You’ve got a naive definition of ‘normal’.

I’d say that the vast majority of people who stumble across a curated Andrew Tate clip and think that the very carefully selected soundbite resonates with them are “normal.”

That’s the issue with deeply personalized targeted marketing. People get presented with a representation of something that isn’t accurate. Instead, it’s tightly tailored to be agreeable, which can result in “normal” people forming positive sentiments towards things that they’d absolutely disagree with if they were presented with a truthful representation.

If someone is swayed by instructions to kill themselves, they are, be definition, consuming content they desire.

That’s a bad argument. Marketing is one thing, manipulation is totally different.

There’s nothing specifically wrong with marketing in general, but marketers with access to enormous amounts of private information blur the line between advertising and manipulation. Using people’s private information to each individual exactly what they want to hear about a candidate without regard to the truth is absolutely something that we should be concerned about.

You have no idea what you’re talking about, if you think people here are bad you must be the most fragile little snowflake who ever lived.

Go curl up and jerk off in your safe space.

/s for those who weren’t sure.

This is hard for me to commit to an opinion on. I totally understand the argument that systemic injustices of the past have impacts today on the opportunities presented to descendants of affected individuals, therefore proactive steps are required to achieve equity. But solutions like requiring blanket reparations from one race to another seem to take for granted that everyone of the first race has been equally privileged by historical injustices, while everyone of the second race has been equally disadvantaged.

This obviously isn’t true. People of color are disproportionately likely to be disadvantaged, but there are people of color who lead highly privileged lives, and there are white people who are highly disadvantaged due to coming from low socioeconomic class, poor health, lack of access to education, etc.

The concept of reparations being paid on a basis of race necessarily involves the government forcing disadvantaged white, Asian, Latino, and other non-black people to become more institutionally disadvantaged, so that a group that contains highly privileged people of color can become more economically advantaged.

Something absolutely needs to be done, we need to be actively fighting for equity, but it’s hard for me to accept an argument that that should be done on the basis of race instead of addressing the causes of class-based inequality that will benefit disadvantaged black people along with disadvantaged people of other races.

For example, instead of seeking to improve the intergenerational income mobility of POCs in a system that restricts the income mobility of those without wealthy parents, we should fix the system and ensure a level playing field between someone who is born to high-school drop outs, and someone who was born to Ivy League graduates.

The wording is a little misleading. A “white noise” podcast isn’t just 80 hours of TV static, it might be a recording of a cafe, a bus station, nature, a storm, etc. not something that’s just generated on-device, meaning it’s gotta be streamed.

Some cases? hjkl is such a euphoric way to move around that all my keyboards have the arrow keys mapped to those letters under a layer. Truly a game changer.

I think people get excited because hypothetically, growth should accelerate. The more people are using mastadon, the more mastadon becomes a viable alternative to shitter

Awesome tips, I’ll give those a try, thanks

Yeah I don’t think businesses doing SEO is really the issue here.

It’s the millions of low-quality, garbage blogspam websites that have SEOd their way into filling the first 10 pages of every single search.

What’s a good canister vacuum? What I can I do for fun in Sparks, Nevada? Why is my cat throwing up? It doesn’t matter what you search for, you’re going to get articles filled with 6000 words of barely-passable English that you have to scroll through, with an add between every paragraph, until you finally get to the part where they “answer” the question with the most common-sense, useless, vague pile of word vomit that proves the author doesn’t know any more about the topic than you do.

But it’s no accident that that’s what Google has tuned their algorithm to prioritize. They’ve got as much of an interest in making you look at those ads as the website, because the ads come from Google and that’s their entire business model.

I have personally never had something I’ve searched for not show up, I’ve never had the App Store crash a single time (I don’t think I’ve ever had any first-party app crash on iOS actually), and it’s always loaded for me as fast as my network will allow.

Just another anecdotal point of view, maybe the situation is different if you’re using an older iPhone?

What are these containers that you’re talking about?

Okay, so I kind of lied, when I set up my radarr/sonarr/transmission/etc docked compose setup earlier this year, I did purchase PIA VPN, which is like $60 per year I believe. Didn’t want to have to think about it anymore, and I can afford it now, so whatever.

But still, over 20 years, that’s like a $1200 savings. When all that you’re realistically risking is having to switch ISPs, and that’s so unlikely that I’ve never met anyone who had to do it, I don’t think it’s as big of a deal as people make it out to be.

Having said that, don’t pirate things without a VPN and blame me when the fuzz comes for ya

Yeah, if they’re going to twist my arm, that’s one thing haha. Surprised that your ISP actually took action.

I’ve always thought it had something to do with absolving themselves if liability.

From what I understand, companies hired by copyright owners send a DMCA request to whichever ISP owns the IP addresses that show up in their honeypots.

ISP has to act on those requests in some way, so they send a sternly worded letter that basically says “we have been notified that your network was used to download copyrighted material illegally. Piracy is bad, you naughty boy/girl. If this continues, we may have to take action which could include canceling your service (don’t worry we won’t because we want your money)”.

Hypothetically, they could turn your information over to the digital rights company, who then could hypothetically file charges against you, but there is established judicial precedent in the US that says that showing that activity came from a specific IP address isn’t enough to convict an individual of a crime without more evidence. Could have been anyone in the household, or it could have been someone who hacked into the network and used it for piracy.

If we want to get even more hypothetical, they could try to convince a judge to issue a search warrant, seize your device, and look for evidence there, which could be used to convict you. But that is an insane amount of effort to go after one of the hundreds of thousands of people who downloaded an episode of game of thrones an Ubuntu ISO.

They do pull out all of those stops going after the original uploaded, though, but if that’s you you’re using way more than a VPN.

Okay, I see this so much, but I have been pirating virtually all of my media downloading Linux ISOs (in the US) without a VPN for… 20 years?

I’ve gotten about a dozen letters from my ISP and I just chuck ‘‘em in a bin.

iPhones get OS updates for ~6 years, security patches for longer. In 2021, apple updated a 9 year old phone with a security patch.

Apple is objectively the only way to go if you want a device that you’ll be able to use for >5 years.

Ah, but then they’d have to use an iPhone if they want to keep their device for 10 years, and everyone knows Apple is evil doesn’t let you use old phones. /s

Hilarious that that only phone OEM that meaningfully supports hardware past 5 years is the one that the goofy goobers here love to shit on for checks notes not letting them use older hardware.

The good news for you is that most 10 year old phones have user serviceable batteries, so you’re free to keep using those if you want.

Not much you can do about software updates, unless you want to pay significantly more for a new phone to cover the cost of OEMs having to pay their engineers to build those updates for the dozens of phones that get released over a 10 year window.

There are plenty of smartphones with user replaceable batteries, consumers just don’t want to buy them. Gaskets that are robust enough to keep out every bit of humidity are always going to be a little thicker than adhesive, which means phones that use gaskets are always in the “rugged” market segment, or the less-premium segment where people don’t care about a few mm dimensionally.

https://www.androidcentral.com/best-android-phone-removable-battery

Glad to see I’m not the only sane person on these threads.

Apples a corporation that only exists to generate profit, they definitely suck as much as every other corporation, but the ‘Apple slowed down phones to make people upgrade’ thing is so braindead that it hurts.