Seems pretty clear now that either Elon is completely incompetent or he’s purposely destroying Twitter. I could go 50/50 on which more is more true. Both could true also.

What if I told you… that’s a feature, not a bug?

It’s far too much to type and way too philosophical for anyone to give a shit about, but, tldr: the US (and arguably the world) is on a freight train speeding at absolute destruction. No one in power is pushing the stop button. (In the US) one party is (sometimes) pushing a slowdown button but the other party is always slamming any button they can find that doesn’t say stop on it. They know where it leads, and this is what they want. Everyone “knows” the current institutions and systems are failing, but the only politically relevant (so, in the US, not the actual left) force with power is the far right wingers who desire destruction and their only resistance is the left and right wing liberals in the middle going “noooo the institutions!” but no one actually cares about the institutions, besides other liberals. They lack any ability though, due to their political ideology, to actually fight for the beloved institutions. They can only rely on the powerful far right to “come to their senses” and stop pushing the death button. Unfortunately for them, the far right will not stop without someone stopping them- forcefully. And since the far right and liberals effectively eliminated the far left and even the center left for the most part… there’s no one to counter that far right fascistic death drive.

But you don’t even need that accurate assessment of things to understand the situation. Just know they want to abolish public education, medicine, doctors, anything related to “science” broadly, any non-Christian religions, non-white people, LGBTQ+ people and anything tangentially related to gay stuff (imagined or real), etc. pretty much infinitely.

These people are the proto-Nazis of our time. Not everything will align perfectly, but it doesn’t have to. They want to burn medical information, they want to destroy what they see as “perverted secular society” burn it all away and cleanse the land for some great rebirth of a Christian Nationalist theocracy where white men are elevated above everyone and your white male status plus property owning status is all that matters. I know this all sounds cliche and overstated at this point… but they keep proving it true every chance they get.

The worst part is that ultimately they’re the only side making progress towards their goal because their goal is aligned with the way things are going and must go. But the difference is we can arrive at that destructive moment, whenever it is, and come out the other side in some Christian theocracy nightmare world or something much better than we can currently imagine possible. As it stands right now, that nightmare vision seems to be the only viable conclusion. Which is rather depressing…

Your first point is made irrelevant by the law existing. It doesn’t matter what Apple says now, they must comply or face fines for violation. Maybe they’ll bring that up at a future court hearing to which I say: I hope the EU imprisons Tim Cook if they try. Why? Fuck em that’s why

They’ll very likely try some fucky shit. Good news is 1) simply the existence of proper alternatives, even if required to be sideloaded, is a MASSIVE step forward and 2) I assume the EU will pursue them if only to suck money from their coffers. Blocking it to a EU citizen who is outside the EU absolutely violates the spirit of the law and the EU should come down on Apple with all their power if/when that happens

I personally use Fennec and Bromium whenever using Android (I’m a sick fuck who hot swaps between an iPhone and a Google Pixel phone). Fennec for a lot of stuff is fine, but much like the default Firefox, it’s still slow- although better. Bromium and other Chromium based browsers on Android, especially on older shittier hardware, are really hard to beat. I find myself using Bromium a lot just because it’s simply faster. Firefox/Fennec with native support for actual ublock origin though… nothing beats that browsing experience as far as replicating real desktop browsing. Bromium can’t keep up and Google doesn’t want Chrome to. Brave can offer a similar blocking experience but at what cost? I fucking H A T E crypto and even their features that you can turn off, just seeing references to them and such pisses me off. Honestly wish someone would spitefully fork Brave anonymously and remove any crypto references. Last time a team did it openly Brave got pissy and tried to get the project taken down… Even though it’s open source. So, fuck them.

Do you have ublock origin installed? It eliminates all those popups in my experience.

This is pretty much what happened, yes. I’d offer an important expansion on “innovative features” though. Chrome was objectively faster at everything. Loading pages, starting up, all that stuff. If all you care(d) about was a super fast, modern-feeling browsing experience then Chrome was all there was.

I was one of those “fuck Bill Gates!” dudes circa 2008 or 09 or whenever Chrome came along. I had been using Firefox for years because, I dunno, nerd shit. All my nerdy buddies used it and said I should use it, so I did.

And then Chrome came along and like you say Google was the cool kid on the block. They were building out Google Fiber (remember that? Feels bad), “taking it to the man ™️!” in the form of ISPs. Oh God, how I wish they had won that fight… Even the might of Google proved incapable of breaking the collusion of government and corporations that empower the ISPs in the US…

Anyway, Google was, if I’m being fair here, doing an amazing job with PR.

They were building up and out Android OS, providing an actual competitor to Apple’s (basically) first to market iOS.

Mozilla simply couldn’t keep up. It was already pretty niche pre-Chrome, but post-Chrome it was just IE/Edge and Chrome basically. Firefox was left far behind by the general public, forgotten and, if remembered, remembered only as “the browser for nerds.”

I’m back on Firefox now after Google’s billionth threat to end adblockers in Chrome. That plus Google’s clearly unethical practices. I don’t agree with everything Mozilla does/has done and some of the stuff that comes prepackaged in Firefox is unnecessary in my view, BUT there’s little point in denying their superiority over the competition in many ways.

There’s absolutely no way they force the usage of apps. How would people without smartphones use their websites? From a laptop, on the website? And if they use a non-standard browser like a fork of some weird shit? I know financial places are run by 70 year old boomers but there’s no way they’d try this as it just goes down a rabbit hole of constant IT work. Certainly not every bank anyway. The entire concept of a place even thinking to do this is hurting my brain because it’s some incompetent. You either hire a million CS people and try to fix problems all day or lose all your customers instantly. A large portion anyway. If this is true for the UK then that little island is gone in more ways than I previously knew. Pure incompetence.

Anyway I wasn’t assuming you were dumb, just maybe hadn’t tried it for some reason. It’s like asking if your computer is plugged in and the switch is on first.

You can just use the websites for any bank or credit card, etc. instead of the app. It’s less convenient and usually a way shittier experience, but, that’s the price of not using Google (or Apple, Microsoft, etc.)

Use Firefox on desktop

Use Firefox (or Mull or Fennec- both are forks) on Android. I have Bromite too for times Firefox is being fucky.

On iOS unfortunately due to Apple’s (soon to be lifted) browser restrictions, the default Safari browser is basically as good as any other since Apple forces other browsers to basically just be reskins of Safari (forces webkit usage). I do recommend Firefox Focus if you want stronger, Brave-like adblocking without using Brave obviously. Focus seems to block close to the same level as ublock origin + Firefox on a desktop. It’s barebones by design though, so not ideal for everyone. I know Google/Mozilla are working on non-webkit Apple App Store approved browsers for next year when that law goes into effect (might not be available officially for NA users, not sure how that is gonna play out yet. Hopefully EU sues Apple for $100B for doing that if they do.) Hopefully that means official actual gecko based Firefox is coming fucking finally. Firefox with ublock is all I ever asked for. I’d even take Safari with actual ublock but unfortunately Apple is Apple, the annoying little fuckers.

What extensions does chrome have which are useful that Firefox doesn’t?

My only recurring issue with Firefox, which may have been fixed I dunno, is it for some reason it “isn’t officially supported” or whatever exact wording to use hardware security keys (like yubikey, which I use on every account that allows it). It’s only certain websites that don’t want to work though. Like google, Microsoft and many others were fine but I think paypal didn’t want to work properly but it does work on Edge, Chrome, probably Brave. Overall annoying as fuck at times but I deal with it to be out of Google’s-world

See my problem with stories like this is everyone walks away thinking “the good thing happened.” But this isn’t a resolution. It’s halfway there. In a sane society if you make an obviously insane request like this for a bullshit and insane reason you should face consequences for even trying. And I know that makes people uncomfortable and “but the legal system!” comes up a lot. I don’t care. Change it. The CEO and every lawyer that ok’d this request from the court towards reddit should bare minimum be fired and probably fined/face their own criminal charges for even trying this shit.

To me this is effectively the same as finding a diary on the ground that says “I smoked crack and sold a gram to my sister in 10th grade” and some overzealous insane person tries to have a court force somebody who saw them drop the diary to reveal the identity so they can be prosecuted for a “crime” far in the past which very well may never have happened. I mean, if we’re going to have a dogshit legal system, and we do, the least we can ask from the multibillion dollar thieves (the capitalist corporations) is they do their own goddamn detective work. No, don’t find hypothetical posts. I can post that I shot JFK. I time traveled over 2 decades before I was born and I did it. Is the problem with trying to use anonymous “confessions” not surface level obvious? There is no evidence beyond the confession! And I’m no lawyer, but generally speaking a confession alone won’t convict anyone. Actual evidence is required. Assuming this shit was actually done, piracy occured, the ISP won’t keep any sort of logs that long and the odds of their harddrives containing that specific media years later? Doubtful. Maybe the judge breaks the law and allows a more broad warrant not just limited to specific movies. I think a skilled attorney gets that evidence tossed anyway since it was gathered illegitimately. Basically it SHOULD BE goddamn nearly impossible for them to ever prove anyone ever did anything like this without the person walking down to the local FBI office with their harddrives in hand, ISP logs and a written confession of all the shit they pirated since middle school. Maybe mention the time they stole gummy bears from their cousin in 3rd grade too.

I dunno, this shit just pisses me off because it’s so brazen and also just so fucking lazy. Like, put some fucking effort into being assholes for fuck’s sake. Trolling through decade-old reddit posts where some dude vaguely referred to his ISP letting him pirate is the best a billion dollar studio can do? It’s just sad really. The CEO and lawyers should voluntarily resign, go home into a dark room, and commit seppuku. We should really bring that tradition of failed higher-ups having at least the dignity to fall on their own sword (literally) back.

They used to claim they wanted a small government meaning not telling people what to Jack off to. It wasn’t solely about the federal government. Of course if you ask them you quickly find out it’s freedom for them to do anything they want while subjecting all of us to disgusting fascist fascinations

I don’t live in VA, let’s say nearby, but my ISP sometimes incorrectly shows VA. A couple sites started popping up saying I had to make an account to which I obviously immediately said suck my dick and started VPNing, which I should be using anyway probably.

Fuck these Christian fascist weirdos. Everyone knows their intent here is to lightly ban porn because no one trusts or even wants to upload their personal identifying information to sketchy companies.

And I know we all know you can use a vpn. For now. While there’s no criminal liability for you. What happens when these weirdos get Jesus’ wiener deep in their brains and decide these laws aren’t good enough… they want to make porn outright illegal. Who has faith the Supreme Court will stop them? Not fucking me. They should already be stopping these laws, but there’s zero indication that’s gonna happen. Crazy to me people still defend any of this.

Some moron just rebranded a logo worth who knows how many possible billions to… just X

Some people are just fucking dumb as hell

Random unrelated thought: anyone ever find it odd or wonder why all the people who snap and become mass shooters never seem to target bags of ass like this guy? Just a completely random thought unrelated to this article. Just his face and knowledge of his statements caused this totally unrelated thought to emerge.

He managed to build a weird cult of preteens and divorced dads but soon it seems he’ll be thrown in a hole for at least a decade. I’m generally anti-prison, but this dude certainly deserves whatever is coming his way.

I do use it use linux for most things and especially for light usage such as web browsing/chatting. Many games also work now thanks for new interest due to the steam deck, which is cool. Gone are the days, it seems, where you gotta read 14 forum pages on why your specific distro won’t boot this specific game. It’s honestly in the hands of the software devs at this point though. They gotta break from the standard for the last 20 or so years of catering only to Windows. I’m hoping the steam deck pushes more teams to embrace the Linux world. I’d also love for Valve to officially release a standalone desktop version of steamOS (or whatever their name is for their distro). I know people have kinda made hacky versions, but an officially supported version with real support for stuff like nvidia drivers (which is another thing… nvidia needs to get away from that shit) would be very cool and would certainly push other companies outside the steam universe to get on board too. It just seems like a matter of time thing now which is certainly better than “this will never happen” that it felt like a decade ago

Jesus Christ, just reading about Microsoft developing something called Moments made me nope out of that article.

Obv there’s worse things in this world, but goddamn it if Microsoft isn’t reclaiming its crown slowly. I think people forget/zoomers never knew, but Microsoft was once, rightly, one of the most hated corporations on earth. They were taken to court, in the United States!, for monopolistic practices. You gotta be doing some insaaaaane shit to get hit with that type of case in the US post-Reagan administration.

Microsoft’s name was basically equivalent to dogshit from the mid-90s until maybe the mid 2000s. Maybe 2010? Hard to put a finger on it. Windows 7 certainly did a lot to get people to calm down from a steady hate-boner.

I just wish, I fucking WISH, that if MS is gonna do this weird “make your pc your phone too! Dur hrr!” shit that they’d offer a Windows Lite ™️ edition where you can opt out of the little stupid assistant thing. No, Clippy, I don’t need help, fuck you very much. Let me opt out completely, without having to fuck with reg editor and CLI, from all types of ads, tracking, “offers for free shit,” all that shit. Just provide a barebones OS, let me add the programs I want, stop popping up telling me the .exe is a trojan sent to murder my dog just because you want me to download shit from your precious proprietary store, just stop all that shit. Something akin to Windows XP or Windows 7 type era. Neither OS was perfect and certainly many features in modern OSes are nice, but the simplicity found in them just because at the time they kind of HAD to be simple in order to function, is something I’d love for MS (and Apple too for that matter) to embrace.

But since none of that will happen, the next best thing I can hope is developers start making more and more programs run natively on Linux distro. Linux has come very far in my lifetime and I’m honestly excited that I can now use Linux basically for everything and only keep Windows installed as dual boot for a few specific tasks. I just hope it keeps growing in coming years. Hopefully demand from gamers for the steam deck and such drives more and more support for Linux. I can you one thing though… if my Windows updated and tells me “set up Moments! Click here!” I’m nuking that shit from orbit immediately. I don’t care what it does, I will never use any of that shit Microsoft packs into Windows. Probably sounds grump old man or whatever, but I just refuse. Stop adding dogshit no one asked for! This goes for basically all devs! Rant over, but I’m still pissed!

I recommend replacing the default launcher. Google has packed so many fucking ads into their paid-for devices that it blows the mind to see. A good replacement launcher removes all that junk and the device runs faster too as a result. I did it on my nvidia shield pro (runs Android TV) and a google tv/chromecast I have too. Made the shield basically flawless and the best entertainment experience and the google tv it made much more useable.

The launcher I’ve been using is called “projectivy launcher” for the google tv. There’s a giant post over on XDA with specifics if interested. It’s made my google tv much better and I’d recommend the small asspain to try it. (I’m not affiliated with the launcher team or anything I just like it a lot)