Imagine it is two weeks before a major election in a closely contested state. A controversial ballot measure is on the line. Suddenly, a wave of posts floods X, Reddit, and Facebook, all pushing the same narrative, all amplifying each other, all generating the appearance of a massive grassroots movement. Except none of it is real. …Trust in the information people encounter on X, Facebook, and Reddit, already eroded, could fall even farther.

It’s much more difficult to be propagandized by any means, including autonomous AI, when you’re not freely offering up your own time and devices daily to have it fed to you, individualized just for you by means of your own data, which you are also donating to the cause of propagandizing you.

I get why people do, there are lots of good reasons, but at a certain point the good outweighs the bad. And there’s no time like the present to make a change.

So if you’re reading this and you are still interacting with these centralized corporate-owned propaganda sites regularly, maybe it’s time to rethink that strategy.

The counting/tabulation is where the fuckery occurs, but you’re lucky to have a paper receipt anyway. I have voted in several states and gotten nothing but a sticker.

At one point there were negative 16,000 votes for Gore in Volusia County, Florida.

So yeah, it absolutely did work for George W. Bush. And for John Roberts too, the low-level lawyer whose work on the resulting Bush v. Gore lawsuit that put Bush in the White House afterward catapulted him from mere attorney, to federal judge, to Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in the span of only five years.

At this point, I’d be thrilled if just one thing – elections – went back to paper. I feel like paper ballots would have solved at least some of this current insanity already.

anna’s archive

I wish. As someone astutely put it in another conversation, now that the tech companies have pilfered Anna’s Archive, the big publishers are going to try to get it shut down.

Meta have paid the copyright fee

Lol, no. “Copyright fees” are what you pay your government in order to register your copyright or keep your copyright registration active.

Or to put it another way, copyright fees have fuck all to do with fair use.

You’re trying make it sound as though Meta obtained consent and paid authors for their own work when in fact, Meta obtained consent from no one, and paid nothing at all to anyone, in exchange for the use of their works.

Even a light skim of the attached article would have told you that much. What do you think a copyright suit is about?

“Meta have paid the copyright fee,” lol. That’s some r/ConfidentlyIncorrect shit right there. Why did you even bother?

“Can we at least wait til he finishes?”

The benefits of just listening to music I think gets overlooked.

Hard agree. And it’s a shame because we have more music at our fingertips now than ever before, from every possible time and place in history. I’m from an era (70s) when just putting a record on and listening to it all the way through was a thing, but I’m not sure how many folks realize today that music can be an event in itself: not as background, but as foreground. Putting it on, sitting in a chair, and just listening while doing little to nothing else.

It’s hard to get time to do it, but when I do it’s heaven. And it absolutely resets my brain in positive ways: afterward, I just feel good. I actually think it might qualify as an ersatz form of meditation, in that a person is not mentally attending anything else while doing this, just listening and letting the auditory experience wash over them. It’s difficult to quantify, but the benefits are very real.

Yeah, I wouldn’t worry about the safety of the extension, though. I have a lot of extensions going already, and this is not the first one to go bonkers as a later addition. So chances are excellent it will work for others just fine.

Huh, I was just writing that I wished Firefox would do this, so thanks! I’ll check it out. Much appreciated.

EDITED to add: unfortunately it’s not for me. I tried it out in automatic mode (recommended) and while it worked perfectly, as soon as I enabled it my browser started to get unstable, pages would lock, mouse pointer would disappear, etc. And then as soon as I disabled the extension all went back to normal. So it’s a no-go for now. But thanks for letting us know it’s there.

Floorp, a Firefox fork, containerizes also. Floorp does it in the same manner, meaning you create the containers and assign sites, and only after that does that site automatically get containerized. I do something similar to what you’re doing, but it’s between Firefox and Floorp. I wish they’d start containerizing sites by default, but for now this is what I do.

That stache addon is gold. “When you care enough to send the very best.”

I was reading the original discussion on dbzer0 and kept wondering what the removed by mod was under every comment agreeing with either partial ban or defed, so I looked at the modlog. It was literally the same pigshit picture posted over and over again, almost twenty times, by the same user, though fortunately I only had to see it once, by choice.

That’s a serious personal commitment to assholery right there, and this is apparently just one of the people coming over to do this on dbzer0 comms. To be honest I can’t claim to understand some of the political nuance that was coming up in the thread, but that one dude sure did make a strong argument for defed via the modlog, lol. If that’s an example of what dbzer0 has to put up with from multiple individual users of another instance, then considering defederation is absolutely a legitimate discussion to have.

Highly relevant video of what sort of culture Zuck metastasized in at Harvard

One, holy shit. And that was over twenty years ago: there is zero possibility it’s gotten any better since.

Two, I love this woman’s blunt honesty. Her take on all of it is fantastic, especially how the “they’re missing something behind their eyes” was so accurate. It’s just horrible how she came to have that knowledge.

Three, read the transcript if you can’t sit still for the whole thing, but either way try to make it to the end. After she gets done with her own personal experiences, she’s all,

So anyways, fuck Harvard. Fuck these institutions. Fuck their respectability. They’re crucibles for rapists and pedophiles. And the most powerful people on earth are the scum of the fucking earth. And we need to take back our power from them.

But the difference is now you know exactly why she says that, and with the power and force of her entire being. Shit, I would too.

In short, Microsoft is now doing for ICE what they were doing for Israel in 2024-2025 to support the genocide:

‘The machine did it coldly’: Israel used AI to identify 37,000 Hamas targets – The Guardian

‘A million calls an hour’: Israel relying on Microsoft cloud for expansive surveillance of Palestinians – The Guardian

Revealed: Microsoft deepened ties with Israeli military to provide tech support during Gaza war – The Guardian

Note: these are all Graun links because they are what I had in my browser history and because they specifically made a point of looking into it, as opposed to other major news outlets. I’m sure there are other sources as well, I just didn’t look for any.

Yeah, exactly. That shit’s not gone at all. It’s just hidden for now. And if we the public don’t pay for it directly as a feature, these companies will still scoop up the data and just sell it to each other.

Truth.

Speaking solely for myself, I have accepted that I am as susceptible to marketing and propaganda as any other human, in an age where we are surrounded by it, none of it honest, none of it in my own best interest.

My response to this has been to cut off all possible routes of advertising: I literally do not watch or read anything that has ads, except possibly passing billboards and in-store ads. I don’t play games that have ads. I don’t listen to radio. I have adblocker on everything, or I simply leave. I can’t stand ads, and I have cut them out of everything I can. I’d genuinely rather quit a service than submit to ads. (And yes, I do love just plain silence, whenever I can get it.)

So yeah, I’m immune: they can’t influence me if they can’t get access. That’s the best kind of immunity there is.

You: I’ve pulled the ideas out my bum honestly.

Me, reading: This is intuitive genius. Seriously.

You’ve said your strategy essentially comes from listening/observing closely and winging it, but honestly what you’re achieving just through keeping at it every way you can is amazing. Apart from not being more condensed (smaller, tighter) that handwriting is actually more legible than I’ve seen from more than a few adults, including the slight nod to the presence of lines. I am not exaggerating.

Your creativity and temerity are both inspiring. Your son is lucky to have you.

Dad joke or name of a great album. That the the dad joke came first is pretty much beyond dispute, lol.