It’s sad that your “tinfoil hat theory” is… probably not wrong. This is pretty aligned with what these social media giants have been getting caught doing for ages now.

It might not even be “muah hah hah” (although it probably is). It could just be that those things are engagement bait that the spreadsheet/algorithm likes so it keeps pushing it harder.

We definitely need to side-eye all these manufactured conflicts as you say. It’s really irritating how, once the upper classes start feeling the pressure, suddenly everybody is dividing themselves into hair-color tribes, generations, gender factions, tax brackets, whatever.

The bait keeps the heat off where the heat is needed most! The ones doing this to us!

Okay but I also heard this in the sustained high notes of the Trolololo song. 😂

Woo, Tumbleweed! Their support of it is a pretty strong plus. I would get that screen sometimes too but it confused me a lot and I ended up just being like “Accept key I guess? Oh cool it boots.”

What are you supposed to compare the key to? Nvidia’s repo on a website using a different device, or before you update or what? Is it like comparing checksums in Dolphin?

I’m not particularly afraid of Evil Maids vs. my Tumbleweed desktop, as I’m much too poor for hired help (lol), so I just turned it off.

They make compelling points about using it for laptops though.

We allow ourselves the occasional Scooby snack…as a treat.

Then the LAN games…

“C’mon let’s plug in and do a 6x4 comp-stomp on StarCraft!”

The Internet was for anyone!

(Stares 1000 yards away)

…But it should never have been for everyone…

I even thought social media was brilliant when it came to say, earlier MySpace.

Why? Easy way to keep in touch with people all at the same time. “Oh look what’s going on in so-and-so’s life”, instead of hoping they’ll stumble on your blog lol.

Even early Facebook was kinda like this. Network of friends and family. Chronological order. Simple, but not exploitative enough.

Then, yeah, I think it all went dumpster-fire when the incentive was “How many complete strangers can I get to follow my hot takes?” and adding rage-based prioritizing instead of chronological, and whatever the hell the “For you” section is. (When I rarely pop on FB with TOR, it’s all just NSFW thot content…that I cannot disable.)

When it all became about following celebrities and being all “notice me senpai!” on their feeds.

…Putting bad companies on blast can stay though. A platform to publicly shame bastards like airlines and politicians is/was a feature. Lol

I have this crazy longing to go back to having time for hanging out in digital worlds with people, without feeling guilty like I’m wasting my life away.

One of my favorite online moments was playing Wurm Online with some random dudes, chatting about whatever stuff while slowly chopping trees, cutting logs, and wheelbarrowing them back to the village.

We built a little supply room that day. Felt pretty accomplished.

Also let’s be honest, it was entertaining.

Adventure is when trouble happened to somebody else! :p

Yiiiiiikes. This is why I’m gonna be stuck on tailscale or another VPN only access for quite a while. I know it’s not perfect, but exposing ports on today’s Internet is scary.

I know I don’t have the mental overhead to secure literally everything, and have a solid contingency for when some botnet armed with a zero-day inevitably breaks it.

Really glad this person wrote this write up about how that happens and what it looks like though. It’s REALLY interesting and I learned a lot!

I have a Motorola I probably need to do this to, especially if Google is about to lock down against using F-Droid and stuff.

What a huge freaking inconvenience. When am I gonna find the time?

But I’m hoping there’s builds for something that will just work and not be like “Oh BTW the camera doesn’t work.” It seems a lot harder to find alternate ROMs these days if you’re not on a Samsung or Pixel.

It’s gotten so complicated too because they keep adding more and more anti-user layers. I like messing with stuff but I don’t want to be forced to hack my daily driver! Ugh.

This was quite educational, thank you very much for all the detail! I feel like I understand fundamental economics a little better now.

Hey no fair, you’re just reciting the events surrounding 2008!

But yeah. Scary stuff.

If it helps, I gave you both updoots because the discussion was enlightening and mostly productive. :)

Klaus was digital 2D! It was so GORGEOUS that movie.

At this point they can just shut down Google. Oh well. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

I always confuse ZRAM and ZSwap. From my understanding ZRAM is the better one and Zswap is kinda outmoded.

It turns into a rabbit hole every time I gotta reference it! Lol

Glad to hear people like it because I thought it was really cool…

…But not having that European easy bank import option and having to manually download your sheets and import them is probably why I didn’t stick to it very well…

…but then again it imported those sheets like magic so there’s that!