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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 17th, 2023

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  • You can always get a new Chromecast (we were forced to as the ancient bullet proof one told us to “fuck off, I want to die”). The new one has a remote control and apps, which I always thought were missing from the minimalist Chromecast family of products. So look at us, now we have a shitty roku when all we wanted was a device that I could send things to from my phone. Needed and wanted nothing more, but I got it. My tone is muddled here, so I’ll make it clear that it’s worse than it used to be, and I’m annoyed I was forced to pay to downgrade.


  • Speaking as someone with no social media (big grain of salt), whenever I’ve heard reporting on people seeing the genocide on their phones it was always referencing tiktok. They never said “people watched children be exploded on twitter or Insta”. That could be due to user preference or whatever, but as an outsider, I have the ambient notion that more of this kind of content was coming from tiktok.

    More concretely, in a lot of the stuff that came out of the twitter files, it’s clear that the US government does have, what I would classify as, inappropriate contact with american social media companies that can controle narratives. Without saying something with absolute certainty, the statement he’s making sounds pretty reasonable.

    Also nothing is just one thing, there’s probably a ton going on.



  • In our healthcare system they’re talking about refusing non emergent treatment for people without insurance until they get Medicaid, which can apparently take a month. This would save about 20million, which is strikingly close to what Propublica reports the system pays in executive compensation. In other words, if the money is THAT important, we have a way to save that money without literally denying cancer care (time is a factor). But reduction in executive expenses isn’t on the table. Fuck these high earning sociopaths.












  • I genuinely don’t understand why so many people go with the network brand. AFAIK all of the US networks have MVNO’s that operate on their networks at much lower cost. Some of those virtual operators are even owned by the big guys, e.g. Cricket on ATT. My coworkers pay literally hundreds of dollars more per month than is necessary, and what, they get a few Mbps faster data rates? Is that really worth it?

    Edit: TIL a lot of people have had a hard time with MVNO’s. My experience has been excellent and consistent, but that apparently doesn’t generalize.




  • For me using signal wasn’t about becoming Jason Bourne, it was about changing the threat model. I don’t have any dilusions of grandeur that I can’t be owned if I’m targeted, but you know what? My calls and texts aren’t stored with my phone company with a direct link to the Government and advertisers. That may be low hanging fruit, but that’s dealing with most of the issues the average user is going to run into. I’d suggust that the step from SMS to Signal is of greater benifit to a normal user than from signal to something more advanced. And, fwiw it’s open sourced and audited, which gives me more confidence than something like imessage or WhatsApp, despite similarities im encryption schemes.



  • Yeah that’s true about losing access to your shit for sure. There are options like multisignature accounts that could reduce the possibility of theft, but really the danger in crypto is shooting yourself in the face and losing your keys. Theft comes from bad software around the crypto like browser extensions and shit like that, the blockchain itself though makes theft numerically impossible on timescales like the existance of the universe. But your point stands that it isn’t user friendly, which isn’t new to emerging technology.

    On a personal note, I very much like the model of self custody of assets, and this is coming from someone who almost fucked up and lost their keys. Loss of assets is a possibility and should be in the mind of users, but the tradeoff here is that you always have access to your funds and control over them.

    Another commenter stated that crypto is solution in search of a problem, and I don’t think that’s not necessarily wrong. I see that as optimistic because it’s still a solution. It potentially broadens the space of possibilities from our sole option of centralized control by existing wealth/power structures.