experbia

“I assume” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

as someone who runs GrapheneOS and looked into the possibility of doing contactless payments: no. it simply does not work. all the contactless payment apps can somehow detect you’re not running the stock OS for the phone and choose to lock themselves down.

cashapp and venmo will also freeze your accounts almost immediately upon installation and login and, in my case with cashapp, insinuate you may be reported to law enforcement for fraud when you appeal with info about your phone lmao

happens more than you might think. 4chan is a weird unique place. it’s mostly unmoderated, which makes it the default locale for a lot of unsavory people tossed out of all the nice clubs. but it’s not ONLY the unsavory people (the worst of which tend to keep to themselves anyway)

mostly, the result of the low level of moderation and lack of personal control over what you see (no “feeds” or anything, it’s just a plain forum) is that you see a lot of people “raw”.

they have no account attached to their posts, certainly no real identity. can this make shitty people feel emboldened to say shitty things? yes. can it lead to surprisingly meaningful moments of actual vulnerability between people who have no reason to hide? yes that too.

most of the non-extremist users of the site are, I think, people who prefer and engage with the latter, while just scrolling past the cringe edgy teenagers and dollar tree nazis thinking they have a secret club.

it is hard to find this kind of honesty and depth on other social media sites. reddit was a bit closer than the rest for a while when they had a very liberal registration policy (email didn’t even need to be verified so throwaway accounts were common and accessible) but I think they’ve cracked down on that a bit in the name of ad profile profitability. even having an account that can “be found” by people you know or future friends you meet on the site can keep you from being willing to be totally open. on low-moderation anonymous forums like 4chan, there’s no reason to worry about your “persona” or reputation. in fact, users who seek either tend to be universally ridiculed for it and told to return to other vapid sites.

it also has a reputation for its users being, um, generally some kind of neurodivergent. I think this is because of the very low quantity of social rules that have any consequence. social rules are exhausting, easier to just stay quiet past a certain point.

These products are not built for consumers.

they’re often built for investors. they are feasible enough products that some people will even buy them, so you get investors. then, the thing is always just “one more issue we need to fix” away from “mass adoption”, “for real this time”… to keep milking the investors as long as possible.

When was it ever about improving it for the end user?

back in the day when it was about building the best interface you could to last the product lifespan, maybe.

that’s not profitable for the designers tho - chasing the current design meta is their version of planned obsolescence for interfaces. “oh that interface looks old so it doesn’t work anymore” - statements dreamed up by the deranged and greedy.

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bunch of fucking interface designers so deep into their shit that they’re forcing everyone to chase the UX meta and play ranked competitive UI when 90% of everyone is just trying to be casuals and play what they’re accustomed to so they can unwind at the end of the day

“yes well you see moving every interface element on your computer to a totally new location results in a 0.0001% improvement in the average user’s workflow, therefore: bite the pillow, changes are coming, we’re the experts you dumb schlubs!”

I agree folks are overestimating how many will switch. but also maybe you’re underestimating too - a lot of browser installations are managed by the “family tech guy”. the father, mother, brother, sister, aunt or uncle who sets up everyone’s new laptops on Christmas and has the suggestions when you look for a new phone. we all know the type. a lot of us are the type.

setting up granny’s laptop? I’ll install whatever browser lets me automatically block the most “1000th visitor!” banner ads and change the desktop icon to the old AOL icon because that’s all she knows the internet as. she doesn’t know of care about the browser options so it’s up to me. Chrome used to be fast and simple so it was the right choice. Firefox has caught up a fair bit on UX simplicity and speed and now offers better blocking and general security, so it just stole the crown for these installations imo. I trust it more to not let her mess the computer up, so even if I’m not using it as my main personal browser, it gets use here.

weird. who could have predicted a rug pull from an analytics and spyware company… lol.

if you get in bed with adtech vipers and don’t anticipate problems, you’re gullible as hell. if you don’t stop them (or worse, if you let them) ad people will sell you, your soul, and your passion to the devil for a single penny.

same. I see outrage-obsessed people constantly talk about how using a custom domain or (gasp) running your own mail server is internet suicide and literally impossible because your addresses won’t be seen as real or your mail will never get delivered by anyone. I’ve been doing both for over a decade with no trouble whatsoever, so I wonder how badly these folks are botching their mail setup to be getting that treatment.

I agree with your general sentiment here (that such an arrangement is not trustworthy enough for me to feel completely private) but your delivery of said sentiment is really fucking rude, dude.

Even if it’s not secure enough for you or I to feel private, it likely exceeds the security necessary to satisfy most people’s threat models so they can not only feel private but objectively be more private than if they just used Google docs.

incremental or opportunistic privacy improvements are better than none, a fact that has seemed to be lost in elitist privacy circles these days.

bunch of fuckin art pirates. crying about software piracy while they have their own bots pirating everyone’s art.

wow. does the factory that made it have absolutely no quality control processes in place? I would be embarrassed to own a vehicle that did that, and more than a little worried about its safety.

I always thought it should be “unlock”, because that’s more what is happening. you’re not buying it, renting has a connotation of a fixed term ownership time, but unlock describes the action… they’ve had the movie the whole time sitting there, probably in a CDN near your home already, but you’re not allowed to see it until you pony up. it’s locked away.

same. I buy a lot of software/games and media/music/movies, and before I buy I always make sure I can pirate it down the road if I need to. if I can’t, I reconsider how much I need it. I’ll switch to my pirated copy at the drop of a hat without a drop of guilt. if it has annoying or unperformant drm? it makes me sign up for an account to use my paid software on my own computer? its servers go down and it won’t boot? switched.

this was my experience too. kept putting it off because I assumed I’d need to tinker a bit. didn’t at all, worked immediately with only the simplest configuration. genuinely amazing, I wish my software worked that well.

same. an ad for a thing means the thing is shit. they have to try and trick you to get it instead of letting its quality organically speak for itself.

when things are actually good, you don’t need an ad agency to tell you.

I don’t believe I’m immune to advertising but I don’t think advertisers are willing to admit that it’s just as easy to create negative brand associations as positive brand associations. when the only exposure you have to a product is frustrating and irritating and offensive, these feelings can bleed over when you see them on a shelf later.

after many years of trying to ignore advertising and pretending I’m not influenced by it, I’ve admitted I am, just like everyone else. so instead of resisting the effects, I try to turn the feeling of brand familiarity into a warning sign: if I’m drawn by familiarity to a particular product, I question why before I buy. if the answer isn’t “a friend or i have used it and found it valuable/good”, then i remind myself that it’s not good enough on its own. they have to try and trick me into liking it, so it can’t be that good. if it were good, they wouldn’t have to drop dump trucks of cash into an ad agency to try and trick people into buying it. an ad for a thing means the thing is shit.

People who are modifying Windows this deeply are not going to switch to Linux

I did. I was a heavy Windows customizer and deeply understand it as an operating system and target for application development. I left because, at some point, I realized the OS I (one way or another) paid for was treating me like a product instead of a user, and I resent that. I don’t like the feeling of slowly losing grip on the OS as it slides into becoming adtech tooling for marketing interests instead of the thing that runs programs for me. Despite my entrenched Windows knowledge, none of my primary personal computers run it anymore, including my gaming PC. Adaptation is a lot easier than most people expect, in my opinion.

ding ding ding

this is your reminder. 5 hours overdue, but here nonetheless.

but for real, your phone can do these things.

The content, for sure. I’ll just ask they provide their own USB drive, or I’ll buy a good one for them and fill it if they’ll comp me for that.