But but but but…

F r e e

S p e e c h

Forbiddet

I never give money to the homeless. They’ll just buy drugs and alcohol.

I keep it for myself. So I can buy drugs and alcohol.

—

For real though, I try to give $5 if I can. Some people will waste it, some will make good use of it, and it’s impossible to tell from the outside looking in. So I might as well swing at every ball. Giving to charities is good too, but they don’t reach everyone (for all sorts of reasons).

Sean Murray’s curse is finally broken.

ITT:

People throwing shade at the devs who could easily be maxing&relaxing in IT but chose to make art instead, rather than the perverse financial incentives baked into the industry which encourage them to overpromise to secure funding and then underdeliver to abide by publisher demands.

But maybe I’m in the unreasonable one.

over the long term–and I’m talking, like 20-30+ years–it could be positive. One of the things that made the US economy strong in the 60s was the fact that we had strong labor, and strong manufacturing

Looks to me like the strong economy of the 1960s coincided with ending 20-30 years of high tariffs… Sooo…

My most successful standups have been like:

“Okay, we’re all here. Anyone wanna take a look at anything together?”

“I need some help with XYZ. Alice, can you take a look?”

“Sure.”

“Anything else? No? Alright, let’s do it.”

Typically less than 2 minutes of whole-team time, at our desks. Really just a reserved pivot point where it’s okay to interrupt each other’s tasks to ask for some pairing time. Sometimes an unofficial second one would happen after lunch.

Seeing db0’s stance on AI has been depressing.

“Back in my day”, the sense among piracy advocates seemed to be that cultural artifacts are so important to society and human dignity that they shouldn’t be held hostage by gatekeepers who are only interested in profit and see exposure to a wide audience as a monetization failure. It was a respect tor the value of a creative work, a duty to preserve that signal and not let it be consumed by the noise of commerce.

Today, it seems that the pirate scene views cultural artifacts as disposable and fungible, raw materials with no essence or signal in their own right. It’s more about speedrunning towards some inevitable nihilistic chaos, tearing everything down to spite the old gatekeepers and joining forces with the new gatekeepers so long as they seem to be on the side of destruction and “free shit”. There’s no allegiance to society, just a brutal individualistic free-for-all.

It’s the antithesis of what I believed the internet was going to do to the old copyright regime. And I’m not sure there’s a home for people who still think like me.

People wondering what Chrome has to do with a search monopoly:

The obvious benefit is that they can default the user’s search provider to Google.

But the more nefarious benefit is that, by controlling both the client and server, they can unilaterally decide the future of web standards. They don’t have to advocate for proposals, gain consensus, and limit themselves to well-supported standards the way other companies do. They can just do it, gain the first-mover advantage, and force others to follow suit.

If they don’t like HTTP/2, they can invent their own protocol and implement it for their search servers and Chrome. Suddenly, using Chrome with Google Search is way faster than using Chrome with Bing or using Firefox with Google Search. Even if Microsoft and Mozilla don’t like the protocol, they now have to adopt it or fall behind.

This has happened. QUIC was deployed in 2012. Firefox gained support in 2021.

They’re doing the same thing with Privacy Sandbox, and you can also look at browser feature compatibility tables to see how eager Google is to force their own interpretation of every not-yet-finalized web standard as the canonical interpretation.

Edit: Also, JPEG XL vs. WebP.

FTC works. For now.

The Importance of Ice

No cap frfr

Even the smallest meme can change the course of the future.

I think I like this one best of all.

Super common name. Still have to spell it out for people.

Oh boy, some timely propaganda.

Basically bobcat-in-a-box

And obligatory XKCD

Sure, the wolf shouldn’t have been trying to eat the stork.

But did you see how viciously the stork pecked at the wolf?

The wolf has a right to defend itself until the stork is no longer a threat.

Gandhi + Alf

Lemmy does not understand that people are leaving X cuz of Nazis, not cuz it’s a centralized corpo platform.

Yellow Mountain Imports is great.