More hard data is coming out as enough time passes to collect and analyze it. But this topic has consistently been reported on in the last few years.

I feel like positioning the ‘average person’ as always disengaged or never doing enough reads more like an attempt to define in/out groups than a genuine effort to actually do anything about the problem.

Disagree. I think everyone deserves a reasonable degree of privacy and interoperability and choice as a protected right, within the markets and services we already have.

I don’t think this is true. Most people do care, in my anecdotal experience. I am not in tech circles. It is not a niche thing to be concerned about these days.

Actually, good news, they have! Google just lost its search monopoly trial with the US government, and they seem to be about to lose their advertising monopoly trial too. The US FTC also just released a report (not a legal action) concluding that all the big companies have abused data collection and recommended that the government do something to make those practices unprofitable for companies. I know the EU has also been doing some significant stuff, both against apple specifically and big gatekeeper companies generally. You can certainly argue it’s not enough, and I would agree with you - but it’s given me some optimism that more action and real enforcement might be in the near future in many countries.

People always say shit like this as if people don’t have a multitude of different life circumstances that affect and coerce how they interact with technology. That’s just how capitalism works. It’s not a matter of willpower. Privacy Bootstraps Theory is unhelpful. Being able to completely opt out of entrenched tech monopolies is a privilege. It’s great that you can do that, not everybody can.

It’s excellent that alternatives and ad blockers do exist but we need regulatory action to hold companies accountable for things that are designed to worsen user experience to pressure people into paying. It’s also a serious accessibility issue, to increasingly have everything be bright and loud and motion filled and unpausable all the time. This trend goes beyond YouTube and it sucks, we need to regulate this nonsense.

It’s subscription based, but Nebula is creator owned I believe. Sucks though that everything free gets acquired by some extractive company.

Thank you friend

Bad news, but also I am relieved to hear that Ricefail is an apparently common experience.

Every time I cook rice it comes out bad. Tips? I’d like to be able to make edible rice without purchasing an appliance. Movies and history tell me this is possible??

How tricky is this to install and use? I have a samsung and use lots of the usual apps. Wondering if it would be feasible for that purpose.

No, thanks for the clarification. I misunderstood that part.

I genuinely don’t even know where to buy an affordable device that is free from this kind of control. Some company always has outsized control (and in some cases arguably surveillance) over anything you can find on the market. It sucks so bad.

Ew. Fuck google

Disagree. These companies are exploiting an unfair power dynamic they created that people can’t say no to, to make an ungodly amount of money for themselves without compensating people whose data they took without telling them. They are not creating a cool creative project that collaboratively comments on or remixes what other people have made, they are seeking to gobble up and render irrelevant everything that they can, for short term greed. That’s not the scenario these laws were made for. AI hurts people who have already been exploited and industries that have already been decimated. Copyright laws were not written with this kind of thing in mind. There are potentially cool and ethical uses for AI models, but open ai and google are just greed machines.

Edited * THRICE because spelling. oof.

Yes! Very luckily my health flares only seem to get real bad for a few days at a time nowadays, so i do have some “real food” mixed in, but as a person who has been struggling with shame about eating less well than i wish i could on those days it is very nice to be reminded that food, literally any food at all, is good enough and in fact an act of love toward myself. Excited to peruse the book for some more ideas

Use napkin for remaining peanut butter before you put it in the sink. Then it will make the spoon less intimidating to wash.

Okay this made me tear up and is perfect. Peanut Butter On A Spoon is a large percentage of what i have been eating lately. I feel seen.

Information that should be taught in school heath classes. It makes me queasy how often I have seen this from organizations and unscrupulous people in the wild. Happens a lot on campuses and wherever a lot of people are ‘new’ to an area or otherwise vulnerable socially. Predatory shit.