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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 8th, 2023

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  • Yeah, for real. YouTube is essentially placing infinite bets that it can drive you into the rabbit hole. Watched a short of Dillahunty give Peterson a verbal wedgy? You must like big words, so here’s more Peterson! Watched a short of Joey Swoll telling people to be polite, because it rolled on automatically? Here’s an Andrew Tate wannabe with shrivelled nuts to subtly criticise you about your dad bod.

    Obsession and radicalisation are one and the same to the algorithm, and both turn a targeted individual into a money printer. And fuck the consequences right? Because Google got theirs.


  • I came to PS through YouTube shorts and his streams were cut to ribbons and repatched into something resembling a zeitgeist-appealing view.

    Then I watched a couple of his long form videos and was like … eh. If anything it taught me more about the danger of using shorts as an onboard to any big vtuber. Much like movie trailers and their movies, they tend to overpromise and underdeliver.

    This became undeniably apparent when YouTube started shoving Jordan Petersen into my feed. Much like the thousand monkeys at their typewriters, you can take the words of anyone who talks at length almost daily on a subject and edit them into something that sounds reasonable and appealing.

    I already knew that JP was a right wing rhetoric Markov chain posing as an expert/pundit before YT started promoting him, but it really did cement the point.








  • Sure it’s a challenge, but it’s not necessary for getting people to use the software. One does not require the other, but it is a gateway to being able to do that.

    It is self-evident that free software with open licensing and no strings attached is a superior and more beneficial ownership model than closed source paid licensing. That part I don’t think anyone needs to be convinced of.

    It’s just not necessary to make that one of your core beliefs, or add several others, before using the software.



  • To my surprise, Nanoleaf tech support responded to me within 4 hours, with a full description of the protocol that’s used both by the Desk Dock as well as their RGB strips. The docs mostly confirmed what I had already discovered independently, but there were a couple of other minor features as well (like power and brightness management) that I did not know about, which was helpful.

    Combo of investigating and a foot up from the manufacturer.

    When I’ve done this in the past for game controllers I’ve not received such an emphatic response (other than when I was working for the vendor).

    Did get some via FOI for a few other products though.





  • A lot of the times when people hear of Richard Stallman, or other people, who correctly state that all proprietary software is absolutely inexcusable, they feel pressured. Which makes them recoil and distance themselves from those types of ideas. If you need to suddenly re-learn the entire way you are using the computer, and you may have certain habits, or certain things you rely on, or enjoy very much, either games, or software, or in case of PewDiePie, the platform he is on. You will automatically feel like whatever these Stallmans are asking from you is so absurdly hard for you to do, that you don’t even consider it. More than that, to protect yourself from that hard work, you come up with a bunch of reasons, to not even engage in that idea. Which creates an opposition. And it is not something that we want.

    It’s not just that, the overbearing FOSS mentality, from Stallmans corner of that world, is that you need to take a damn political position on software to be able to interact with other people that use it.

    Which in itself is not actually true, but if you approach it like this with non-technical types then they will rightly and instinctively balk at both the software and you.

    Bringing people to FOSS should be the same as bringing them to any other software, and if the ideology behind it is so self-evidently true then - by its own standard - it won’t need significant petitioning to convince them they should use more of it for ethical reasons as well as to meet their needs. This is software, not Amway. They’re trying to write a word document, not to join a cult.