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1 year agoI didn’t know it was a Cloudflare site, but I was happy to see it’s not running Google’s hardware fingerprinting Ajax scripts that I dislike more than Cloudflare services.
Thom Gray
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- 18 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: August 6th, 2023
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Unless we want Google to complete the “Death Star” and totally control the Internet, I think using services based on their products still perpetuates Alphabet dominance of the web. I use Firefox based browsers and search engines like DDG and Brave that don’t depend on Google’s code base to exist.
I don’t blindly stand behind any of these companies, but I believe DuckDuckGo is privately held, so it doesn’t have shareholders clamoring for the greediest and most deceptive business practices like Alphabet and Microsoft. I know Brave is controversial, but lately their search engine has been working well as backup for DDG, so I can avoid Google all together.
Companies don’t desire to be treated as people under the law, the 1886 Supreme Court decision that interpreted the 14th Amendment as corporate personhood was the most racist decision we still live with today. The amendment was written to grant freed slaves citizenship, but the same greedy capitalists that benefited from slavery used it to begin the neofeudaism that still enriches the few while causing suffering for the masses today and it’s only getting worse. Don’t “love” any corporation, they’re literally born out of the greatest evil in US history.
I think the automotive analogy is relevant, some think using technology means they understand it. I’m a pretty good driver, but it would be unwise to ask me to repair your car’s transmission. My grandmother spends more time on her computer glued to Facebook than I spend using my computer on a given day, but I’m not asking her to build my next gaming rig.
It’s easier to build a PC in 2023 than it was in 1993. Modern motherboard’s typically don’t require separate cards for sound, network and video (unless you’re gaming). It’s mostly integrated now and you don’t need hours manually manipulating jumpers and trying to affix terribly designed IDE cables now replaced with SATA. I’d much rather work on repairing my modern PC vs trying to troubleshoot a Compaq 486 20+ years ago.
I highly recommend Howard Zinn’s book “A People’s History of the United States” to gain a better understanding of how and why such deplorable things took place in the US.
In the 1990s if you wanted to play a PC game you had install it manually with a CD, typically configure ini files in a text editor and fix irq requests for your peripherals just to play. In the contemporary world a zoomer only needs to tap the install icon on the screen, Gen Z may have more experience usually technology than any previous generation, but the days of asking grandma to fix your computer seem a certainty on the horizon.
You make an excellent point and it’s easy as a PC gamer like myself to forget, that Apple actually sells a lot more games than Value.
A dispassionate authority is more effective at protecting local communities from predators, but at what price? Unfortunately that dispassionate authority also has little compassion for the poor and marginalized people it rules and even less accountability to them. I’m also more afraid of the Orwellian police state being proliferated by the marriage of federal law enforcement and multinational corporations than criminals in my neighborhood. Those people breaking the law in my neighborhood probably need better access to mental healthcare instead of long sentences in federal prisons handed down by said dispassionate authority.
Services provided by for profit corporations are almost never truly free. It usually means “free” in exchange for access to your user data or “free” if you watch these advertisements. That’s not free, it’s an exchange of your data that’s valuable for resell to a company or your time to watch their ads.
There is also a “finite supply” of clean water and electricity, but during the dawn of the Internet age corporations had more lobbying power than before and were able to stave off real meaningful regulation, now the consumer pays the price. We need to stop giving corporations the same rights as people and revisit the 14th Amendment they stole personhood from, as it wasn’t intended for that purpose. Regardless of what Mitt Romney might think, corporations are not people.
3·1 year agoI’m pretty lame and just run USSEP, Cutting Room Floor, SMIM, Immersive Citizens, Alt Start, Rich Merchants, etc… When I try to go nuts with Mods I spend all my time modding and never actually get into the game. I wish I could find some community advice on minimal mods. When I “used to” look on the skyrimmods reddit most ppl seemed more interested in how many mods they could get, like quantity over quality.
You’d be better off using the Windows version on Linux through Wine. Is there an app specific to MacOS that isn’t available on Windows? Honestly, at that point I’d get a Linux laptop and just use an iPad for the proprietary MacOS app if I couldn’t get it working on Linux. There is a Ubuntu snap package that spins up MacOS in a virtual machine as well.
A lot of my groups have moved to Signal from FB, feels a lot less dirty using a community platform vs a filthy advertising company. Now I just need to get a phone not developed by an ad company i.e. Alphabet Inc.
Skyrim, grab a few new mods and the game is practically new to be again!
I haven’t found Google useful as a search engine for years and now Youtube is squeezing creators and pushing so many ads it will become unusable for me once the anti-ad-blocker policy is fully implemented. Paying for Youtube premium isn’t the answer either, it will cost as much as Amazon Prime just to watch YT videos, then the price will continue to rise after we subscribe to the service.
We must remember that Alphabet Inc, the parent company of these services is an essentially an advertising company that also sells the data they collect about us to virtually anyone, including police in right-wing states looking to arrest abortion seekers.
https://telegra.ph/How-Big-Tech-Revenue-and-Profit-Breaks-Down-by-Company-12-09
https://www.androidauthority.com/youtube-anti-adblocking-feature-3354930/
I tried to find the video on PeerTube, from the end users perspective I think we should encourage others to choose community over corporate and use platforms like PeerTube to post these videos instead of YouTube (Alphabet).