People trying to have long-form discussions on Twitter/X has baffled me since the beginning. It is decidedly not the right platform for that and it was never designed to be. In fact, its design clearly discourages any meaningful discourse. I have never been able to wrap my head around that site and its users.

I really should read that one. I’ve been a fan of Poe’s Haunted for a long time.

I’m reading Universal Harvester by John Darnielle. I think I like it, but how much probably depends on how the writer is able to bring it all together in the end. I do like the somewhat unconventional structure though, and the book is very atmospheric. It feels like it’s more focused on painting pictures of a time and place than strictly telling a story, or something, I’m not good at describing it.

I’m sorry, but that’s private.

He does appear to be reasonably black, yes.

It’s pretty good actually. Tastes way less like shit than your average cup of coffee anyway.

[Richard Stallman] usually does not browse the web directly from his personal computer. Instead, he uses GNU Womb’s grab-url-from-mail utility, an email-based proxy which downloads the webpage content and then emails it to the user.

If you’re not doing this you’re not properly paranoid.

I refuse to accept that there is nothing we can do about it.

I don’t think you quite understand just how stupendous the amount of data Google processes from YouTube alone is. There is basically no way for hobbyists to provide an equivalent service. Very few companies have those kinds of resources. If you want, you can of course try running a PeerTube instance, but you rather quickly run in to problems with scaling.

I find it almost miraculous YouTube exists to begin with. It is no accident Google has very few competitors on that front, and I don’t think YouTube is even profitable for them. Without Google’s deep pockets and interest in monopolizing the market, YouTube would have withered a long time ago.

Trust me, I want a solution too. But 500 hours of content are uploaded to YouTube every minute. All of that is processed, re-encoded, and saved with multiple bitrates. You can’t compete with that. YouTube might eventually keel over from Enshittification and its own impossibility, but replacing it with anything meaningful will be a challenge.

I bet you say that to all the colorblind people.

The US still has a lot of lead pipes and I think that kind of explains a lot.

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Yup, that’s bound to happen, which is why I’ve written off actual AR-glasses long ago. Maybe if there’s an OpenSource solution, but seeing how slow Linux phones are coming along, I’m not holding my breath. But I can still dream!

I remember what the internet was like before we had ad-blockers. I concur with others who have said turning the blocker off would make it even worse. There no fucking way I’m turning off ad-blocking under any conditions. I’d rather just stop using the internet altogether. I can not verbalize how much I hate ads. I stopped watching TV because of ads a long time ago. Never again.

Oh man, I wish I could get a pair of AR-glasses with ad-blocking in real life. No more ads polluting the streets. That would be great.

Read this a few years back and remember really liking it. Turgenev is probably one of the more approachable Russian classic writers. Seriously worth checking out.

A friend of mine gave me the DVD as a joke. Joke’s on him though, it’s a fun film!

Public forums aren’t private, no.

My pp is plenty small. Thank you for your concern!

Not sure what is going on there. With me, scrolling jumps around but it’s usually related to opening and closing the virtual keyboard. For some reason opening the keyboard messes with the screen position. Annoying, but not unusable. A reinstall may be in order, but pmOS recently had broken installer images, so try to make sure that’s fixed before doing that.

I’m following the stable branch and upgrading when a new version drops. pmOS has been pretty good, but every now and then a full reinstall has been necessary. I’ve been using PP since the Mobian community edition.

Yeah, PinePhone is currently one of the few acceptable options available. Affordable, fixable, private. Even with it’s flaws, it’s pretty good. Unfortunately mobile linux needs to mature a lot before other companies will jump in, but lack of hardware and attention seems to be still hampering the development. A conundrum. Still, all’s not lost yet.

Broken how? It’s buggy but usable for me.

PinePhone with postmarketOS and Mobian as a backup OS. It’s good enough for my needs, but I do wish Linux phones had more options. For one, I’d like a smaller phone than the PP.