Took you a while, eh?

I will admit that YouTube is the strongest vice in my life, I just can’t get enough of it.

Well, do it like everyone trying to shake off a vice: if you feel you can’t go cold turkey, switch to a less harmful surrogate. Ditch the YouTube app and switch to something like Newpipe or FreeTube that both give you access to YouTube’s content, but at the same time comes with more functionality (background playback, downloads), protects your privacy (accountless subscriptions and playlists) and also fucks with Google’s bottom line by blocking ads.

Google’s got my data by the balls. I think it’s a bit too late for me.

I get this post-privacy fatalism a lot, but luckily for you, it’s patently false.

Big tech’s business model - at least for now - is to profile you and sell this image of you off to advertisers and other businesses for personalised targeting (and possibly other shenanigans, but let’s not get into that). In order to be valuable to them, this profile must be accurate and up-to-date.

Now, luckily, people aren’t static beings. We change as we grow, not just older, but as human beings. We change jobs and even careers, social circles and places of residence. We change our marital status (hopefully only once ;), the number of people in our family (hopefully only incrementally ;) and the people we want to spend most time with. We change contact details and bank accounts, brand preferences and spending habits. We change our beliefs and habits, political convictions, our outlooks on and goals in life. Just try to picture the person you were ten years ago, and, I hope for you, you’ll see a Venn diagram that may have some overlap, but also some pronounced areas of difference. As time goes on, these differences will become larger and larger, until the profile of ‘old you’ is entirely worthless to any advertiser because it gives them little to no idea who ‘present you’ is and how to target them.

You may be right that the best point in time to untether yourself was yesterday. But the next best is today.

What’s the state of BluRay ripping these days? I know it used to be tough, but then again, DVDs are also “encrypted” and that’s nothing to worry about any more.

I am aware of that, hence the ""s. But you’re correct, that’s where the analogy breaks. Personally, I prefer to liken them to parrots, mindlessly reciting patterns they’ve found in somebody else’s speech.

A critical, yet respectful and understanding exchange between two individuals on the interwebz? Boy, maybe not all is lost…

A talk on LLMs I was listening to recently put it this way:

If we hear the words of a five-year-old, we assume the knowledge of a five-year-old behind those words, and treat the content with due caution.

We’re not adapted to something with the “mind” of a five-year-old speaking to us in the words of a fifty-year-old, and thus are more likely to assume competence just based on language.

I suppose they’re still working out the details of Fascism as a Service (FaaS), i.e. the monthly subscription fees, tier names (Trump > Mussolini > Franco > Hitler > Thiel), and so on…

That’s my next stop probably. Been on degoogled Android for many years and loved it. But vendors have started locking down their bootloaders (fuck you, Samsung!), Google has made moves to make life harder in Android for custom ROM devs and sidesloaders alike, so it’s only a matter of time until they’ll go full Hitler on it. So: Go, penguin, go!

Golly, this thing looks like it has… seen… a lot of action. Is anyone still using that tool? That looks highly unhealthy.

Don’t worry. They’re already working on exporting fascism.

“My parents were a bunch of homophobic racists, so it’s OK for me to be a bigot today.”

“I grew up with domestic violence, so beating up my kids is just my way of being nostalgic.”

These statements sound insane, don’t they? Well, they’re perfectly analogous to what you said. You’re making it sound as if growing up with something makes it an immutable fact of one’s life. They aren’t. As we obtain better judgement of the world around us, we can grow out of things just like we once grew into them.

Google has been a terrible company for a long time now, and recently it has even become an active supporter of the fascist regime trying to establish itself in the U.S.

I’m not saying decoupling from the big tech oligopolies is easy; it isn’t. But not even making a conscious effort to even try, that amounts to being complicit in, if not supportive of the fascist takeover.

Your choices matter. Make them count.

Sorry, my sensors for irony, sarcasm and satire have been severely damaged by 2025. Please, puh-leaaase tell me this is!

Agreed, this can be read both ways. It just goes to show that companies don’t give a shit about right or wrong, legal or illegal, and they’ll willingly collaborate with democratic institutions and oppressive regimes alike as long as it suits their bottom line.

Came for this, left satisfied.

I don’t disagree on the longstanding corruption problem. Yet I uphold the claim that this does not just expose the system to domestic, but also foreign corruption and influence.

“Disproven conspiracy”? In light of the multitude of connections between Trump (or his cronies) and the Kremlin that show up in the most recent batch of the Epstein files, I guess we’re on the verge of making that a proven conspiracy.

Until then, just looking at Trump’s track record is enough to convince me Trump is 100% enacting orders from Moscow. Why else would he

• withholding and threaten to cut Ukraine off from American military aid.
• drive a wedge between the US and its former Western allies.
• give D0GE unfettered access to the government’s most sensitive information (including nuclear ones), only to then have Russian IP addresses try to connect?
• gut USAID, thus putting more pressure on Europe through increasing refugee streams
• and the ist goes on…

Not an American here, nor a defender of what people did or didn’t vote for.

What I was getting at was the massive media manipulation from outside and inside and the obvious foreign control the Dear Leader is under. With the deadly combination of of poor education, widespread media illiteracy and pervasive social media, our democracies have become even more remotely-controllable for whoever is willing to put the money in.

America doesn’t. The Russian asset in the White House and its brainwashed minions do.

Great. Now they’re building infrastructure and industry atop a stolen Trojan Horse, which may still bite them the moment the little oange man tells Nadella to flip the switch.

The only difference really is the occasional extension that needs a manual install.

Well, that and the lack of telemetry and “phoning home” to Redmond. And that’s a big one.