Meanwhile you have the President of the United States over here talking about what a legend he is and what a fantastic job he did. Congratulations, China, you didn’t even have to do much really, but you win.

Saved the Internet

Yeah… this appears to have been overblown.

I’ve never paid a cent to stream anything. There’s all kinds of streaming everything that wants me to pay money to stream their shit. Guess what? No.

You can do it now. You’ll be able to do it in the future too. Movies, games, makes no difference. There are several lifetimes worth of games you can play without capitulating to the stupid late-stage capitalist bullshit that’s going on in this moment.

And it’s not always easy. I recently purchased a copy of Max Payne 3, a 14 year old game, because it was on sale for $7. After downloading, I discovered that it required me to register an account with Rockstar to play the single player campaign. I uninstalled it and got it refunded. I intend to pirate it now, out of spite.

Fuck these corporations. Don’t contribute to them. There’s plenty of other shit to do and there always will be.

Must be nice to live in a country that still believes in truths and falsehoods. In the US, unaccountable lies appear to be a feature, not a bug.

I did this, and you’re right - no ads. 👍 Thanks a bunch, I’ve saved your comment so if I run into one of these again I may hit you up!

Yeah, they’ve done this on this one particular site that I like to read, one old (hilarious) celebrity blogger who made a new home on [redacted]. [redacted] is pure shit. I dunno exactly what they’re doing but the ads they serve up are largely local rather than third party - and they’re served up so aggressively the site is all but unreadable on my phone. So ads are crazy in-your-face despite having adblock on the phone itself and a Pi-Hole! Just to keep reading the guy I like I had to set up a shortcut that loads it in reader view to bypass all the bullshit and fuck knows how long that will last before they somehow figure out how to block reader view.

Edit: I probably shouldn’t be giving them ideas, lol.

Yes, well, my use for Ollama is solely as a plugin for Home Assistant. But you can wrap llama.cpp with whatever you want or use the half-dozen semi-popular competitors! My point is just that there are no tools that are exclusive to Windows, they’re all on Linux.

Now I have a leftover Windows micro-PC running a local LLM model, so I can be less dependent on GPT, as long as time isn’t a factor…

Might as well go all in. LM Studio, Stability Matrix, Comfy UI, Ollama - everything’s native on Linux.

Because realistically I can only scroll on Fedi for maybe 20-30 minutes in a day before I’ve seen everything and if I have more time to kill, Reddit is there. Although I don’t comment there at all anymore, it’s truly worthless for conversation.

This was what came to my mind as well, however Google does let you turn off your history for YouTube and when you do that (as I do) it just shows a blank page when you go there, so that’s one way it can be done.

Nobody does it because everybody likes to pretend they don’t like the crack until they have to go without. I do it on principle because YouTube has single-handedly changed a particular member of my family, one of the most innocuous people in the world, to someone who has loathsome opinions. I hate it a lot and don’t want that for myself. I am on no social media that serves up anything based on your previous clicking behavior.

15 years later and the Photos app on iOS is still the same nearly useless pile of shit.

Can’t skip the update if you don’t have any Windows installations.

taps_forehead.jpg

I didn’t like Twitter enough to join it when it didn’t cost $20.

I hope this means that Shitter is starting to be in some trouble.

None. I was never invested in it very heavily. I had one channel that I was a pretty involved member on but the whole “you don’t have to tell them how old you are, they’re going to use an algorithm and your usage patterns to deduce it,” I was just haha no, fuck that, and I quit.

Stop using Windows. Stop using Discord.

Yep. On it almost a year now, ever since 10 was EOL’d and I learned Discord was building a profile on every user based on usage.

Linux has been awesome and Discord mostly sucked anyway.

Probably better to be able to just hide your plate at will.

Except insurance has basically decided it doesn’t need to actually pay for the most part.

Sure, although I would phrase it I think a bit more pointedly: “it has become impossible to tell managers mesmerized by artificial intelligence that the tools are not, in fact, capable of what they imagine they are capable of.”

This points, rightly, at it being a failure on the part of the managers - not artificial intelligence. And God knows that’s spot fucking on.