And look how many Linux distro producing companies there are that are the size of Google or that earn even a significant fraction of what Google earns.

Linux is a totally different ballgame. It started out with open source and free access in mind. Linux distros are often made by volunteer developers who do it for the love of the game, non-profit companies, or companies that have found some way to monitize it like RHEL. And companies certainly pay for support, standardization, and exhaustive stability validation. There’s also the commercial use of Red Hat’s customizations, and arguably faster responses to patching vulnerabilities.

Hate to break it to you, but you are not Google’s customer. Don’t believe me? How much did you pay for Chrome?

This move is in fact being made with their actual customers in mind.

There’s a reason scam artists target the elderly. If a box on the computer screen says “put payment info here” then who are they to argue with the box?

I’m still convinced that he’s actively and intentionally trying to destroy Twitter.

Well, let’s talk about when Twitter was founded…

Try finding a dumb tv for sale of relevant size and quality. I know you don’t have to connect it to wifi… Usually. But I just want a TV that doesn’t have all this shit in it to begin with.

They have become the evil they were once apart from.

In a streaming landscape dominated by ad companies like Google and Amazon, Roku was once the viable alternative. Unfortunately, in the 21st century, enshitification comes for us all eventually.

Give me freedom from advertising or give me death.

Just as venture capitalism demands.

You know what? Okay! I’m in.

“Students who have completed Archery, Fencing, Pistol (Air Pistol or Rifle) and Sailing should send an email to…”

When a university education becomes a fantasy story meme. At least if you’re attending MIT, you’re probably multiclassed into some kind of technomancer.

You mean the always-on GPS-enabled internet-connected microphone and camera which is also likely Bluetooth and NFC beaconing and contains all of my most personal data including my name, contacts, unencrypted chats facilitated by major cell phone carriers, photos, emails, and other personal files which are also likely synced with a cloud service operated by major multi-national corporations, and also stores biometric data such as facial recognition, fingerprints, time spent sleeping, and even heart rate and number of steps taken assuming you have “fitness” features enabled?

With those last couple items, these massive companies that regularly share data with law enforcement are literally tracking your every step and nearly every beat of your heart.

Well don’t worry about that, I’ve got Express VPN.

Curious about something, maybe you know since you work at a theater. I seem to remember hearing that a theater has to pay royalties each time they show a movie and that newer technology can track and report this automatically. Does the latest technology automatically track this as I recall? And if so, would playing a movie as a test count as a showing?

They were always going to. As long as Xitter has a user base with money to spend, the large corporations do not care. Anything they do like withdrawing advertising is all for show.

And after all, are you going to cancel your Netflix subscription over this? I actually probably would personally but my partner uses it quite a lot, so we’re sticking around. Some people will cancel no doubt but nowhere near a critical mass that will affect their bottom line and they know it.

Don’t worry, it’s completely acceptable that you neither know about nor care about a billionaire’s daughter.

From a legal standpoint, I sort of get it. One risk of the fediverse is that data is cached locally from federated servers. That could put server owners in legal jeopardy for hosting illegal content. However, if the server is actively moderated and owners respond responsibly to take down requests, they should be okay - in the US at least, and assuming current protections for service providers remain intact.

I think a good option (if technically feasible) could be to have the choice to de-cache communities or servers that are questionable and make it so that data is transmitted live from the federated server when requested by a client. That would add load to both the local and federated servers though, especially if volume is high.

If you don’t need the advanced features of photoshop, paint.net is a good lightweight and free alternative. It has all the basic layer-based editing features.