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It’s easy to avoid buying things from Amazon

I mean… Yes but also no.

Amazon have gone to crap in recent years and has become a more upmarket Wish or Temu. Much of their storefront is full of Chinese knock-off brands these days.

What Amazon does offer is somewhat reliable next (and sometimes same) day delivery. The only way you can get something faster is by travelling to a brick & mortar shop and buying in person.

As for AWS, aren’t we forgetting that Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Google, even Alibaba and Huawei have their own cloud solutions?

I grew up on most of the examples you quoted. They’re Emmy award winning masterpieces compared to Skibidi Toilet.

Indoor smoking bans in public places made sense, but this is just dumb as fuck.

Second-hand cigarette smoke is a health hazard when frequently ingested and it was probably refreshing to not have everything smell like tobacco. But this harmed the hospitality sector and made smokers far less inclined to go out drinking. A lot of pubs shut after the 2007 smoking ban introduced by the UK and the hospitality sector hasn’t really recovered since. A good ‘best of both worlds’ approach would have been to allow larger establishments to have a ventilated indoor smoking area and make it a soft-ban, but unfortunately big tobacco is the enemy.

And now Keir Starmer (British PM) wants to push through a similar outdoor smoking ban to what the EU are proposing, where it would become illegal to light up outside a hospital or in a pub beer garden.

This moronic plan would basically kill what is left of the hospitality industry, and if Keir Starmer’s grand master plan to solve our country’s housing crisis is to make more pubs shut so greedy parasitic landlords and property developers can snap them up and turn them for a profit, then he’s gonna be remembered as the UK’s worst prime minister. And believe me when I say that the Tory bastards who killed thousands with austerity measures, dragged us kicking & screaming out of the European Union, partied in 10 Downing Street while we were forced to lock down from COVID, and who crashed our economy with tax cuts have put up some stiff competition.

Fun fact, you used to be able to smoke on airplanes, and the air quality on flights actually decreased after smoking bans were put in place, because the regulations around air conditioning were also cut.

In all seriousness… Skibidi toilet is probably one of the egregious examples of brain rot in our society. Gen alpha is truly cooked.

I’m in the first camp. Instagram is flooded with spam accounts posting links to illicit Telegram channels where actual CSAM is being distributed. The owner of Telegram was also arrested recently for failing to safeguard his platform from such highly illegal activity. Children having easy and often unrestricted access to social media is probably the reason why things have gotten so bad.

Every major social network should be asking for ID verification, but there should be strict safeguards on how that information is used and stored, with hefty fines for failures to safeguard.

Gab tried to pull the same thing with their Dissenter plugin. It was such a bad idea that Mozilla and Google banded together to remove the extensions from their stores for ToS violations.

Now imagine what a nightmare it would be to moderate the ability to comment on anything online with actual standards and decency.

Actually, the screenshots of the ban messages were found via a Google image search and are not me.

But yeah, Reddit has a problem with rude power mods swinging their banhammer. It’s been documented for years.

Anybody who legitimately gets giddy-as-fuck over the thought of a Muslim woman being stoned to death for adultery should not be trusted with dating advice. Yet somehow this asshole has a social media following of millions, has indoctornated a lot of young people into misogynistic views (I know secondary school teachers who have seen pupils gobble up lots of Andrew Tate content), has eluded bans from mainstream social media (his shit is still all over YouTube), and still has a following despite facing rape and human trafficking charges and being on EUROPOL’s wanted list.

Isn’t this at all concerning, and a big sign that society is failing men?

He looks like the Stonks meme guy. No seriously…

Facebook listening in on your microphone is one of those things that I actually believe to be true. Ever had conversations with people to then realize that you’re being served targeted ads based on these conversations? Seems very coincidental.

Off is the direction in which I would like Microsoft to fuck if they think I’m gonna have a deep learning AI spy on my computer activity.

This just makes me want to switch to Linux.

Honda 100%. Even if Elon Musk wasn’t a colossal douche, I wouldn’t want to drive a truck that looks like it was ripped verbatim from a SNES game.

I’m autistic and I’ve never heard the term ‘aneurotypical’ before…

Maybe he was wearing it ironically to shame Republicans, and not because he personally wants to taste Trump’s shoe leather.

Ahhh who am I kidding? He sounds like a bootlicker to me.

If you asked me fifteen years ago if I wanted to live in the United States, I would have jumped on the first ship to Staten Island in a heartbeat.

Nowadays I don’t even want to visit the country, and unjust bullshit like this is a big reason why. Y’all have a serious problem with allowing your police forces to do whatever the hell they want and argue “qualified immunity” for things that would land you significant prison time in another developed country.

I really question why there’s still a lifelong waiting list to apply for a visa to work in the US, when the state of the country is actually quite bleak…

On the plus side, the sheer power consumption of using an LLM to dish out targeted advertisements will be prohibitively expensive. Any agency stupid enough to do this with current technology is gonna go bust.

As for hosting the LLM locally on the viewer’s machine… Remember the furore of shady companies burying crypto miners into their software? This is going to be even more wasteful of system resources and is going to result in such a sluggish user experience that the industry will go bankrupt.

Genuine question, is Bluesky worth using in its current state? Can it hold a candle to pre-Musk Twitter?

I’m asking because I feel incredibly burned by the barebones state of Threads and I don’t really want to commit to another platform that doesn’t have its shit together. Threads still doesn’t have trending topics and functional hashtags over a year into its launch, and this is is shit that Mastodon had for years, despite Meta expecting to piggyback off of the ActivityPub protocol and be welcomed into the Fediverse with open arms.

So imagine you’re on PornHub and then out of nowhere, Clippy shows up and says “hmmm looks like you need some help pleasuring yourself”, then starts flicking through similar nude pictures and videos to what you’ve been looking at before. The idle animation of the AI assistant even changes to Clippy morphing into the shape of a penis and shagging a rolled up piece of lined paper is if it were a fleshlight. You can’t tell if Microsoft are mocking you for being a coomer, nor can you tell whether to find Clippy’s sexual deviancy funny or creepy.

Somehow that hypothetical dystopia of Clippy watching you masturbate is only slightly worse than what Microsoft plan to do with Recall. If the mere thought of a machine learning AI taking screenshots of your desktop every few seconds and learning from your computer usage habits isn’t absolutely fucking terrifying… Then imagine that these are likely being uploaded to a server for the perusal of advertisers, intelligence agencies and any hackers skilled enough to break into Microsoft’s servers.

Even if it was stored locally, all it takes is one dodgy web link for you to inadvertently send all your Recall data to a hacker and have it ransomed.

Everyone would likely defederate from them, much in the same way that you all rushed to close the shutters upon Threads.

I also don’t ever see this happening, unless Spez fucks up with Reddit so badly that it sparks a mass user exodus, much in the same way that Digg v4 sank any hopes of Kevin Rose remaining a successful tech entrepreneur.