Cash for clunkers harmed buyers in the used car market, especially the poor.

SOPA/PIPA

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act

That bill would have completely destroyed the internet. Democrats and republicans alongside Hollywood faught the American people and lost. It’s the only time I’ve seen the people actually win, and pretty much every individual regardless of their other politics was united against it. It’s debatable if we could have done it without Google and the rest of big tech helping though. But still, it sent a clear message across the entire political spectrum that there was a line they couldn’t cross.

We also briefly won Net Neutrality ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality ), and although it’s no longer in effect, the ISPs would have probably done a lot worse if they didn’t know we cared and are watching.

Honestly though, I don’t know if stopping things from getting a lot worse should even count as an “improvement”.

I don’t think she meant it. She probably said it in the heat of the moment and then forgot she even said it later.

I have the same TV and built a custom stand for it. Doesn’t change the fact that the included stand is a bad design.

Mint.

I switched a friend from Ubuntu to Fedora specifically because the partition setup during Fedora install is so good. (It was during a new build)

You can donate to Mozilla, and I do. https://donate.mozilla.org/en-GB/

A lot of people will have to donate a lot to equal the amount they are getting from Google though, and if Google pulls that money I feel that Firefox would end before people donate enough to make up the shortfall.

Reddit had this magical mix of: “The world is about to end”, “Now for something funny”, “Here is something interesting, but neutral”, “Here is a someone shitty getting away with something shitty”. Here it seems like it’s just posts about the world ending, corporations doing shitty things, and occasionally Linux/Reddit commentary.

Imagine going to the grocery store filling your cart with stuff and then checking out. Then you leave the cart behind and only take the receipt home with you. In this analogy, the NFT is the receipt that you get at the checkout counter and your cart is the actual picture file. Although you do usually get the picture file, anyone else can access it too.

Sure the receipt proves that you bought the thing, but you having the receipt only matters if somebody else cares.

The art world was actually a good target for NFTs because I can print out a picture of a Monet and hang it on my wall for basically free, but other people pay hundreds of millions of dollars for that same painting just because it’s “the real one”.

Technology is quickly becoming less and less about the underlying technologies and more about how the large corporations want you to use their product. I was briefly a volunteer website administrator for a small non-profit and despite having done freelance web development 15 years ago and knowing how to program HTML and several other web technologies, it was a struggle because they used Google on the backend and everything in Google was unintuitivly laid out and impossible to do without going through the Google interface. I often frustratingly joked that I was a Google administrator, not a web administrator.

Another example was some Linksys wireless mesh extenders I bought. The setup process involved using a privacy invasive app on your phone to connect with Bluetooth. It would try for 5 minutes and then just error with no error code. There is no manual setup process. There was no log file. When it didn’t work after 5 minutes of trying, it told you to call a phone number that was always busy and blocked the 5 minute connection process since it needs a phone to do both things. Eventually, after about 6 hours, it just randomly started working.

Combine that with people biologicaly becoming less able and willing to learn as they get older and it’s pretty likely that millennials will eventually get left behind even if they try to keep up to date.

https://www.retroarch.com/index.php?page=platforms

RetroArch has versions for both ARM and Intel based Mac’s. You shouldn’t have a problem playing up to Dreamcast, possibly later. There is a bit of a learning curve, but RetroArch is on pretty much everything now, and it’s worth learning.

The Sega CD had a purpose. The CD quality sound and FMVs were clearly something that couldn’t be done on a stock SNES or Genesis. But the 32x… I played one in a Funcoland once and I honestly couldn’t tell the difference between it and a normal Genesis game. Some extra superfluous scaling effects that the SNES could do natively and the Genesis could do if you were a clever programmer?

It would be such a small but significant thing to pass a law requiring adding seaweed to their feed. Even if they passed the cost on, it would raise the price of meat insignificantly. It’s crazy that we haven’t done it yet. Same with making new roofs white to reflect light instead of absorbing it.

They think that the people who are left are more valuable than we were. At least in terms of data collection and ad views, they are probably right.

In the long run, chasing away the power users will probably harm the platform, but it’s not immediately clear.

Reddit probably won’t implode like Digg did because they got a lot of users used to their terrible app, and power users can still use old.reddit and Revanced to patch the third party apps. But enough people have left Reddit that Lemmy is now it’s own thing, and unless Lemmy screws it up badly, it should only keep growing.

I joined Reddit 13 years ago when Digg made their site unusable. I joined Lemmy 1 month ago when Reddit made their site unusable (on mobile). History repeats itself…

I think fundamentally Mastodon can’t work. The entire point of Twitter is for celebrities, brands and governments to have a single place to be able to send out a public message and for that message to be seen by everyone, especially those who opt in to it by following. Decentralized alternatives by definition can’t do that. Centralization is the entire point of Twitter.

Decentralization does work for Reddit/Lemmy though, because they are content centric, not person centric. I don’t care who posts content to the subreddits I follow, just that the content exists, can be easily viewed (RIP third party Reddit apps, hello Lemmy!), and is interesting. Lemmy doesn’t need hundreds of millions of people in a single place to create enough content that is interesting, and in fact having fewer people makes the content that is posted more interesting and focused. Lemmy’s decentralization is a strength because if this instance doesn’t have the interesting content I want, I can just go elsewhere.

People in general crave the big numbers. It’s why Microsoft is so weird with Xbox naming. Having the Xbox 360 compete with the PlayStation 3 Vs “Xbox 2”.

Firefox also started inflating version numbers because the high version numbers Chrome was using made it look more updated.

Nearly all games work flawlessly on Linux now thanks to Steam and Proton.