite has written to his local MP to air his grievances.

Holy shit. That’s his legal name?!

For King of Ink Land, this is particularly tricky as the system believes he’s wearing a mask – but it’s actually his tattoo-covered face.

So is it first name ‘King of Ink Land’, last name ‘King Body Art The Extreme Ink-Ite’? Or is there a middle name in there?

The King of Ink Land, who is now considering using a VPN, was attempting to access a live webcam site when the issue arose.

Whoa whoa whoa. “The” King of Ink Land? That’s his name, not a title!

Godspeed, King of Ink Land. I sincerely wish you success in this fight.

do they just want everything to be crawled

Yes. Web crawling has been a normal and vital part of the web from day 1. We’d have no search engines without crawlers.

The web is user-centric by design. I’m sick of tech companies trying to flip the script and hoard information, most of which is not theirs to begin with (e.g. Google, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc.).

When people say eat the rich, I think they generally mean to start from the top.

20 years ago I would have taken this as satire. Today, reality is far more absurd.

They clearly don’t understand what pride is about, or why it’s needed in the first place. I don’t go around showing my “straight pride” because there is literally nobody out there trying to make me ashamed of being straight. Never in my entire life have I felt unsafe because I was straight. I never had to worry about my family rejecting me if they learned I was straight. Being straight has never affected my housing security. I have not been subjected to verbal and physical assault because I am straight. Nobody has ever, to the best of my knowledge, been sent a brainwashing camp for being straight. There is not a single country on earth where it is illegal to be straight, and there never has been.

You cannot say any of those things about being gay. That’s why gay pride matters. These are not problems of the past. They are all problems today.

To add to this, it is literally impossible to capture 100% of wind power, even in theory, because that would mean bringing the air to a full stop, halting flow. The air must retain some of its energy to continue moving through the system. The theoretical maximum is a little under 60% according to Betz’s Law. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betz’s_law

Let me put it this way: I audit open source software more than I audit closed source software.

My grandfather used to half-jokingly call them the CIA’s press wing.

Never seen one I’d actually trust for the mic, but I’ve seen a lot of Lenovos that have sliding covers for the camera.

I’m a little reluctant to put an adhesive slider on my MacBook because it closes pretty tight and I’m afraid the extra thickness would create a pressure point and cause damage over time.

recently I saw someone spell “extreme” as “extream” which is just kind of baffling, I actually can’t even imagine how one would make such a mistake?

There is a mountain of anecdotal evidence, and a small mound of scientific research, suggesting that psychedelics can improve creativity even in the long term. Ask your doctor if LSD or psilocybin might help with your imagination deficit.

Ebooks.com has a ton of DRM-free ebooks. They have a whole DRM-free section, plus a search filter, and they clearly display all available formats before purchase. That’s my first stop for ebooks.

Or perhaps you do not understand how Discord is commonly used.

People join dozens of servers. Maybe one for every game they play, every TV show they watch, every podcast they listen to. Everything has a Discord.

Even small Discord servers have many channels. Bigger ones will have dozens or hundreds of channels.

Some servers have millions of users. Most of the servers I’m in have thousands.

Many channels are default for all users in the server.

Not sure what the mathematical average is, but this is certainly common at least, and any alternative that can’t handle this is no alternative at all.

If we’re talking about Matrix as a Discord alternative, then that would mean thousands of channels, each with hundreds or thousands of users, many with constant activity.

I’m not sure if anybody actually uses Matrix at the scale of the average Discord user. Sliding sync is supposed to help, but I don’t think the Matrix architecture can realistically scale that high.

I set up their accounts

Setup is the hardest part. Syncing multiple devices and device migration are also hard. I’ll bet you’re going to act as tech support every time they get a new phone. That’s fine for your family, but it’s hardly going to scale.

The performance issues show up when dealing with large groups syncing between instances. You might just not be using it that way, but that’s what needs to work seamlessly for a viable substitute for Discord.

Matrix is notorious for its poor performance with large/numerous groups. They keep claiming to improve it, but it’s still bad.

I mean, it’s great that it works for you, but be honest: isn’t your tolerance for technological friction a bit higher than the average bear’s? People complain that Mastodon is too hard, and Matrix is ten times worse to sign up for and use.

I hate to say it, but Matrix is never going to be mainstream. Its UX is bad and it seems like it’s too bloated to fix. If I tried to get people to move from Discord to Matrix, they’d never take me seriously again. It was hard enough getting people to move from Facebook Messenger to Signal.

I’ve been using cryptpad.fr (the “flagship instance” of CryptPad) for years. It’s…fine. Really, it’s fine. I’m not thrilled with the experience, but it is functional and I’m not aware of any viable alternatives that are end-to-end encrypted.

It’s based on OnlyOffice, which is basically a heavyweight web-first Microsoft Office clone. Set your expectations accordingly.

No mobile apps, and the web UI is not optimized for mobile. I mean, it works, but does using the desktop MS Office UI on a smartphone sound like fun to you?

Performance is tolerable but if you’re used to Google Sheets, it’s a big downgrade. Some of this is just the necessary overhead involved in an end-to-end encrypted cloud service. Some of it is because, again, this is a heavyweight desktop UI running in a web browser. It’s functional, but it’s not fast and it’s not pretty.

The far right are well-practiced at co-opting and twisting concepts. It’s classic doublespeak.

It’s why you have “Christians” who are staunchly opposed to feeding the hungry, or treating the sick. (See: school lunches.)

It’s why “capitalism” now represents the complete lack of meaningful competition, when that competition is the only thing that ever made capitalism worthwhile in the first place. (See: Microsoft getting away scot-free after being found guilty of illegal, anticompetitive business practices all throughout the 90s.)

It’s why “free speech” proponents are laser-focused on creating new and terrifying mechanisms for censorship. (See: *gestures widely*)

I could go on.

It’s sad how little resistance has been made against this corruption. How easily our natural allies have been turned into our greatest enemies.

The only possible silver lining to all this is that perhaps “normal” people will finally start to care about the problems techies have been screaming about for 20+ years now.

It was inevitable that a bad actor would gain access eventually, because there is no such a thing as an organization that you can trust in perpetuity. That obviously doesn’t excuse the actual bad actors that now have access.