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abbenm

@abbenm@lemmy.ml

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abbenm ,

and go to collage.

This is who I want telling me reading is bad

abbenm ,

It is a nice PR but for me I am not impressed. Rolex is also a non profit organization in Switzerland and and mostly help hiding there finance.

Okay but Rolex is Rolex. There are uncountably many non-profits, and many (most?) do good work. I don't think Rolex is representative of your usual non profit.

abbenm ,

Fast forward to today, I ended up killing him and am writing this from jail.

Okay, important question here: are you writing this on Android or iPhone?

abbenm ,

That's what I did!

abbenm ,

My Puxl was from eBay.

To be honest, I don't know much about how credit cards can be associated with phone hardware. I would think it could conceivably be tied to phone #s. In my case the phone is unlocked and it's not an esim, which I understand we will all be moving too soon.

I wonder if it might have something to do with Google Pay or Apple Pay that ties hardware information to payments? And as for Esim, it might make it so that you can't distinguish phones based on their physical sim card so it perhaps introduces a possibility of reliance on hardware.

But this is all speculation on my part. I just don't know and I haven't made whatever precautions would be needed.

abbenm ,

Syncthing is brilliant, although for me it has had a heck of a learning curve to keep straight. Might just be me though.

abbenm ,

NewPipe is a killer app I would say, with nearly Youtube Red level functionality in something that's free and OSS. A bit afield from privacy, but you do get to access youtube stuff without logging in.

abbenm , (edited )

Very good to know. After following your Github link, I found my way to the blog post that it looks like you are quoting:

https://newpipe.net/blog/pinned/announcement/State-of-the-Pipe-2023/

abbenm ,

Wait, what? I don't think they were talking about piracy. They sound like they're talking about something more like a C-Span type thing, envisioned as a YouTube alternative.

abbenm ,

It is but there’s just not enough content to get me to fully stop YouTube yet

I don't think anyone is proposing an overnight switch. You've got to take the long view. That said, I do think when it comes to federated activity pub style projects, Mastodon has gotten off the ground, Lemmy has exploded, pixel-fed seems to be doing pretty good, but the video stuff appears to be a tougher nut to crack.

abbenm ,

Exactly. For any proposed change, it's going to run up against what I like to call Status Quo Extremism, which is a mindset that suggests that "But that would be different from the status quo" counts as a defeater argument against proposed changes.

The combination of incentives would, as you note, need to be driven by niche interests rather than attempting to reproduce the incentives of the top 0.01% of YouTube creators.

Google Allows Creditors to Brick Your Phone (lemmy.world)

I installed NetGuard about a month ago and blocked all internet to apps, unless they're on a whitelist. No notifications from this particular system app (that can't be disabled) until recently when it started making internet connection requests to google servers. Does anyone know when this became a thing?...

abbenm ,

And there's the rub. Sure, it's a financed phone. It doesn't follow that we have to suspend judgment on the means they resort to, to enforce their terms.

abbenm ,

Perfectly stated! The moralizing story kind of serves as cover, as a complete blank check to excuse practically any behavior of the lender, without any limiting principle.

abbenm ,

Between Dale and Amelia, the Earnhart family has been through a lot.

abbenm , (edited )

It's really interesting how the right has embraced moral relativism on a case-by-case basis. Often it is a strategy to quarantine/localize ideas, so as to avoid the need to reconcile them to any broader worldview.

It's also a strategy for insulating ideas and events from history that they want to shelter from criticism, like criticizing slavery, theocracy, monarchism, etc. I've seen real cases in the wild where criticism of slavery was dismissed as "presentism", as inappropriately imposing present day moral values.

abbenm ,

This was a longstanding fediverse complaint, which was quite remarkable to me. It was described as a "missing" feature even though you never had this ability anywhere else let alone the fediverse.

If you get a new email address, it doesn't bring your contacts or your history of emails with you. If you make a new twitter account, same thing. And of course, don't even think about trying to port, say, your facebook stuff into a youtube account. But if the fediverse can't, then it's a dealbreaker.

If you truly want to channel the limitless depths of human creativity, give a Comment Section Skeptic (TM) every fediverse feature they say they want. Then wait and watch as that creativity goes into action, as [insert new feature] is now the new dealbreaker. It is and always will be an endless game of whack a mole.

abbenm ,

Pretty sure the Scrub Daddy came first! It gained huge notoriety for being on Shark Tank, as one of if not the most successful Shark tank product in history, and it's now in every Walmart and Dollar store in the country.

So the meme treats the derivative like it's the original, which I suppose is true to form as an indicator of how people lose track of ideas as they get constantly recirculated.

abbenm ,

It's like what Aristotle said about the differences between the Rash, the Courageous, and the Cowardly.

The Rash person thinks the courageous man is too cowardly, and the cowardly person thinks the courageous one is too rash. So everyone will declare that they the others are extreme, and in so doing they build their biases in.

This is the problem with unqualified statements about who's to the left of who, and especially the problem with both-sidesism. The act of making that kind of statement doesn't happen in some platonic realm of innocent and honest self-reflection, and is every bit as poisoned by politicization as every other political activity.

It doesn't mean there's no truth or you can't say stuff like this, but it does mean that we're all within our rights to dismiss you as a bullshit artist if you don't show your work.

abbenm , (edited )

Thank you for demonstrating my point without the slightest hint of irony.

Do you really not understand that there's a conceptual distinction there at all? You started out by saying it's a proud leftist tradition to call out other lefties for not being left enough. Which, honestly, fair enough.

But you think even the very idea of a conceptual distinction between liberals and leftists is an example of that? That's fucking nuts, and it's not the nuanced point you think it is.

abbenm ,

In Tolkien stories, all the good guys are liberals. Saruman and his uruk-hai are perhaps the most leftist things there are in those stories. Elves are moderate conservatives with some questionable histories.

I hope everyone here appreciates what a special moment this is. This has potential to be the most downvoted comment on Lemmy.

abbenm ,

Don't worry, it's 76 and counting.

abbenm ,

Did people forget what divisive means? I would say it's exactly the opposite of divisive, it's a comment that is produced as much singular unified reaction as you could possibly get.

abbenm ,

Yeah and I meant what I said that you don't get what divisive actually means.

abbenm ,

I love the implication that reading books is bad

abbenm ,

It's just shallow and disappointing.

Your idea of what politics is about has to be bigger than shitposting and trolling.

abbenm , (edited )

Oh phew, I was worried. Okay okay, what year is it? Do you have any plutonium? I need to get back to my dimension and you've been so helpful so far

abbenm ,

I love this, nobody can actually defend this as a healthy way of engaging with politics.

abbenm ,

Pretty sure this meme originates from an actual, specific Twitter exchange. Which became so legendary that people just repeated it secondhand, and now the secondhand repetition of it is getting screenshotted and posted.

abbenm ,

I don't think so? The Socratic method wasn't necessarily a strategy intended to carefully persuade someone by bypassing psychological blockers. If anything, Socrates' counterparts were often antagonized and angered by his questions because he exposed contradictions.

I think the ethos behind it was that Socrates presumed he knew nothing, other people seemed like they knew things, so he asked them what they knew, since others were so bold as to make knowledge claims.

abbenm ,

(Psst it's not actually the socratic method)

abbenm ,

And when it became clear that there were no nuclear weapons, it became a dishonest equivocation about weapons of mass destruction. Meanwhile, there was also loads of dishonest communication about Iraq's coordination with terrorist groups.

abbenm ,

I think this is an excellent idea, a worthy project, and I applaud you for putting some real thinking into practical steps!

My federated X wishlist had social media, reddit-like thing, instagram-like thing, and a youtube-like thing. A federated IMDB alternative would be awesome.

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