I’m glad it acknowledges explains the impacts of anti-fingerprinting measures. I’ve seen some others assume that a random canvas is unique rather than one of the many people randomising it the same way, leading to a false “unique” assessment.

Your browser appears to be returning the viewport in place of the real screen — anti-fingerprinting at work. The substitution is itself distinctive.

Your browser masked your graphics processor. Firefox and Safari have started returning generic strings — “Mozilla”, “Apple”, “or similar” — instead of the real renderer. The fact that yours did so tells us, with reasonable confidence, which browser you are running. The mask is also a fingerprint.

Tragic to hear. I didn’t even think of RSS as vulnerable to advertising, but of course it is.

Valid, of course. Although,

I’m doing that and I’m not even short of money.

Among all the other reasons, I’m not short of money, but I can still use that money for other things. And honestly, even just throwing the savings down a drain at least means it doesn’t go to these companies.

I know people who have some app, I forget its name, on their smart television which is very accessible. It looks like a regular streaming service dashboard. Torrenting doesn’t have to be difficult and technical - but I wouldn’t have seen this if I didn’t go to that friend’s place.

Luckily I haven’t been exposed to much of that behaviour on my local instance. Which instances/communities are you finding all these jerks at? (I’ve blocked a couple for unrelated reasons so maybe I’m not seeing them.)

There’s also some element that “alternative sites” tend to accumulate the people banned from the primary site. Luckily the strong left-leaning initial crowd kept most of the bigotry at bay during the formative years, but I really dislike that in general-purpose instances, many have failed to create much original culture distinct from reddit. Lemmy isn’t reddit, and that can be a good thing.

Real-space example: a women’s-only art installation/lounge. It was only a matter of time before it went to court. I think at one point they (perhaps jokingly) proposed converting it to a bathroom to allow legal discrimination. (and that still wouldn’t be the smelliest exhibition in Mona)

https://mona.net.au/stuff-to-do/art/the-ladies-lounge

Perhaps not the best example but one to start joggin’ the noggin: it can be a weak point to start an attack your local network, if someone is adjacent (like standing in range of your WiFi). Obviously not a likely scenario to most people reading, especially since HTTPS became normalised, but a reason to keep security in the discussion for local home networks.

They both prevented people driving while intoxicated, they’re goddamn heroes!

Our union organisers openly say that, despite most managers being given explicit anti-union chilling off-the-record, managers up to a certain grade are covered by our contracts and have an immediate interest in standing with us. There are already a few lower managers and HR staff as members, which is sometimes useful.

Pasta Puttanesca

I wonder if the name and concept are inspired by the improv comedy Thank God You’re Here, which I notice had an international version in the UK among many other countries.

I’m not resistant to AI or LLMs.

Surely you can understand why people assume you are, when you say unnuanced lines like: “AI is fascism. full stop.” , “with AI, all roads lead to fascism.”

It’s strange to treat oligarchy and the trend of capital towards consolidation (monopolisation) as if they’re distinct from capitalism and not mechanically promoted by captialism itself.

To do what Adam Smith demands, putting a leach on capital under capitalism, is a contradiction that is difficult or impossible to maintain, as we’ve seen. When a company has enough money to punch above the rest, they have the power to buy stakes in mass media news and other propaganda, they can bribe politicians or use their power to promote and empower the ones they can bribe, and they can do the same with institutional anti-corruption systems like lawmakers, judges, police. To inoculate a society against this power of the rich basically requires a departure from liberalism/capitalism itself, revoking the “freedom” of private capital owners to exclude others and abuse their position.

Get on my property!

This is important to emphasise. Older generations were, generally, in more of a bubble, it wasn’t easy to spread word with the same reach and authority as national mass media before the Internet.

Similar situation with other communication advances, like the telegraph, which allowed news of the world and the people around a country to learn and co-ordinate much better than before.

I know a few people in rural US who made the jump from a super right US Libertarian position in late-teens/early adulthood all the way over to Marxist positions. I’m not certain, but I suspect that the US Libertarian and Republican mindsets are often normalised there so people are raised with them by default, but a lot of the underlying ideas that validate the US Libertarian position, like individualism and “freedom”, work better as abstract ideas and tend to break down upon inspection. Most of the additional freedoms of the US don’t matter when people don’t have the money, health and other resources to make use of them. It just allows the rich and powerful to trample the rest.

Can you please share links to China’s homelessness statistics? Maybe my search engine is junk because I’m struggling to find any information later than 2011 (before some of the efforts to reduce it).

google (verb):

4. To search for (something) on the Internet using any comprehensive search engine.

It would be great if we had laws which stopped people from doing that (both our own citizens and foreign). I want landleeches to scatter from here just like they did from China. No home for house hoarders.