• 12 Posts
  • 77 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • Musk is learning the lesson Google and Youtube learned years ago with the “adpocalypse”. If the whole house of cards depends on ad dollars you have to keep them happy.

    Unless Musk is going to take X (Twitter) completely subscription only, or fund it exclusively out of his own pocket, he is not going to get that “anything I want goes” utopia he keeps crowing about.



  • I personally think the whole backlash against master/slave in the computing world is people looking for something in their sphere of knowledge to be offended about so they can feel like they are part of “a movement”. Even if some mustache twirling racist was the first “computer guy” to come up with the term and meant it to be offensive, that is not how sane people view it today. So some of the advocates for changing it should stop trying to build it up into some Pizzagate-like conspiracy against black/brown people.

    Having said that, I also don’t have any strong attachments to the phrasing either. Phase it out in favor of something that makes everyone happy if that keeps the peace. It is just a term that made sense at the time to describe something. There is nothing stopping us from changing it to something else now if we so choose. It is not erasing heritage or some such nonsense. If anything, people having strong hangups about it if there are better or equally as good terms out there that doesn’t make people uncomfortable is far weirder in my opinion.

    The only thing I have somewhat strong opinions about is making it some high priority to go back and erase those terms from solutions that already exist. Change them as you update things, sure, but why create extra work to update something old that is currently working if the only change is not functional and just verbiage. Seems like wasted effort that could be better directed and solving functional issues to me.




  • This kind of thing getting worse and worse at all levels of tech is increasingly pushing me to the fringes of tech solutions (with all of the handicaps that come with that) as those are getting to be the only places where this kind of thing is not pervasive.

    • No apps on phone, if the mobile site doesn’t work it can wait until I am in front of a desktop/laptop
    • No NFC payments as that requires the phone to be blessed by lord Google or father Apple
    • No set top streaming boxes on the TV, just a small Linux powered PC and a cheap Logitech wireless keyboard/trackpad
    • Only Linux OSes on desktop/laptop




  • The world of mobile phones is a real world example of what we avoided on the PC back in the day when the IBM BIOS got reverse engineered, allowing for someone to put out an IBM compatible PC without having to pay the tithe to big blue first. Not that IBM didn’t do their level best to put those efforts in the ground with their lawyers and the courts as soon as they found out about it. Thankfully the legal system of the time didn’t allow that to happen.

    It has been pretty depressing to me that the tech literate have been so easily lulled into accepting such things in the name of “cool toys” and “security” virtually everywhere in modern life besides the PC/laptop/server spaces.

    Phones, TV set top boxes, smart TVs, IoT gear. They are all a cesspit of locked down propitiatory and gate kept gardens where nothing happens without the gardens keeper getting a cut and having final say over everything.

    This sort of control and gatekeeping from the likes of Google, Apple, and Qualcomm was not something that was hard to see coming a mile away, yet we all collectively let it happen anyway.