I boycotted for a bit, refusing to buy anything from there unless there was nowhere else to get it.

Now I’m not so much boycotting them as I’ve forgotten their existence and need never return. They are just a much of square footage adjacent to an out the way outdoor mall that’s half dead. Unless I need to stop into a GameStop, which is at most once a year, that’s just a little piece of town there’s no reason to be in.

I wish you could just buy a fucking tv. I don’t want your shitty-ass proprietary version of YouTube or Netflix. I don’t even want WiFi or an Ethernet port. I’ll buy a fucking Roku or Apple TV or whatever. Or just watch Blu-rays.

I tried blocking so off those ports from one of my Samsungs. Eventually YouTube couldn’t work. You’d have to jump through massive hoops including unblocking their servers and hard power cycle — I can’t even remember. I thought they legit bricked it because I didn’t want any updates or spying or ads forced on me.

TVs are just awful. Monitors are way better, but I have yet to find 85" monitors.

Is this a dumber timeline than the one where ISIS spends all it’s time trying to convince nubile and Islam-curious AI girls to move to the Middle East to become part of a harem?

Interesting. I’ve been using Hoppscotch for two years now.

Story time?

My experience with them was bad. Somehow they automatically moved me from a plan for just vpn (which is pretty cheap) to one that included a bunch of bullshit I didn’t need, want, or even know I could use. The new plan was over $30/mo. There are ISPs who charge less than that!

My previous VPN service has been about $36 per year or something. I remember it was small enough that I just paid it annually out of pocket change, which also lowered the price in comparison.

I stopped sailing the seas, as it were, and dropped it. Then I needed to briefly, and tried Nord. Meh. Anyways it’s strictly land-lubbing these days.

Good luck enforcing that.

Look, it was a miracle I got myself laid, now you want me to tell you how? I don’t know, the 80’s were kinda crazy wild. Not like the 60’s or 70’s, but nothing at all like today.

10’s I’d say go play with the home team — gay hookup culture looked crazy from the outside — but now? Maybe AI can get you laid, but I sure as hell can’t.

Uh… Military spree killing? Mass death-infliction? Wholesale slaughter? Yeah let’s avoid calling it war.

I always make sure to tell my audience to remove any smart glasses. It’s just creepy doing it in front of them otherwise.

“By downloading this software, you agree you are a very naughty boy or girl.”

I’dn’t’ve known.

Clearly should’ve been whoms’s.

Making windows worse, AI, and forced CPU upgrades in this economy? There really is something for everyone to hate here.

VC Lawyers insist. Not worth it for the company to fight for something (not going to arbitration) that no one will notice or care about if it doesn’t change. Or maybe they didn’t care.

I’m just saying capitalism ruins everything because investors only care about maximizing profit and minimizing risk, this forces bullshit like this onto everyone downstream. One solution is not to use the product. Better solution is to change the law to make mandatory arbitration illegal. Best solution is to throw billionaires into the ocean and stir the solution until the solid is fully dissolved.

Born in 1973. Can confirm nothing happened prior to 1997.

Yeah, someone could do the difficult work of putting all of my MagicShel accounts together into a single aggregate person, for whom a fair bit of demographic data would be available if you combed each account. That being said, none of it is PII and connecting me to my actual identity would likely require cooperation of a couple key sites. I think if you compromised (or subpoenaed) a minimum of 3 separate services you could put it together based on who made donations in my name.

Point being, no random internet asshole is going to be calling my phone or knocking on my door, and I’m not interesting enough to be worth the effort for any rational actor.

I don’t use non-pseudononymous social media.

I give people a lot of grace when it comes to these things. Sometimes they are lazy or incurious, but other times they may lack confidence in the documentation or their ability to understand/execute it. Still other times, they may have other tasks they are dealing with that are pushing them to their cognitive capacity.

But, yeah, laziness is annoying when it impacts your ability to get your job done or even just relax if you have some downtime.

The environmental cost is not enormous because I’m not using it on a massive scale. I kill more of the environment playing PlayStation than I do using AI. I also don’t use AI to get exposure to art, I use it to critique my writing from a different perspective. I’m a good enough writer to know what feedback to accept and what not to, same as when I use it for programming: I’m an expert with 30 years of experience and I can evaluate the quality of the code, however sometimes it points out things I’ve missed because I’m also human and can make mistakes.

I’m a better writer than 95% of the planet, which isn’t good enough to be a professional, but is more than sufficient for social media. However I do appreciate an outside perspective and believe me I am well able to recognize bullshit feedback that doesn’t align with my style or intent. I also rarely use it for that in any event because I rarely look at what I’ve written and have a sense I’m missing something — but it does happen.