Seems like shit!

I like what the ublock origin creators/devs have to say about ads/adblocking

It is important to note that using a blocker is NOT theft. Do not fall for this creepy idea. The ultimate logical consequence of blocking = theft is the criminalization of the inalienable right to privacy.

Ads, “unintrusive” or not, are just the visible portion of the privacy-invading means entering your browser when you visit most sites. uBO’s primary goal is to help users neutralize these privacy-invading methodsin a way that welcomes those users who do not wish to use more technical means.

From their Github

Doing monthly (or more frequent) inventory of the store will “check” the cashiers, as every store has to do. When employees go through and get a total accounting of items actually on hand vs what the system says. Well, it tells the entire story not just on cashiers. How well the stockers kept track of damaged/expired items, theft, cashier mess ups, etc.

I worked grocery, all departments, including receiving when I was younger and had to do inventory all the time. Of course it relies on the employee not being lazy (👀) and actually, you know, doing inventory. Usually the managers waddled their asses over if they wanted “real” inventory done because tbh I spent about an hour actually counting shit and then went and took a nap in the bathroom (had a bench for changing clothes) and just marked everything as matching. Something something pay minimum wage, get minimum work.

Them stopping customers has to be for lowering shrink from theft, but that shit is already negligible anyway. Smart management knows that it’s already baked into the profit margin for the store and harassing people, treating everyone as a thief, will just drive away regular customers. If I get continually hassled somewhere and my time wasted there’s no way I’m gonna keep going there. Even if they manage to catch a bunch of people stealing stuff it just kind of… doesn’t matter.

This is another one of those cases of individuals not understanding statistics and profit margins, etc. You see chuds crying all the time about “but you can’t just steal the chicken! Price go up!” and they seriously can’t comprehend that, as someone who worked in the store(s), they throw away more food (from damage or spoilage) constantly than hungry people could ever realistically try to steal. Like, yeah, there’s a threshold and if literally every shopper is stealing then sure the system breaks. But most people don’t. The people who do, overwhelmingly, are doing so because they have little other choice. It’s just incredibly stupid that managers and especially random employees or (the worst) random customers try to give a shit about theft like this. I’ve had more than a few times where I was working on something and some old guy comes up like “hey. I think that guy over there put something in his pocket.” And I’m just like “ok.” And go back to whatever. I mean wtf do they expect? Should I immediately man the store’s .50 cal turret and blow away the college kid or poor single mom who stuffed a steak in their jacket pocket? I’ve seen entire cases of chicken and other meats being crushed in the waste compactor week after week. That steak doesn’t matter.

I think he’s just incredibly stupid. When trying to figure out someone’s actions just consider what motivates them. Elon desperately wants people to adore him. He probably really thought he could buy a giant media-adjacent outlet and turn it into a machine to churn out pro-him propaganda. Obviously he misunderstood many variables though, the first of which being that unlike a newspaper or TV network, the owner of Twitter doesn’t create or really control the content created and put out. I mean, he can and does censor certain stuff now, and Twitter always has but in the past it did lean more towards banning Nazi shit which was better. But in general, people are gonna do what they and no matter how much he boosts his dedicated blue psychos it can’t overcome the that right wing shit just isn’t popular outside of a small subset of the people. You can’t make an entire website dedicated to advocating for the deaths of transkids and expect it to be popular. He bought into the BS hype around the right wing in general. They mistake rigging “democratic elections” (gerrymandering, voter suppression, etc.) as proof of their popularity. No, it just proves they can rig shit and people are ignorant and/or apathetic. Polling proves repeatedly that even burger munching Americans are pro-socialist type programs when not poisoned with the word itself (poisoned due to a life of indoctrination to get a knee jerk NO if they hear it).

I think this is correct.

Also, it’s incredibly ironic because him and all those weirdos like him. The altright, or whatever the fuck they are, “freedom of speech brother!” “Socialism is slavery!” “Crypto will free us!” “Covid was a Chinese hoax!” types of dipshits. They’re like the far right version of what they imagine “woke” liberals to be. I’m not drawing equivalency in the ideologies (obviously), just pointing out that they are, literally, the overly performative, loud, obnoxious virtue signaling people they imagine “woke liberals” to be and mock constantly. Almost like… they’re projecting. Hmm.

And there’s another saying amongst the right wingers… “go woke, go broke.” Welp. It turns out they were their own snake eating their own ass on that one. They smoked too of their own stash. Drank their own Koolaid. Shot themselves in the fucking head.

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.)

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.

If you talking about a test at like a DMV, I would guess it’s more simply just employees don’t want to bother to pull questions up and review with possibly annoyed people or they’re understaffed and the higher ups “solve” part of the issue by saying don’t talk to people, just shove the papers in their hand and move on.

Yes. I went from shitty tv and a gf to great tv and no gf. Not sure how to measure this.

Pretty sure it either QVC (the sales channel) or some cartoon with those colors for art. Probably the former. Shit was a long time ago.

Goddamnit.

Now you’re getting a followup story of how such a small incident fucked with me years later.

I was with my (at the time) gf in our apartment and I don’t remember the exact specifics, but I was sitting looking at the TV straight-on ie the proper viewing angle. She was sitting on our floor looking up at the TV at like maybe a 45 degree angle.

I can’t remember the show or what it was, but on the screen there were some pastel colors. All I mentioned was like “oh, pastel colors. You like those colors.” She was drawing at the time, so it was somewhat relevant. Anyway she looks at the TV, from the bad angle still, and snaps at me “those aren’t pastel you fucking idiot!” And it was like that spinning shit in a movie of me in my head like “no…no…that test was wrong!” Normally we kinda went back and forth like this. Kinda like Vinny and his gf in that movie “my cousin Vinny” but less toxic and less Italian (same thing?). This time though I was just like “but… uh… the angle…” she kinda kept saying I was wrong for a few minutes before I finally tested it myself and then told her to stand and all was revealed. I was not an idiot after all.

And that goddamn test was wrong!

That 74 is kind of tricky and my vision is “normal”

This reminds me of a time I was taking one of these colorblind tests. The person administering it was flipping (way too fast) through the numbers and I was reading them fine. A trickier one came up which I could very clearly read, like this 71/74 one, and I said (because fucker was flipping way too fast) “71… no, 74 actually.” He marked it wrong. It felt like a real life Seinfeld incident after that where I kind of stopped the whole test and was saying basically, as nicely as I could, “hey. I said 74. Mark that correct.” MFer didn’t even vocalize a response. I can’t remember but I think he did like two more numbers, said I passed with whatever number of tests with one incorrect. I had to get my eyesight examined after that (this was for some pilot shit. Like a physical) and I told the doctor and he kind of shrugged it off too like “you passed it. It doesn’t matter.” IT MATTERS TO ME GODDAMNIT

Thanks for triggering this random traumatic event from over a decade ago.

Dragging out the take overs is such a colossal fuck up. If you’re gonna be a piece of shit you announce it, let people be pissed, ignore it, and then crush the dissent when the day comes.

If anything this just shows spez/reddit are completely incompetent, more than anyone already knew. He’s too much of a pussy to pull the trigger and do the shit he very obviously intends to do. A dumbass and a coward. What a combination.

They only read what is presented to them and as we all know the “official narrative” lacks a lot of details and includes outright lies. Any true telling of history would always result in “oh so we should probably do what the Soviets were doing… and improve it.” Instead the US being dominant after WWII has led to so much ridiculous and insane propaganda that can even the light suggestion to Americans to rethink their ideas on China and the USSR (and the US or Israel on the other side of that coin) is instantly smashed with YOURE A COMMIE FASCIST! Great world to live in…

I think this was all fairly well predicted by many people way before my time and smarter than me, but it seems kind of obvious that in a world of declining hegemony and in turn declining material conditions that the average workers of the world either push to the far left and embrace socialism or to the far right into fascism. It’s basically inevitable in the long run.

The problem is one ideology seeks more equality, fairness, etc. and to end exploitation by capitalists around the world so everyone can live lives of dignity and we can all work in our own and each other’s common interests of, you know, not destroying the world.

Fascism kind of plays on the same mindset of “someone is fucking me. But who?” and smashes in whatever ethnic or racial group is convenient to hate. Black people, “the Jews!”, Arabs (“Muslims” to Americans), South Americans and Mexicans, Chinese people, etc. Instead of the logic of cooperation towards a common goal it just sells cooperation but only within your assigned group for their betterment and the extermination of other groups.

given two paths basically, one which requires overcoming whatever baked-in resentment, fears, racism, whatever people all are raised to have in this world and the other which says “no, all that bullshit is actually correct. most basic primal urge to kill everyone else because you think you’ll die otherwise is correct.” Obviously there’s some amount of “some people are like that” because I don’t think I’ve ever really thought like that, but of course there’s also a learned and socially instilled component helped along by lack of education and straight up misinformation (propaganda) that can lead otherwise “good” people to just follow along, believe the zero sum game bullshit, and commit any atrocity in the imagined grand idea of defending themselves and their people from the others who they were purposely denied ever actually knowing and learning about.

We’re kind of at an unfortunate point now too where it seems like (and who really knows?) we’re heading towards some incredibly bad times. More wars and a shitload more deaths as the world transitions from US hegemony to sharing it with other nations, China being the biggest right now. It feels like we’re fighting an impossible battle of winning over minds already complacent to the right wing. The Marxist, et al. education in “the west” is essentially zero and the world can basically count on the US/EU to fight every step of progress along the way if any progress is to be made at all. I mean look at the whining over China who has explicitly pretty much stayed out of foreign politics. They have a few loans around the world and the west is in full-on baby crying mode. Just imagine where it’s likely headed (and this is not blaming China who has every right to do what any other nation does. The US/EU are clearly the ones in the wrong here).

So I dunno. Shit’s fucked, people are uneducated and falling for bullshit fascist shit, and the left seems unable to keep up with radicalizing people. Not for lack of trying or for lack of “being correct” but because of really too many reasons to go into… probably the chief reason being the fucking US lucked into its position post-WWII and that basically setup the world to get bent over and fucked by fascism sold under a different label. The US isn’t called “the fourth reich” for no good reason after all. I’ll stop rambling.

Agreed on the edit. I’d go further and say it’s almost definitely not worth his time/effort/money because even if he does win, which is never guaranteed, or squeezing a fat settlement… I dunno, laws are fucked and doing it isn’t worth it imo for a few stupid comments that I find unlikely to really do anything to his career outside of reddit app development (which is dead now anyway…)

As far as the court case stuff goes, first, not a lawyer. So, you know, you could stop reading now and perhaps should! However, if the case is basically “the reddit CEO said X and Y things publicly accusing my client of attempting to blackmail reddit. There’s no proof of such attempted blackmail and reddit has harmed his potential to develop professionally for corporations in the future… blah blah blah.” Then, in this hypothetical case, the burden of proof would be on reddit/Stevie boy to prove that Christian, the dev, had attempted to blackmail reddit and they’d have to show something or provide something in someway as to prove that. Like emails, phone calls, tweets, something. It’s actually kinda funny because like you COULD attempt to blackmail someone but if no proof of that exists, and the target complains and openly defames you by saying “he’s a bad person and he tried it!” You could actually then sue them for defamation and possibly win. The burden of proof in the US (or whatever the wording is there) for being liable for civil offenses is only a “preponderance of the evidence.” I’ve watched an unfortunate amount of lawyers talk about it, also unfortunately friends with a couple, and had it explained that this means basically “51% or more chance that this happened based on the evidence then the person is liable.” As opposed of course to criminal cases, which defamation is not, where the standard is “beyond a reasonable doubt” which basically means without making up insane scenarios and hypothetical a normal person would see this evidence and conclude like 99% that the suspect committed the crime. There can be some doubt remaining, but all reasonable doubt (logical scenarios and shit) is eliminated basically. The standard for civil is pretty low in this way, honestly. If Christian provides the spez comments about him the court would say “why did you make these comments mr. Spez moron guy?” And at that point he has to provide a real reason. Saying he felt blackmailed or “it just was” wouldn’t cut it, I don’t think. Obviously corruption exists and such, but honestly, unless spezy moron kid actually has some message or email from Christian he probably would win some case if he bothered. I have no idea what the damages would be. Probably not much. Probably not worth it besides annoying spez which would be pretty funny.

Non-US citizens can sue within the US the same as any US citizen can. It’s the same rules where first standing has to be proven and go from there.

An example of this playing out was when Elon falsely called that submarine British guy living in Thailand a pedo on Twitter (more than once actually). He was able to sue Elon in US courts (I believe he lost that case for some BS reason or another, but the point is it can be done).

This insane behavior is directly enabled by Apple.

True story time:

iOS has never, to my knowledge anyway, allowed changing icons on stock iOS ie not-rooted/jailbroken devices.

After a decade of stock icons they released the shortcuts app that allows for creation of… shortcuts.

Some crafty fuckers figured out quickly you could create a shortcut that was placeable on the home screen and could completely replace an the original app in function. Basically a shortcut that you tap and it simply opens some app, any app, and that’s it. And you could give that shortcut any image you wanted. Just download a cool .png or recolor the original one, whatever you wanted. Sounds cool. A shit-ass, annoying work around to an obvious QoL addition (making icons changeable on per app basis or allowing icon theme packs like android has had since forever).

So story over, people have a work around? Wrong. Apple specifically went out of their fucking way to add this little notification. A small one, but so fucking annoying, which was never there before and cannot be turned off by any non-root access means (so far anyway). Now when the shortcut is run it says like “automation complete” for a second and disappears. There is SPECIFICALLY an option under the shortcuts and automations in iOS to disable those types of notifications but they seem to have added it (because it wasn’t there before, confirmed by old videos where people explain how to set it up before updates broke it) as a giant double middle fingers up fuck you to customers. There’s clearly no reason to not be able to disable that notification completely when you can disable basically every other notification (oh, system update pending can’t be turned off either- gotta make sure you update constantly so you can’t accidentally have a root-able phone one day and escape such bullshit! Oh no!). They’d probably claim safety or it’s a bug or some bullshit if they even bothered to acknowledge it, which they never have and it’s been several years now.

My only conclusion is app makers cried that they wanted to sell the ability to change icons (or Apple took it upon themselves since they take 30% of that transaction anyway). Or it could actually be a bug. If it’s a bug they have never acknowledged it despite certainly thousands of reports over all the versions of iOS. Not even a “oh yeah that’s not intended. But it’s low priority.” Just silence, so, gonna have to go with the obvious option here. They fucked it as a fuck you to users. Might as well be spez at the helm.

Correct.

Music streaming essentially “solved” the “issue” of music piracy. Although it never solved the greedy corporations which were and still are stealing and living high off the creators (they always shift blame to pirates or now streaming. It’s never THEIR fault of course.)

Unfortunately the movie/TV business missed the cue on this one and thinks charging like $50 for a super ultra suck your dick bluray is gonna sell when piracy is always an option. If there was a few big libraries of movies/TV with literally every single movie and show available the day of release and forever after that for some price, I dunno what exactly, with no addon nickel and dime bullshit, I might consider not downloading everything from dodgy sites. But that day came as close as it ever will probably and then moved on to the modern times where Paramount and Discovery think anyone is gonna pay for that shit non-bundled.

Mullvad vpn is one of the few if you actually give a shit about privacy

If you just want ISPs to have an excuse to play dumb to what you’re doing then the usual suspects are pretty much fine. Just don’t expect them to offer even a sliver or privacy from any governmental agencies (basically true for all of them although some make it policy to make it as impossible as they can to prevent nefarious (under guise of benevolence…) eavesdropping

Is there a reason why? I was doing a joke or bit originally, but I do wonder these random things.

In my own life I basically took to smartphone app usage over desktop browsers (or laptops) nearly immediately when I got my first in my early 20s. I’ve now come to the point where I find browsing written forums on non-mobile almost painful and only do it for troubleshooting type purposes. Same for consuming media like news or YouTube videos and such. Some things just seem to take to using as background, distracting scrolling and now that I know that I can’t go back. Although one desktop I had years back for about two years was boring as fuck and the IT somehow didn’t block reddit so I used that on desktop just so my bosses thought I was doing stuff and not on my phone (bad service there anyway and IT never seemed to care unless it was incredibly over the line nsfw stuff)