I’m clutching my pearls as I type this.

I think it’s important to note the difference between “make a living to keep things going” vs. “I want to make ‘fuck you’ money.”

I have no problem with people who make a good product and seek donations or sell their product at a reasonable price.

Hell, take uBlock Origin. I’d easily pay $10 / month for this but they do not want money. So I do what they request and donate to the people who make the filters.

This is the first year in perhaps a decade I won’t be giving to the Mozilla Foundation because they are enshittifying their product. I wrote to them and told them why I won’t be donating. I don’t know if it will make a difference but I’m keeping an eye on them over the next year.

Dustin (SmarterEveryDay) has weird energy and not in a good way. It comes off as a little creepy.

I know he and Diana met at some YouTube function and have done collaborations. Even though I know their friends IRL, it was still a bit creepy to me that he went to visit her while she had long COVID right after she got married.

I will say that she didn’t show any red flags for me until after she did the hydrogen cars series. I know creators have to get paid but still…it was like when Aubrey Plaza took Dairy Farmers money and did a commercial for milk.

Very off brand for both of them and lost a whole lot of respect when they did it.

PayPal is not a bank. Your funds are NOT FDIC insured, no matter what their docs say.

I remember when Physics Girl took Shell money to promote hydrogen powered cars.

It was very suspicious that they never talked about how the hydrogen was produced.

While I agree that the search engine has gone to shit, the problem I have with people who ask really simple questions is that they haven’t done the bare minimum to ask for help.

Simple questions have fairly popular answers and even an enshittified Google search will return the correct result within their fucking AI.

If you have a simple question and the answers seem confusing, tell us why the answers are confusing. Don’t just ask the question.

Being able to Google your question is an important skill, but so is asking a question in a forum. Since forum posts are at their very nature asynchronous, being able to do your own searches shows those who are trying to help you that you have the skills to read their responses and extrapolate to your situation and then take the appropriate action.

I provide a lot of free support on various Linux and developer forums. The sheer number of people who want me to hold their hand is too high.

There is a reason why it worked for the Republicans and won’t work for the Democrats: the bases are vastly different.

Republicans, by in large, will vote for a Republican even if they don’t like the candidate. I saw this a lot when I was a poll worker. They don’t even care about their platform. So long as they have an R at the end of their name, they get a vote from Republicans.

While Democrats vote Democrat, they’ll only come out to vote if they are energized. They won’t come out to vote if they don’t feel like you’ve earned it. We saw this in 2016 and 2024.

Simply put, Republicans are more reliable voters.

The Democrat tent is very large with often conflicting values. A lot of single-issue voters will simply stay home than to vote for a Democrat. Because of this, it is rare when a candidate will arise that will galvanize and coalesce the base.

The last time it happened was Obama.

Right now is actually the perfect time to create a third party. You have effectively two years to get people excited about an actual progressive party and if the DNC come knocking saying you’re going to split the vote, tell them that they are splitting the vote and they should fold into you.

I’m fucking tired of the Democrats learning the wrong lessons from lost elections. They’d rather lose than give up power.

What?! How?! So I can learn to avoid it!

Even if they earned it ethically, they literally can’t spend this much money. They can’t spend the money fast enough.

They hold on to this much money to keep score.

When Meta acquired GIPHY

TIL…

As a token of our appreciation for your volunteer work, we’re offering a Tor t-shirt to operators who run 5 or more WebTunnel bridges during this period [November 28, 2024, and will run until March 10, 2025]

Later:

Maintain your bridges running for at least 1 year.

Am I the only one confused by this wording?

That being said, assuming the latter, that’s a lot of bandwidth for a T-shirt.

I’d really like to see the major cloud providers donate a portion of their bandwidth to the cause…but that might just be wishful thinking on my part.

Cloudflare sort of provides this now by being a MITM to secure your site between your server and the end user. But this requires you and your end user to trust Cloudflare.

And fwiw the ACME protocol is open so anyone can implement it. I believe even the ACME software that EFF sends out allows you to choose your server with some configuration.

I wonder if mobile providers are still getting paid for long distance calls. Because if they are, they have a perverse incentive to keep scammers on the line.

Which, in this isolated case, I’m okay with.

If Alex Jones becomes press secretary, I’ll be convinced that this is all a simulation.

A part of me actually wished that the Onion would have purchased InfoWars, but in secret, like maybe under a subsidiary corp that has a right-wing sounding name.

They don’t change Infowars’ branding or anything but the articles become subtly liberal.

Maybe an overt purchase is better but I really want to troll the right.

The trick that the Government has learned is that it’s easier and cheaper to buy your location data from a third party.

No warrant necessarily since the data is available to anyone who wants to buy it.

Do not under any circumstances bring your cell phone, dumb or not, to a protest.

Memorize important numbers, writing them in your arm if necessary.

Answer all questions with “I assert my fifth amendment right and will not answer any further questions without my attorney.”

The ironic thing is Breyers ran commercials about how you could pronounce every ingredient in their ice cream. They had like a 10 year old read their ingredient list vs. competitors.

But when they got bought out by Unilever, quality went downhill fast

For now. I fully expect rules like this to be fully rolled back so that ice cubes will be legally “ice cream”.