So their cynical move is to send more traffic to reddit at the same time reddit’s quality has gone down the toilet. Sounds like Google alright.

The kitchens are an issue, and the larger point about profits is spot on.

We desperately need more affordable high-density housing in the US. Unfortunately these places are often miserable to live in. Noisy, cramped, and cheaply made.

They don’t have to be miserable. There are designs, and construction materials and methods that work better.

Working class people deserve more.

My hope is that a notewothy percentage of health care providers will move out of red states. There are shortages everywhere. They’d be welcomed in the more civilized blue states.

A-fucking-men.

Been bitching about this for years to deaf ears.

Old enough to remember when folks took pride in how few lines of code they could write to get something done. Not unreadably dense undocumented code. Just lean, clean, and efficient.

There’s still a place for large complex software, but 99% of business apps that just move text strings, datetime values, and decimals around from point A to point B aren’t that place.

Black Box Down listeners: “Well…AKSHUALLY…”

Just kidding, I love that podcast.

Cybersecurity is expensive and doesn’t contribute directly to profits. It can prevent serious damages (legal, financial, and reputation) but that requires long-term thinking. Most executives don’t look past quarterly earnings.

I’m really bad at remembering how to drive places, and always have been. Zero sense of direction. Pre-GPS life sucked ass for me in that respect.

But I do miss pre-internet socializing. Phone (voice) calls, cocktail parties, cookouts with the neighbors, and work mixers could all be very pleasant experiences.

Also miss not being tracked and recorded every minute of every day. It’s creepy AF how we leave digital trails everywhere we go now.

I mostly agree with you.

But I also think it’s important to think of the neighbors we disagree with very differently than how we view right wing politicians and corporate executives. Our neighbors may have some shitty opinions and ignorant positions, but they might be decent people at heart. No right wing politician or billionaire CEO is going to be decent at heart.

That will work for now. But the open web is under attack.

More and more content is being locked inside of apps, pay walls, etc. Google search sucks because they only show you paid promoted content. Thus WEI bullshit is just another step in the direction of taking away free and open access. If this shit is left unchecked, mainstream websites will stop working with open web browsers like Firefox.

Their goal is to charge fees and subscriptions for everything. And to take away freedom of choice and open access. They don’t want to compete with value or quality content. They want to remove our ability to even use the competition.

They ban people for all kinds of crap. Some of it is for violating their TOS. I’m guessing some is just arbitrary corporate BS, too. I mean it is Hooli, er, Google.

Trying to circumvent their anti-ad-blocking detection on YouTube could get you banned on YouTube or maybe more.

Please be careful, as YouTube is owned by Google, and getting banned by Google is potentially devastating for some people. Google’s products and services dominant the web and mobile, unfortunately.

I’m not saying you will get banned, just pointing out the potential risk.

The whole thing is a cluster. Ad blockers are a necessity IMO.

I’m sort of the opposite. I liked Joplin but found myself needing the features of Obsidian. I do know what you mean about Obsidian getting in the way. While it’s easy to start using it, there is a bit of a learning curve to using it well. And it can be a little quirky-annoying at times.

I think that’s one reason there are so many software offerings in this space. There’s a wide range of preferences when it comes to features vs simplicity.

For me, Obsidian is just about perfect without any extensions, but I’m also glad it is extensible if you need them. The configurability and customization, while using standard markup, and keeping the vault storage sizes small were the major pros for me.

Some other products I’ve tried in this space were just too much for me. Huge save files, overdone UXs, and proprietary formats. Joplin and Obsidian were both a breath of fresh air when I found them.

I hope you are right about this moving forward. My experience so far has been the same as yours (re: the arms race, uBlock working well). My understanding is Google is being super aggressive about this and they are not dumb, they know about uBlock, Pi Hole, and other ad blockers that people use. They want to make it impossible to use them by basically profiling your browser and its extensions. However, that could just kick off a variation on the arms race. A lot of things about their attitude makes me angry, but they are just ignoring the fact that advertisements are a vector for malware and don’t really care if they help spread malware as long as they are getting that sweet revenue.

Check the ingredients, a lot of times it’s just soap / detergent. It does work. Some guy on YouTube experimented with it. Sorry, I forget the channel name.

They’re like some arrogant grifter couple from Better Call Saul.

Dumb question, will it be possible to create a browser that will trick the shitty new web into thinking you’re using an approved non-ad-blocking-browser while you still block the malware/ads?

I know this sounds like an internet edgelord, but it’s like they want us to build the guillotines.

They think “the gubment” or “libtards” are trying to control them, make them look foolish, and/or force obedience/compliance down on them. In my opinion, it’s mostly projection. Their weird power fantasies make them imagine others are trying to dominate them, when in truth it’s just common sense medical advice.

It almost looks like the art style is doing a reverse Garfield. It’s bizarre and hard to look at.

The people who charge $300 for textbooks are surprised people don’t want to pay $300 for textbooks. Typical.