It’s ethical because it runs on donations and has a non-profit business model.

Meta likely spends at least $1 billion a year running WhatsApp.

Please donate to Signal if you use it.

I can speak some Boomer. I get this!

I understand what you’re saying, but AOL had the opposite problem. The internet at that time was hard to use in general, so it was more about trying to provide enough of anything to get commercial viability for regular people. At one point, AOL was 30% of the entire internet. Seriously, it hosted almost a third of everything online. The alternatives were CompuServe or Prodigy or simply not being online at all. But you paid for it up front as an ISP. AOL didn’t provide anything for free up front.

The Web 2.0 walled garden approach is about preventing you from wandering out onto the wide open spaces of the rest of the internet out there and not seeing the content curated to make the platform provider money. And making the 10% of daily internet content composed of idiotic FB comments and posts seem like it’s worth all your time when you can easily use one of 5 or 6 search engines to find alternative content. Making staying in the garden so cost effective and frictionless that even using a search engine seems “hard” to do.

Not the only one, but it’s the walled garden platform approach.

The idea (from around 2010ish) was that every platform is an app and every app is everything. A company buys up other smaller companies until you have a payment system, a marketplace, a VOIP system, advertising, job posting boards, 4 different waya to share media, etc. etc.

While the tech world sold this as, and actually viewed this as, some organic online super village, it wasn’t. It was a series of shit stripmalls adjacent to a Walmart in a shitberg town on a big freeway linking other shiberg towns with Walmarts. Sterile, restrictive, one size fits all dipshits kind of garbage. There’s a kind of person that thrives in the parking lots of Walmarts and stripmalls in shitberg towns, and they thrive on social media, too.

Lemmy reminds me more of early internet as well, but also refined by the common language of those platforms as a common starting point. It’s a niche, and it’s not for everyone. But it is for you, welcome.

A lot of areas that seem like only pedestrian areas in Europe are still roads. Cars regularly drive on tiny streets, especially in Italy and France, nearly clipping people eating dinner.

Still to this day I hum Black Sabbath when I drive fast or do any fancy weaving.

“Oh, I hope this doesn’t awaken something inside of me…”

FS?

As in “F’ing Shit”?

Some southern Slavs call tap water “technical” because it’s technically safe to drink, but definitely has a lot of stuff in it that you don’t want to drink… You complain as you chain smoke.

TIL there’s an arcade version of Ghosts n Goblins

Thanks for the links!

Or Latvia?

I feel it. I feel the cosmos!

Earthworm Jim

Atomic Robokid (Genesis)

Tempest (Atari 2600 version)

Ghosts and Goblins (NES)

The game where it’s a rich guy that sends a trained assassin out onto a island with nothing and hunts him for 24 hours, and if the assassin kills the rich guy he gets his freedom and like $20K.

Rock n Roll Racing (SNES)

Beyond All Reason/Planetary Annihilation

For a browser, Waterfox and Ironfox are better alternatives. Don’t forget extensions. Might as well have Brave as a backup if you need a Chromium browser.

It’s not quite what I’m saying, but it’s a starting point. It also isn’t really a thing yet. They’re expected to be available in 2027, so with EV incentives being eliminated, the now $27,500 basic model is already 30%+ more expensive before even appearing IRL.

Greatest romance of all time.

Yes and no. There’s a YT video of some guy fixing anything on any car. The catch is that for components for easy things are getting harder and harder to reach. I always used to change my oil myself because it takes 20 minutes and I know the filter got replaced. Harder and harder to do every car I have. So even basic maintenance I can’t do myself anymore.

Modular components could be workable in terms of you pick frame 1, 2, or 3 with batteries. Then you pick wheels/motors packs A, B, or C. Then you pick more and more options. If you own the A and C options, it’s a 45 minute swap out with a system that confirms things are plugged in right. Not every configuration would work together. Toyota uses a lot of interchangeable parts between cars. I mean do this with a whole back end or front end. So like 5 swappable zones that work in maybe 15 possible configurations per frame.

Maybe you want a battle wagon. And want to grow out of that to a pickup. Or start with compact car and expand to a compact SUV.

100%. They all look the same.

instead they will do it by making some tech execs part-time lieutenant colonels…

This is to shield them and their actions when the people their system target get called “enemy combatants.” It’s literally a tech Gestapo.

Holy shit, this is absurdly shocking. I can’t believe this isn’t bigger news. The CEO of freaking Palantir is a Lt. Col. not just for “no reason” ?

Headline should read “Websites have been tracking you by browser fingerprinting for a while. Google publicly doing it for 6 months.”

Test your footprint: https://abrahamjuliot.github.io/creepjs/

https://www.amiunique.org/