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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2023

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  • I guess not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good would be a fundamental different value. I used to think just pay for what you want because being a customer should lead to better results. The last 10 or so years has disabused me of the notion - so many companies are plenty willing to lie to us or treat us horribly and charge for the “privilege”.

    My main point is you seem to be saying “Advertising driven journalism is worse than pay for access journalism.” I’m saying “citation needed” - given how cable news and online sites are such echo chambers now (and widely accepted and studied to be so). Even more concerning is the drift of podcasts, substacks, and youtube channels that rely on donations or subscriptions to ever more extreme areas in “audience capture” where advertising has been less a direct driver than broadcast news. This leaves me wondering if the traditional broadcast media like ABC/NBC/CBS isn’t less prone to conspiracy theories, outright lies, and also more likely to be willing to show me something I don’t want to hear because I’m not directly paying them.

    Also sites like https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/center/ and https://adfontesmedia.com/interactive-media-bias-chart/ tend to rank traditional “boring” sources as most factual and least biased, especially local broadcast affiliates local newscasts. I.e. pretty traditional advertising driven news a la the 1980s.

    Maybe you dispute factuality rankings and bias rankings. Maybe you think conspiracy theories or shows like “The Daily Show” or Tuckers twitter show are better than choosing not to cover some topics that you feel they should have covered.

    I just think today it’s far harder to bury a story - if you want to hear about it, someone is commenting. But it’s far easier to flood the zone with bullshit, and the incentives with pay for access media seem to encourage being like Joe Rogan and not Barbara Walters for instance.

    And maybe your entire point is there’s no good solution and news was worse in broadcast times vs today. I might agree with the first except for that means giving up on getting any news at all and I disagree on the second. It’s also why I think having both currently known workable models as alternatives may help - the paid news sources will not be able to as easily be pressured by advertisers or the government funding to not cover topics and the advertiser sources will be more incentivised to report mainstream and boring news than the pay sites.


  • And the direct pay model has plenty of audience capture or the well known yellow journalism issues. IDK it seems to me like ABC of the 1980s was more trustworthy than cable news or social media of the 21st century. Lies of omission are better than straight up lies imo - no documentation is better than wrong documentation.





  • Ehh. That’s like accident billboards. I maintain that most people don’t know they can block ads, and a large part of the masses who have heard of it think it’s complicated or too hard for them.

    With ad blocking I have a small tension that if I know a sort of thing exists, I presumably will find it when I search for it. So I don’t want another vacuum ad.

    If I don’t know something exists then I have to stumble on it somehow.

    The bigger problem would be if they didn’t block their own ads. I honestly didn’t even know they did ads so my blocking, of which they’re a part, apparently is working.


  • I looked at both, and went with fastmail because at the time it had a shared calendar you could use, which I do with my family to track events and do scheduling. Fastmail is standard commercial privacy though. Good enough for me, but no where near Proton Mail from what I understand.






  • You don’t have to. Thousand of people who know what they’re doing does. But why would I trust any of them? I’m pointing out you have to choose who you trust, and from the history with the makers of Vivaldi, I trust them. Same as I don’t trust Google given their history.

    Of course, I’m screwed anyway because there’s not reasonable competition in the phone space, and I have to use Microsoft products for work, and… {insert a dozen more things here}. Given all that, I’d like the browser that works better for me.


  • Although you could take into account what the makers are telling you. You have to trust someone, and at least to my knowledge, Google fails and it’s all over the news, Vivaldi has not. It’s not like I can validate the Firefox source either, I’m just trusting the website I download it from, or more likely my distro packaging. And people do look at call outs browsers make etc.


  • My problem is - last time I looked, which was a while ago to be fair - there weren’t good tab management plugins that also supported tab title search, a list of tabs to easily close ones I didn’t need anymore with ctrl+click or shift+click, no session management, problems with cross window tab viewing/searching, no tab stacks, and now workspaces are kind of awesome for me too.

    I’m not saying there aren’t extensions for each thing, I’m saying I could NOT get them all to work together, and have a fast performant browser without weird hangs, and the UI was kind of all over the place and hard to remember cause none of the extensions were designed to work together from what I could tell.

    What I don’t get is why Vivaldi didn’t code on top of Firefox, but I think it’s because there are sites that work in chromium and don’t in Firefox, and fail silently - and just like in IE6 days, they’re sites like my parents retirement site, they can’t NOT use them.



  • Mostly because the browsing experience IMO is much much worse with Firefox. I tried extensions to get functionality back, it made it worse - slower, buggy, extensions would stop being developed etc. I wish Firefox was better, I really do. But IME it’s frozen functionality like it’s 2010 or so. Like, they have tabs, who hoo. I really find save/restore, multi window control, tab stacks, sessions, workspaces, and easy UI config pretty important in day to day use. That said, I also think ads are a deal breaker, but I really wonder if this won’t bring back some of the ad-blocking proxies you run locally or something.

    Or, someone forks chromium to keep Manifest v2 or whatever.


  • Not so much chrome, but many browsers (like my favorite Vivaldi) are chromium based. I wish they’d just keep uBlock going in the chromium rebuilds, but IDK if that’s possible. Seems like it should be to me though.

    Also, we switched at work from Firefox because somehow they broke system level updates a few years ago, and nothing I could do was able to figure out why their installer stopped working without first having someone run the uninstall graphically to update to the new version. It would just say Firefox wasn’t a valid windows exe till I manually removed it. And even the Mozilla Enterprise list seemed flummoxed. Honestly, I think they should have reverted the installer change, or even just use a standard installer that doesn’t have this problem, but hey.


  • Well, what you could do is run a DNS server so you don’t need to deal with IPs. You could likely adjust ports for whatever server to be 443 or 80 depending on if you’re internal only or need SSL. Also, something like zerotier won’t route your whole connection through your home internet if you set it up correctly, consider split tunneling. With something like zerotier it’ll only route the zerotier network you create for your devices.




  • I’m pretty sure in the US this is already answered as “no”. The reason is - non-persons in the legal sense cannot hold copyrights at all. This was tested with photographs I think taken by a monkey and maybe a bear. The AI isn’t a legal person, so cannot have copyright.

    That’s not to say humans can’t take an AI image, and manipulate it / clean it up / etc and have copyright in the final result if they do a minor level of touching up or more.

    Of course, I find the idea of copyright and IP rights in general as usually expressed pretty insane anyway. The AI “conundrum” is just another point showing how nonsensical IP laws are when you actually think about them and the supposed things they’re meant to accomplish.