burntoutcase

You are going to get more people to see your post if you put it on Medium. You are going to get more "friends" if you are on Facebook. You are going to interact with more people if you are on Twitter.

That's the whole point of the POSSE concept pushed by the IndieWeb people. By all means syndicate your shit on Medium, Twitter, Facebook, etc -- but post it on your own website first.

If you don't have your own website, you're nothing but a digital sharecropper. Ask right-wing YouTubers how that's working out for them and you'll find their answers instructive once you get past the butthurt.

IMO, every browser should handle JavaScript the way it handles cookies. The user should be allowed to:

1. run all JS regardless of source

2. reject all JS from sites other than the ones they're visiting

3. run all first-party JS and allow third-party JS from trusted sites

Would this make things harder for adtech? Yes, but nobody is paying me to care about advertisers or publishers.

Will Bruce Wayne sparkle in sunlight?

Fair warning to anybody thinking of using Librem Social: it's a Mastodon instance whose management seems willing to tolerate speech that most of the rest of the Fediverse finds objectionable. Don't expect that you'll be able to interact with users of other Mastodon instances, as their admins may refuse to federate with Librem Social.

Honest question and I don't have super strong opinions on the subject, but is product placement really that big of a negative?

If a product placement can't be justified on plot or characterization grounds, then I find it an obnoxious distraction and a sign of spinelessness on the part of the director and editors.

If I'm driving down the road, I don't see a bunch of de-badged cars, I see Chevy logos and Ford logos and VW logos.

Do it really matter what kind of car James Bond drives? Not really. All that matters is that it's something only rich pigs can afford and was customized by Q with all kinds of non-standard and outrageously illegal features, like artfully concealed machine guns.

Basically: aren't we all exposed to a metric assload of product placement all day anyway?

If I want reality, I know where to find it. If I go to the movies, it's to get a reprieve from reality. I'm paying good money for the convenience of a ready-made waking dream, and the presence of gratuitous product placement cheapens the fantasy.

If product placement doesn't bother you, that's fine. It annoys the fuck out of me, so I prefer to read novels or play video games when I want to relax.

(Besides, the prevalence of CG makes most mass-market movies nothing but defective video games anyway. Who needs MCU when you can watch a let's play of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Libertines?)

Diversity in tech is a joke, and will remain such as long as businesses can hide discrimination behind "culture fit".

Current dogma seems to be that rational people can just take the type 1 info out of your type 2 advert and think with the appropriate organ.

I'd rather just consign the type 2 adverts to the nearest null device and pick up a copy of Consumer Reports when I want factual information about a product. It helps that most of the women used in advertising are just skinny blondes that you can get for a dime a dozen in Stepford, CT.

Telegram is spyware, just like WhatsApp.

Ten bucks a month? For instant messaging? Did you think this through?

They might not see explicit advertisements, but they're getting exposed to a metric assload of product placement.

I'm not surprised. Advertising is nothing but private-sector psyops.

If Kickstarter will not voluntarily recognize the union, then the union should go on strike and remain on strike until Kickstarter recognizes them.

Can we not make it illegal punishable with the death sentence?

I think all spammers should be dealt with in the manner Vlad Tepes used to deal with Turks, criminals, and people who talk at the theater. However, we're going to need a lot of thick, sturdy bamboo stakes if we're going to impale every spammer we find.

We could just get rid of our telephones. Let's be honest here: when was the last time you were actually happy to make or receive a phone call? It's time to KonMari this tech into the nearest dumpster.

I guess you're one of those passionate techies that founders love, rather than a mercenary.

It's not a "windfall". They did the work. They made that wealth possible. They earned every bit of it.

They learn / don't learn that skill from kidfluencers on YouTube.

Thanks for giving me a new excuse for being a misanthrope.

I only chose college because the pressure from my family was such that I had only two "valid" choices:

1. Go to college

2. Enlist in the military

I would have preferred to have gone to a decent trade school and learned a skilled trade whose practitioners had a strong trade union to look out for their interests.

Instead, I became a developer. Glad to see kids today are learning from my mistakes and not selling themselves into indentured servitude by going to college.

I've made secondhand optical media my fault because I'm sick of paying rent.

It's easy to measure workers by how many hours their ass is in their seat per day, so that's what gets measured and that's how we're judged.

I'm tempted to say I'd rather be paid per bug/feature, with the pay rate increasing based on the complexity of the bug/feature, so that when I think I have enough money I can say no to additional work without repercussions -- but workers in other industries organized against [piece work](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piece_work) for a reason.

While I'm glad that kids in Netflix-only households aren't getting bombarded with advertisements targeted at children the way kids my age were in the 1980s, I can't help but suspect that these ad-free kids need to be exposed to some advertising in an educational context so that they learn to recognize when somebody is trying to con them into buying shit they don't need and probably didn't want in the first place.

We used to have an entertainment industry in the United States. Now we just have Disney and Comcast. But $DEITY forbid we use existing antitrust laws (not to mention the Commerce Clause in the Constitution) to break up the megacorporations and clear the field for meaningful competition, because that would be socialism and we can't have that.

Tech companies aren't willing provide any of that, so they try to sell you on the shit you don't care about instead because it's cheaper.