Seems pretty clear now that either Elon is completely incompetent or he’s purposely destroying Twitter. I could go 50/50 on which more is more true. Both could true also.

Thanks I hate it

Most obvious monopoly since Ma Bell. Even worse than Microsoft which was also obviously a monopoly. Break them all up. Microsoft, ATT (for the… 4th time? Maybe just abolish them at this point…), Comcast, Verizon, Google, Apple, the list goes on. All those food corps that end up being 3 parent companies owning everything else. Break it all up. Force unionization also while going through the legal processes.

What if I told you… that’s a feature, not a bug?

It’s far too much to type and way too philosophical for anyone to give a shit about, but, tldr: the US (and arguably the world) is on a freight train speeding at absolute destruction. No one in power is pushing the stop button. (In the US) one party is (sometimes) pushing a slowdown button but the other party is always slamming any button they can find that doesn’t say stop on it. They know where it leads, and this is what they want. Everyone “knows” the current institutions and systems are failing, but the only politically relevant (so, in the US, not the actual left) force with power is the far right wingers who desire destruction and their only resistance is the left and right wing liberals in the middle going “noooo the institutions!” but no one actually cares about the institutions, besides other liberals. They lack any ability though, due to their political ideology, to actually fight for the beloved institutions. They can only rely on the powerful far right to “come to their senses” and stop pushing the death button. Unfortunately for them, the far right will not stop without someone stopping them- forcefully. And since the far right and liberals effectively eliminated the far left and even the center left for the most part… there’s no one to counter that far right fascistic death drive.

But you don’t even need that accurate assessment of things to understand the situation. Just know they want to abolish public education, medicine, doctors, anything related to “science” broadly, any non-Christian religions, non-white people, LGBTQ+ people and anything tangentially related to gay stuff (imagined or real), etc. pretty much infinitely.

These people are the proto-Nazis of our time. Not everything will align perfectly, but it doesn’t have to. They want to burn medical information, they want to destroy what they see as “perverted secular society” burn it all away and cleanse the land for some great rebirth of a Christian Nationalist theocracy where white men are elevated above everyone and your white male status plus property owning status is all that matters. I know this all sounds cliche and overstated at this point… but they keep proving it true every chance they get.

The worst part is that ultimately they’re the only side making progress towards their goal because their goal is aligned with the way things are going and must go. But the difference is we can arrive at that destructive moment, whenever it is, and come out the other side in some Christian theocracy nightmare world or something much better than we can currently imagine possible. As it stands right now, that nightmare vision seems to be the only viable conclusion. Which is rather depressing…

(Not that person)

1 File transfers can be done via apps like localsend, pairdrop/snapdrop (selfhosted, I wouldn’t use the public servers), or simply putting files on a shared server, etc.

2 This is impossible to correctly answer until the new phones are actually out. Reason being we don’t know the restrictions (or hopefully not) that Apple will arbitrarily apply to the port. The iPad, for what it’s worth, can easily mount USB C drives and other accessories, so, hopefully Apple continues in that vein of sanity

3 no

4 my iPhone is my actual phone phone and the pixel is wifi only.

Your first point is made irrelevant by the law existing. It doesn’t matter what Apple says now, they must comply or face fines for violation. Maybe they’ll bring that up at a future court hearing to which I say: I hope the EU imprisons Tim Cook if they try. Why? Fuck em that’s why

They’ll very likely try some fucky shit. Good news is 1) simply the existence of proper alternatives, even if required to be sideloaded, is a MASSIVE step forward and 2) I assume the EU will pursue them if only to suck money from their coffers. Blocking it to a EU citizen who is outside the EU absolutely violates the spirit of the law and the EU should come down on Apple with all their power if/when that happens

I personally use Fennec and Bromium whenever using Android (I’m a sick fuck who hot swaps between an iPhone and a Google Pixel phone). Fennec for a lot of stuff is fine, but much like the default Firefox, it’s still slow- although better. Bromium and other Chromium based browsers on Android, especially on older shittier hardware, are really hard to beat. I find myself using Bromium a lot just because it’s simply faster. Firefox/Fennec with native support for actual ublock origin though… nothing beats that browsing experience as far as replicating real desktop browsing. Bromium can’t keep up and Google doesn’t want Chrome to. Brave can offer a similar blocking experience but at what cost? I fucking H A T E crypto and even their features that you can turn off, just seeing references to them and such pisses me off. Honestly wish someone would spitefully fork Brave anonymously and remove any crypto references. Last time a team did it openly Brave got pissy and tried to get the project taken down… Even though it’s open source. So, fuck them.

Do you have ublock origin installed? It eliminates all those popups in my experience.

This is pretty much what happened, yes. I’d offer an important expansion on “innovative features” though. Chrome was objectively faster at everything. Loading pages, starting up, all that stuff. If all you care(d) about was a super fast, modern-feeling browsing experience then Chrome was all there was.

I was one of those “fuck Bill Gates!” dudes circa 2008 or 09 or whenever Chrome came along. I had been using Firefox for years because, I dunno, nerd shit. All my nerdy buddies used it and said I should use it, so I did.

And then Chrome came along and like you say Google was the cool kid on the block. They were building out Google Fiber (remember that? Feels bad), “taking it to the man ™️!” in the form of ISPs. Oh God, how I wish they had won that fight… Even the might of Google proved incapable of breaking the collusion of government and corporations that empower the ISPs in the US…

Anyway, Google was, if I’m being fair here, doing an amazing job with PR.

They were building up and out Android OS, providing an actual competitor to Apple’s (basically) first to market iOS.

Mozilla simply couldn’t keep up. It was already pretty niche pre-Chrome, but post-Chrome it was just IE/Edge and Chrome basically. Firefox was left far behind by the general public, forgotten and, if remembered, remembered only as “the browser for nerds.”

I’m back on Firefox now after Google’s billionth threat to end adblockers in Chrome. That plus Google’s clearly unethical practices. I don’t agree with everything Mozilla does/has done and some of the stuff that comes prepackaged in Firefox is unnecessary in my view, BUT there’s little point in denying their superiority over the competition in many ways.

I let people play on my lawn just to bring balance to the universe. Unless they don’t clean up their dog’s shit. Then old man mode erupts.

Normie is incredibly common online in general. It’s not just relegated to weird right wing sites either.

I’m in my mid 30s and even I gotta say… you sound a bit like “old man yells at cloud” with this take. Just chill out a little bit. You’re making the rest of us approaching-middle-agers look bad.

And if you’re somehow younger than me then I gotta say… actually, keep it up. Your apparent lack of being terminally-online (oh no, I used a recently coined term…) is definitely healthier than whatever the fuck the rest of us are doing.

Revanced has sponsorblock though and has for a while

I was using Heimdall and it was having some weird corruption(?) issues. Switched to homarr when I saw it the other day and it’s great. It has small icons (for phones) medium (for like tablets) and large (for desktops/laptops) all can be changed independently so you can optimize for mobile and desktop usage. Très bien

Which is annoying tbh.

Would be nice if the smart whatever (see I forgot their app name already while typing) team would… team up somehow with the revanced team and they agree on one name, one app. Having two apps for what is essentially the same OS with a different skin is… silly. Like an app for Apple TV and a different app that does essentially the same thing for iOS.

I see updates from as recent as last week on github?

On that note, if anyone sees this comment or another and wants to try YouTube revanced (or extended) DO NOT JUST BLINDLY GOOGLE AND CLICK THE WEBSITE THAT COMES UP FIRST

I have no idea if that site is owned by a legit dev or not. What I do know is the legit devs directly say on github, where the source code can be reviewed, to NOT download from any other place than github.

Sorry for the PSA but I just don’t want people downloading possibly malicious code from random sites. It’s easy to fall into the blindly search, blindly install hole.

I think it’s just the ease of GUI for people. This isn’t to shit on anyone, btw. A lot of people don’t like dealing with the keys and IPs involved, few as there may be, with setting up wireguard.

If someone else has a compelling difference or reason to use tailscale then I’d be happy to hear it. I tried it once and it worked fine enough. But wireguard works just as fine and takes the same time to setup if you already know what to do. Like wireguard seriously takes 2 minutes.

There’s absolutely no way they force the usage of apps. How would people without smartphones use their websites? From a laptop, on the website? And if they use a non-standard browser like a fork of some weird shit? I know financial places are run by 70 year old boomers but there’s no way they’d try this as it just goes down a rabbit hole of constant IT work. Certainly not every bank anyway. The entire concept of a place even thinking to do this is hurting my brain because it’s some incompetent. You either hire a million CS people and try to fix problems all day or lose all your customers instantly. A large portion anyway. If this is true for the UK then that little island is gone in more ways than I previously knew. Pure incompetence.

Anyway I wasn’t assuming you were dumb, just maybe hadn’t tried it for some reason. It’s like asking if your computer is plugged in and the switch is on first.

You can just use the websites for any bank or credit card, etc. instead of the app. It’s less convenient and usually a way shittier experience, but, that’s the price of not using Google (or Apple, Microsoft, etc.)

Americans: just remember for rough mental computations. Keyword rough

1M ≈ 1yard ≈ 3feet 1Kg ≈ 2lb

You can almost basically just convert yards to meters directly. For kilos just 2x in your head for easy math. 2.2 is the actual multiplier, but for estimations, 2x works for most cases.