There are a lot of subreddits which routinely award hundreds or thousands of upvotes for repetitive low value posts. … This is a cog in the well-tuned machine of new-accounts being created and matured to look ‘real’ for when they are later used for advertising / manipulation later down the line.

In the early months of a new account, it is easier to spot. Eg. If you see a post on a game subreddit with a title like “Exciting to try this game, any tips get started?”, you might click the profile and see that their entire history is a bunch of low-effort discussion starters. “Name a band from the 80s that everyone has forgotten”; “What’s the most misunderstood concept in maths?”; “What’s the most underrated (movie / band / drug / car / tourist attraction / whatever suits the topic of the subreddit)?”

A heap of threads like that, on a new account with a very generic name (adjective-noun-numbers is a common pattern); posting on a variety of subredits… is highly suspicious. But it gets harder to recognise as the account gets older and has a longer history - at which point it is ready to be sold / used for its next purpose.

A typical ActivityPub+Lemmy post.

I’m sure Microsoft would be supportive of that point of view. And with their wealth and lobbying power … … Lets not mention it again, and hope for the best.

Yeah, taking precautions to protect your health and the health of other does sound like anti-freedom. Is it still legal to wash your hands in the USA, or are they cracking down on that too? It’s surprising that kind of stuff was allowed to continue for so long.

Notice “free speech” is in scare quotes. The previous comment isn’t suggesting that free speech should not be protected. But rather they referring to the fact that many fascists claim that to criticize them, or to refuse to promote their views is to stifle their free speech.

The issue with this stance is that it’s one of those all-or-nothing points of view.

Not it isn’t. Every single individual person who decides to live without a car is an improvement. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing.

Yes. GOG. itch.io. Direct from some other website. That’s right.

Steam is very good; but the hidden cost is that you depend on them maintaining their service. If they turn evil, you’re screwed. You either have to bend to their will, or you lose your library of games.

On the other hand, GOG and itch.io are arguably not as good as Steam right now, but they don’t have any kind of lock-in. So if they start to backslide, you can still walk away with your full library of games. I do think it’s a good idea to ‘not put all your eggs in one basket.’

Hey, no one is trying to stop you from doing that. I’m sure it is very convenient for you.

My point of view though is that automatically uploading my personal files to some corporation computer on the other side of the world should not be the default when I try to save something. Maybe sometimes I’ll want to use that feature, but there are a variety of reasons why I don’t want it most of the time. And I definitely don’t like having to jump through hoops just to avoid it.

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What’s X? Is that the older version of Wayland or something?

To me it is weird that every day on lemmy I see new posts complaining about all tankies… but I never actually see any of the content they are complaining about. And outside of lemmy, I never see or hear the word ‘tankies’ used at all. I’ve asked a couple of people I know in real life if they ever seen discussions about it in their parts of the internet, and none of them people I’ve asked have ever heard the word before.

So… like I said, I find it weird. It’s like some kind of lemmy boogieman.

The “and more” is the worrying part. They’re telling us that some of the things they are adding are not ‘features’. So then what are they?

Ads, probably. That’s the trend these days. More and more ads, in everything, everywhere - just really probing the limits of tolerability.

Forced accounts are evil - including Android. Here’s my Android story:

When I got my first Android phone, my intention was to not have an account - or at least have as much isolation between any account and my actual usage as possible. So I decline account creation when I first started using the phone, and told the phone to only store all contacts locally. That worked, and I was pretty happy with it. But later, I wanted to download a couple of basic apps from the app store - and that required an account. So I created a bogus account to download the apps. …

After creating the account to download stuff, I noticed that the contacts had automatically associated themselves with that new account had automatically uploaded all my contacts and personal info to google to sync with this account. This is precisely the thing I was trying to avoid in the first place. So, I immediately logged into that account via google’s website and told it to not store any contact info, and to delete all existing info. Which it did.

But then some time later… the account again decided to sync with my phone - this time to delete all the contacts from my phone (presumably because I’d deleted them from the online account). So although I’d gone to some deliberate lengths to tell my phone to only store data locally and to not upload it, what i ended up with was all personal data uploaded, and then purged from my phone. I had to try to restore my contacts from an ancient sim-card backup from my old phone.

Since then, I’ve decided that I will not use a google account for my phone for any reason, ever. I’ve use F-droid and the Aurora store instead. (But actually I very rarely use any apps anyway.)

Steam works very well on Linux. There is a setting in Steam to enable ‘proton’ for all games - this allows you to play Windows games on Linux without having to do anything else. It has worked flawlessly for every game I’ve tried.

As for your movies thing, I don’t know. I deliberately avoid software that automatically searches and catalogues stuff on my computer. So I’m not sure how easy it is to do what you are asking for. It’s something that I’d avoid rather than seek out.

In my specific case the manufacturer is Microsoft. (It’s a Surface Pro.) There isn’t anything wrong with the battery. The gist of the issue is that there are milllion-and-one different things that can wake the computer from sleep, and then a couple of reasons why it might not automatically sleep again when ideal. If it was up to me, I’d have it so that the power button was literally the only thing that could wake it. But alas, I cannot even find a way to stop it from waking when opening the case (which I would like to do to check if it has woken up from some other reason).

In any case, I’m just saying that power management can be a problem in Windows (as well as in Linux).

Power management is a joke. Configured as best as possible, walked in the other day and it was dead - as in battery at zero, won’t even boot. Windows would never do this, unless you went out of your way to config power management to kill the battery (even then, to really kill it you have to boot to BIOS and let it sit, Windows will not let a battery get to zero).

Are you kidding? Windows does this all the time. There have been countless times when I’ve left work with a fully charged laptop, then bring it back the next day to literal zero charge without having used it. I no longer trust sleep or hibernate mode at all for anything longer than an hour. And I’m not the only one with this problem. My partner (with a different laptop) has had the same thing happen, and so have my colleges.

I’ve got some ideas about why and how it might happen; but kind of beside the point. The point is that it is not true that Windows would never let your battery drain to zero while the computer is not in use. It does do it. Often.

Microsoft’s insidious insistence on online accounts is the main reason I stopped using Windows. Even with a local Windows account, one time I accidentally opened Edge, and it started automatically importing browser info from Firefox and then syncing it to the Microsoft account that I was using for MS Office. From my point of view, that was some extreme bullshit. Too much to tolerate. I didn’t want Edge to import anything from anywhere - no matter how ‘convenient and easy’ it is. and I certainly didn’t want it to upload anything - no matter what assurances of ‘privacy and security’ are claimed. And until that point, I thought accounts for individual apps could be keep isolated to just that app.

How can such a fundamental element of thr human experience can be so conspicuously absent for almost all art and media.

What are you talking about? Heaps of movies have sex scenes. Heaps of songs are about sex. There are heaps of books and other stories about sex. The internet is packed with sex stuff of all kinds. Advertisements in the street are obvious implicitly or explicitly about sex. So how can you say that sex is ‘conspicuously absent from almost all art and media’? Are you looking?

Allowing explicit porn on twitter doesn’t make it ground-breaking in any way. It just changes the tone and target audience of the site, such that you will now see porn inserted into basically any conversation or topic.

Your problems are with capitalism and how we distribute our resources, not with advancements in automation.

This particularly story isn’t about wealth distribution though. It’s about environmental damage caused by this technology. So that’s a whole other class of problem. As for the other problems being about capitalism, I agree for sure that capitalism is a source of many many problems… but while we are in that system we should still try to minimise the problems. So if this technology has major problem when combined with capitalism, then we should either stop using capitalism, or stop using the technology - or both, until we make up our mind which we prefer to keep!

Sure. I agree it won’t change unless citizens push for a change. But choosing to not participate is not pushing for a change. That’s just capitulation. Choosing to not vote is not a signal of protest. It’s a signal of someone who doesn’t care what the outcome is.

Voting is the first and most basic step in pushing for change. Doing more is good, but you definitely can’t skip that step.