I remember a time when webpages had banner ads that didn’t flicker and make it impossible to read the page, and that also weren’t based on corporations spying on you. If it had stopped there, we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation right now. Even a few second pre-roll ad before a video starts based on the video content and not the user’s history would be annoying, but something a lot of people would tolerate. But no, number must go up!

Exactly. Billionaires own the media and the politicians, so they can control societies from the top-down and the bottom-up. A lot of people genuinely did vote for the orange gameshow host they made famous on their networks and then promoted non-stop on their news shows, so I guess that’s “democracy”.

I think at least part of the reason why English has become an agreed upon international language is because these variations are permissible. If everyone had to speak RP, then the language wouldn’t be as accessible.

In any case, average citizens are not enemies. As always, the international billionaire cabal has decided it’s more profitable this way, so the orange gameshow host and other “leaders” go along so they can get paid instead of sniped.

DuckDuckGo has been a “good enough” option for me the last 5 years. A couple times a year when I’m not getting good results, I try the same search on Google and don’t get anything better.

And *you* would be morally bankrupt were you rich

Which is why capitalism begins with the word “cap”. There needs to be a cap on the maximum wealth any one individual can accrue, because absolute power corrupts absolutely.

The trip to Mars will be similarly expensive to a trip to the New World back in the day. I can imagine history rhyming with something akin to indentured servitude. Especially if the rockets and resources on Mars are owned by billionaires like Musk.

There are 2 reasons a big corporation will ever do anything:

1. Make number go up

2. Avoid number going down due to bad PR, government fines, etc.

This probably falls under #2.

I have no problem with people who contribute a lot of value to society being proportionally rewarded. However, having a net worth in the billions is just plain ludicrous, especially since the billionaires aren’t the ones creating all the value, they’re just controlling it. For example, did Gabe invent everything that makes Valve as successful as it is, or was most of it designed and developed by engineers who are paid a fraction of what he is paid? Even if most of Valve’s IP started with Gabe and other engineers were doing the grunt work to “make it so”, that still shouldn’t mean that society allows this one man to control billions worth of our societal resources.

I can at least confirm Jellyfin on a tablet works well for toddlers when they have their own Jellyfin account that is locked down without a password while other accounts have a password.

I’ve been in tech a long time and don’t allow WAN ingress into my network at all because I don’t have time to properly harden my self-hosted services. For absolute beginners, I wouldn’t recommend making anything public until they’re more experienced. Just running Jellyfin for you and your family on an old laptop is a perfect starter project.

Sometimes, I find it interesting to watch short clips of professional athletes doing exceptional things that most humans can’t do, but I don’t have the patience to sit on my ass for hours watching a ball go back and forth.

I used to religiously pre-order Zelda games, but I have yet to even bother with ToTK. I couldn’t finish BoTW either. On the other hand, this year, I’ve played through KCD2 twice, so guess my tastes have changed.

Probably won’t get a Switch 2 and will wait for a decent emulator. Nintendo’s litigiousness puts me off and I don’t really want to give them any more money.

Software subscriptions. I’ll buy a perpetual license if there’s no decent open source alternative as long as it will run offline. For example, $300 for Marvelous Designer back in the day was reasonable, but they can fuck right off with the subscription-only model.

Worshiping money above all else is similar to worshiping a god above all else, and can both lead people down a path to extremism.

Well played; the anagram there never occurred to me.

DDG is incrementally better for privacy and the search results are usually good enough. A couple times a year I check Google if DDG isn’t giving me decent results and usually find Google has nothing DDG didn’t show me. I don’t know of anything better that doesn’t require a credit card or self-hosting something, so guess I’ll keep using it.

DDG’s AI search is useful sometimes, but makes shit up often enough that I don’t believe a damned thing it tells me without checking the sources.

I shy away from VMs because I prefer having a pool of resources on a machine that can be used as needed instead of being pre-allocated. Pre-allocating CPU, RAM, and doing PCI passthough for GPUs wastes already limited resources and is extra effort. Yes, the best practice for production k8s is setting resource requests and limits, but it’s not something I want to bother with when I only have one server.

If WASM+WASI existed in 2008, we wouldn’t have needed to create Docker. That’s how important it is. WebAssembly on the server is the future of computing. - Solomon Hykes (co-founder of Docker)

I assume WASM will grow in popularity to ultimately replace containers and an open source serverless platform will emerge that has similar ubiquity to k8s. So far, we have projects like wasmCloud and Fermyon.