Apple has a search engine, it’s just not publicly accessible. They’ve had a web crawler for many years and their internal search engine is likely what powers things like siri suggested sites and information for apple maps. It is correct they could enter the search and advertising game at any moment, though unlikely because it would destroy their brand integrity.

That said apple is no saint for privacy. For one they actively enable google; they take billions from google to fund safari development in exchange for prioritizing google as built in search and feeding google user data. For a company like Mozilla this is an ethical conundrum; without googles money they’d likely be done. For a company like apple it is inexcusable. the few billion, while a tremendous amount (I think 18 billion?) is a pittance to them.

Further to your point of “active permission” with the tracking limiter this is not always the case. Apple is aware and does not do anything to reform. Part of the reason companies want you to use their app on ios is because then you will be far more likely to open links via the in app browser, which is still safari/webkit, but now escapes sandboxing and allows for far more precise tracking and fingerprinting even if you utilize the tracking limitations built into ios.

Notice how only sketchy games with tons of blatant ads will prompt the “ask ad not to track” box. Instagram, twitter, youtube, reddit, etc generally don’t because they don’t need to track you through permitted routes. Apple has long been aware of this and continue to do nothing (forcing links to open in safari or another browser, limiting traffic on in app browsers, etc). Lord knows what other tricks scumbags like facebook have to circumvent systems and track everything you do. Apple is well aware it happens without user consent but tolerates it and then has the gall to say their hardware and software is “privacy oriented”

wait until they finally feel it is okay to revisit implementing the webdrm proposal from two years ago, that would make adblockers and such irrelevant because the browser would check each webpage for “integrity” and if something changed the webpage’s prescribed layout it would be systemically blocked “for safety”.

The feedback to this proposal was harsh so they dropped it. Jk they just did it in a smaller way, applying it to android webview instead of chrome as a whole. this is a classic Google move; now they get telemetry on the webdrm for the eventual wider rollout, they’ve opened the concept up to the masses, and they can roll it out in small chunks so eventually one day we will be like oh shit, the browser that 70% of the world uses requires a cryptographic token verification for webpages to load to make sure I see the ads.

Ending sideloading is potentially a step towards this actually as it makes it more difficult to run any software that would bypass drm and makes webdrm systems stronger. They’re focusing on android because long term phone/tablets have been outpacing computers for internet browsing for years now. Computers are more difficult to manage and ultimately a dying market.

Ffuuuuuuuucccckkkk gooogle and all advertising firms. They are the instruments that perpetuate and drive the rot of capitalism. Destroy all advertisers

I tested this out on my partners phone

UBlock on iphone works well and is free but is limited to safari, does not appear to even work with safari used as an in-app browser (eg using a mobile lemmy app and clicking a link that opens but stays in the app, not switching to a safari and opening a new tab). In some cases it is more effective at blocking ads

AdGuard is more intrusive. Instead of just an extension for safari it also installs a vpn profile. The advantage is that this allows it to act as a dns filter for the phone. This means it works in all apps to some degree, though several work around it. Costs $5/yr

Depends on your use case I suppose

This simply isn’t possible in the modern era in a hospital network. You don’t own your records, the hospital does. You very likely don’t decide if you respond to subpoenas, there’s a policy in place drafted by executive leadership that they probably comply with any that are “valid” to avoid the expense and potential legal complications regardless of ethics.

This is why when I started doing gender affirming care, especially for pediatric cases, I went independent. I only do mental health though tbf. It’s far more difficult in this age for a physician to remain independent, especially if they don’t do very lucrative things like surgery (who are far more likely to be independent because they have oodles of cash and don’t want hospital networks taking any more than necessary)

And even then with modern electronic records it’s not that simple. Even for my practice it would take weeks to “torch” records and I technically would not be able to verify this was done. I’m also not sure if EMR or hosting providers could be subpoenaed. I assume so.

Convenience, big data, and capitalist healthcare have led us to a horrifying place where the government stealing your records is easier than ever and healthcare workers wanting to do the right thing have more barriers than ever

Aside from all that though is that the correct response, at least initially, should not necessarily be to destroy records or go into hiding but to hire lawyers and refuse release. Generally it’s not as hard to refuse release as one would think, I’ve done it a few times for reasons unrelated to this. If it becomes clear that you’ve failed in this, which is important because it can set precedent that records cannot be released for anti trans bullshit, then you go off grid.

The fact that there is no reporting on a countersuit or pushback from any hospital makes me think that my first paragraph may be the case and that they all simply willingly complied to avoid rocking the boat though. It’s not a given; you have a decent window of time to comply with subpoenas and they could be formulating a plan to not comply, but my gut says many simply handed the records over.

From the linked thread:

“it’s too ingrained for the masses to be simply guilt tripped to stop eating animals. They simply taste too good.”

A wild new spin on victim blaming for 2025. “Sorry you have to die pig. I know you can do basic arithmetic and display emotional responses on par with a human toddler but I simply cannot handle the idea of not eating something as tasty as you. It’s my biology. Ps if you hurt my dog I’ll kill you”

Morality and ethical behavior are not defined by popularity

Carolina reaper is old news chum, they have pepper x now. That’s like 2-3x as hot as a reaper

Headphones I think it’s called? But lidarr has the best integration given it’s a fork.

If this is about the lidarr metadata being fucked you can try something like https://github.com/blampe/hearring-aid, which has its own issues but is working.

All of the arr stack developers flip their shit if you so much as suggest adding support for a custom metadata server. It is by far the biggest weakness of the stack and it is mind boggling that all the major forks have inherited this behavior from sonarr.

Lidarr shows how foolish this approach is, musicbrainz makes one change and the app is fucked for over three months now with no end in sight. Thetvdb could do this to sonarr, themoviedb could do this to radarr. Adding a method to add other database sites with api access (or even just local data) should be a priority, but they not only dislike the idea, they get mad about it. Oh well, free project, fork it if youre so great, etc etc

To answer you more directly the pricing could’ve been as low as it is now probably a decade earlier if demand was there to push the supply chain to go to where it needed to be, basically

Economies of scale and supply chain investments thanks to government subsidies primarily from Germany in the 2000s and China in the 2010s led to Chinese manufacturing of panels becoming extremely streamlined and massive factories dedicated to panel manufacturing.

That said there is still much room for growth thanks to lackluster adoption from major markets like much of Europe and the US. Additionally funneling more money into r&d is worthwhile; current panels have an efficiency of about 20% but lab cells have pushed this to 30% with novel material design and theoretical designs could even push past 40% efficiency.

Europe is the driving force on the big efficiency stuff at the moment, China is the big driving force on manufacturing and production, driving costs down, deployability, etc. speaking broadly of course. Germany has been notably a frontrunner on both since early on (though obviously China has the actual manufacturing capacity).

America is notably fickle here, there is work for both high efficiency cells as well some manufacturing but manufacturing is tricky because (somewhat) of regulatory constraints around lead, the lack of a manufacturing capacity to begin with, and most importantly the lack of a cohesive energy policy over time. Every few years with regime change we tend to see some minor progress then said minor progress undone by fossil fuel lobbying (it creates jobs, you see! Because installing panels isn’t a job that pays well and doesn’t give you black lung).

Then we frack away for a few years and roll back subsidies while China deploys 278 gigawatts of solar to our pathetic 49 gigawatts. They will likely have 1 terawatt of solar power by 2026 and already have 50% of the globes cumulative solar whereas America is projected to have a paltry 182 gigawatts in 2026, 10-12% of the worlds solar, with intense growing need from AI and crypto farms likely being filled by fossil fuels. Expect to see coal plants life extended by Trump, grid failures, increased emissions, etc. the gop orchestrated the removal of all that climate data right from the start to set the stage for this.

Apologies for doomerism

Nice shell and clean work.

What did you do for the joycons? The last time I went in my switch I finally bit the bullet and dropped the extra cash for Hall effect joysticks. It was pricier but not that costly (like $27 instead of the normal like $3 joycon swap) but they are far more sensitive and will last basically forever whereas I was swapping joycon sticks like once a year before bc of drift and dead zones. Absolutely crazy they didn’t go with a better design for switch 2. The ifixit guide showed the joycon stick is basically the same despite Nintendo claiming it’s sturdier.

The world has enabled a monopoly on payment processing and as a result Mastercard and visa hold the keys to censorship in various domains. If they refuse to do business with your company because it’s too naughty you are basically locked out of receiving funds and starved from doing any commerce. All mastercard has to do is add you to their match database and you’re blacklisted from accepting credit cards from all vendors their partnered with, which is basically everyone in the fucking world

They should be limited to only denying things that are actually illegal like child pornography and drug trafficking since they are a pseudo government entity. But since they are a private business they instead are not content agnostic and refuse to do business with objectionable content that is legal but otherwise toxic to be associated with from a business perspective.

It’s the cloudflare vs tier 1 internet provider argument, basically. A tier 1 internet provider is basically a utility and content agnostic. That’s why they will route to disgusting content like kiwi farms, 8chan (when it had a website), etc. because unless there is a court order saying otherwise they have to show that content. But cloudflare, which controls access to a significant portion of the internet (like 50+% at this point), is privatized, and can decide they dislike a site or more likely that supporting it is toxic to the brand, and abandon it leaving it to get ddosed offline. No one cared when this happened to those right wing shitholes because they’re garbage but when the needle swings (like now) and left wing media gets targeted the precedent has been set that it is fine for them do to this.

Mastercard and visa (and paypal) have similarly done this before. They have taken small businesses and websites down numerous times because they do not want to be associated with controversial content. Sometimes it’s right wing nutjobs but it’s also kink stuff a lot of the time. It wasn’t really publicized before though.

Archive everything. A torrent isn’t perfect but it is far more resilient than a shitty site like rapidgator or mega. If all the seeds drop off they may hop back on someday, if the link is dmcad or otherwise deleted it’s gone forever.

Fuck their e-cred. It’s all stolen. The only time you don’t spread something around is when someone posts something special to a private community to only be shared within that community because leaking it outside of that community could cause them grief or even serious consequences (eg someone leaking content to a private tracker community that they fear could be traced back to them so they specifically ask to keep it within x community). Though tbh I’ve seen this happen at least 4-5x over the years and it always leaks out to the wider internet, people will always share (as they should)

Vanity paper, author just wanted to go on about Naruto and their dissertation topic. Any media franchise would work and the paper could be written in a more generalized manner as a result that would probably be more helpful instead of some weebs gushing about an (overrated) franchise

Case in point: in the works cited there is another paper from the author about how Naruto helped them understand CMT better from 2 year prior to this publication. Just a weeb shoehorning that shit in. At least shoehorn in the superior stereotypical shonen (dbz)

from childhood my dad gave some consciousness. he was a Vietnam vet who was drafted against his will and was resentful of his experiences. He wasn’t necessarily versed in theory but he was as a result pretty fiercely anti war. He struggled with ptsd and health effects from agent orange exposure for the rest of his life. The second point stuck with me and with early Internet access I researched that very young. PTSD is kind of inherent to warfare but a poorly tested ecological weapon that is essentially chemical warfare because of how much cancer, birth defects, etc it causes? And then dropping propaganda on the country to claim it was safe even though scientists were protesting its use domestically? Starting to form the opinion the US is maybe a shithead state and not the “good guys”

High school was 9/11 and Iraq/Afghanistan which was a lot of firsts. Going into this was more of a traditional 90s counterculture “fuck the system” anarchist queer kid. The context of the times was different though; had friends who were shitheads. A lot more was tolerated then. 9/11 was shocking but also what prompted some of us to start researching what could’ve prompted such an attack and the history of imperialism. This led to lots of tension and some friend group fracturing as many buried their heads in the sand believing the attacks were out of spite (the gwb “they hate our freedom” narrative).

This is also around the time I became vegan, although admittedly I stopped for a brief period in my late 20s. That was around 16? Iirc. This was wholly for welfare reasons so i consider that politically informed

As an aside I remember my dad genuinely researching places to send me as the Iraq war started. I was about to turn 18 and he was terrified of another conscription. I had 2 friends from high school enlist and they were killed, I don’t know how to feel about it. I am sad they were exploited and destroyed for imperialist machinations so that they could pay for college, I guess. I am far more sad somewhere between 600,000-1,000,000 Iraqis were murdered.

Shaped from there, lots of reading, went to college and formed new social groups, internet matured, etc this is like 2005 era and when I start getting into reading various philosophers, the classic college freshman ones like Nietzsche and Sartre, then a ton more. Eventually that came into Marx and Engels, etc.

I struggled throughout life defining political concept. Anarchy felt wrong because especially the more i learned about logic and thought about it the state seemed inevitable but i also despise hierarchy. I do believe capitalism is inherently and deeply flawed and i do think communism is a superior model but it is still flawed because it ultimately relies on creating a system wherein some people are more important than others which opens the doors for corruption and avarice, which are part of human nature. I believe this is necessary though, at least for the foreseeable future, because while technology and automation could enable people to self govern we are not at a point where such technology can be deployed in a trustworthy state and protected from malicious actors. in the meantime literally any collaborative model would be a vast improvement. Why fight each other when we can work together? But with this last point I suppose I am preaching to the choir

This is 100% it for me

The 90s were shit politically and socially. 1996 was when welfare was destroyed. Rodney king. Desert storm. “Colorblind” racial awareness. “Don’t say gay”. Etc.

But when I think of that era, when I was in middle school and starting high school, before the walmart came to my smallish town where I grew up and wrecked the economy, things were genuinely and observably different.

It’s basically concurring what you say. We would walk home after school and stop by neighborhood shops, owned by people who lived in the community, and were amongst our homes. Suburbia track homes didn’t exist yet so the idea of a small store in your neighborhood wasn’t so foreign even though it was a small town and not a city. It was probably about 4-5 miles between the furthest of my friends houses and we would convene at a central friends house or a park or something. And like you said because the shops were all run by people in the community they got to know us. I’m not gonna lie, I wasn’t a poor kid, I was solidly middle class, but there would still be shop owners that would throw me a free drink or whatever every once and a while because I stopped by every day after school

When I was in high school walmart came to town (probably like 2001?). People protested in town hall meetings and a ton of dissent was raised but it was allowed anyway. Looking back as an adult im betting walmart just paid off the council members or whatever. They built a fucking huge one and disrupted the town for literal years. It was a small town with an actual “main street” and the construction closed this for years which starved a ton of the local businesses and closed off a bunch before it even opened (again looking back as an adult this was probably a tactic, walmart had the resources to get that building up in like 6 months and it took like 4-5 years).

By the time it opened I was at college. It quickly started closing other local businesses. Every summer I’d go back and the town would be a bit more dead. By the time I graduated basically every shop I had gone to was closed, replaced by walmart and a few other big chains that had moved in like home depot and autozone, putting everything else out of its misery. At this point the development of suburbia track homes had been ongoing as well so you’d drive past these monstrosities of the same fucking house copy pasted 800 times with nothing to do for miles.

It’s been like 15 years since then and the last time I went back it was just so depressing. There’s nothing to do there now. The only stuff is bars and restaurants. The only non conglomerate stores are weird shit like spirit Halloween, hair salons, yoga studios, and there was actually a trump memorabilia store where my favorite hangout used to be which broke my heart

I do mental health stuff and when I work with people who are under like 20 years old I feel so bad because they just never got to experience that. Their version of america has entirely been overtaken by corporate overlords. It’s crazy bc it wasn’t always like this. Like there were always corporate overlords, in the 80s and 90s they were telecoms (and they were actually declared monopolies and broken up! Only to eventually reform into basically the same monopolies 20 years later) and the emergence of big tech (the lack of any kind of regulation on microsoft in the 90s is something we are paying dearly for now). But when I work with a teenager who lives in one of those suburbia environments and struggles to make meaningful social connections because they can’t hang out with people unless their parents drive them around I feel awful for them. Utter failure on so many levels. Civil planning, zoning, regulatory, economic, etc.

The idea of actually being able to start a retail business and have a 3rd place in your community is basically unheard of now. Even service businesses (like repair shops) are basically extinct outside of auto repair because tech and appliance manufacturers have conditioned us to accept that everything is disposable even if it’s like 2 grand and our regulatory bodies are worthless. You can’t build anything anymore, you can only slave for the bezos/walton empire

This is absolutely true. It’s called design-to-cost or design-to-spec. It’s not how every laptop is made but it’s how a lot of them are

Most companies will say “let’s make a $699 laptop built around amd ryzen with 15” display and 8gb ram” then engineerings job is to work around the constraints

That’s how you end up with plastic instead of aluminum casing, 60hz panel instead of 120, soldered ram, weirdly placed ports, etc

Some laptops are design first (macbook, framework, surface) but even these will have cost cutting measures to bring them to ideal price points

things I learned from repairing/refurbishing laptops as a hobby/way to save a ton of useful electronics from becoming ewaste/way to earn extra cash:

most laptops are designed atrociously bad. like from an electronics perspective but also from a casing perspective. This is the case regardless of your laptop being $300 or $3000 and it’s a mixture of planned obsolescence, idiotic design choices, poor material selection, and cost cutting

Sometimes it’s just a cheap laptop with very thin or brittle plastic that will inevitably wear down and start to break apart, especially if it’s used heavily. Lots of chromebooks were like this but even pricier stuff like the $6-900 acer nitro

Sometimes it’s got a weird material selection like a rubberized coating that wears away like the asus zephyrus ($1500-3000)

Sometimes the hinges are basically designed to fail and after a year the top half cracks apart in such a way that the casing needs to be entirely replaced or given a hideously ugly and not sturdy repair (basically every hp laptop ever ranging from hundreds to thousands)

Sometimes boards are given cost cutting measures that are paired with “security” measures that render repair impossible. If you have a macbook from ~2015-20 that was a cheaper model one of the cost cutting measures was to remove what’s called a TVS diode from the 3.3v and 1.8v nand power rails. A TVS diode, to oversimplify things, is to protect against power surges. So now when a power surge occurs on either of those lines instead of a TVS diode taking the hit and either clamp the excess or in extreme cases fail. In that case you’re replacing a 3 cent diode that takes 5 seconds to solder instead of a much more costly SSD that requires complex BGA rework. BUT here’s the kicker - apple also stores the firmware keys on the SSD which are paired to a chip called the t2. So once the ssd is dead you are fucked, only apple can restore it. I can reflash macos and efi partitions but without the firmware keys it won’t boot. Only option is an entirely new logic board. Also all your data is gone

It’s fucked now. We let tech bros win. Apple gets the heat but they’re not the only ones. Dell pairs ssds to their tpm module, pairs displays, webcams, fingerprint readers, etc. hp has whitelists for ssds and wan (meaning only “authorized” parts work) and pairs ssds. Lenovo has whitelists for wan cards. They’re all not as aggressive as apple and it’s not across all models but they’re testing the waters and clearly moving in that direction.

Even consoles now - ps5 and Xbox pairs optical drive (though Xbox can be done with some nonsense), switch pairs nand, all three will ban you from their network for fucking with the console.

Our world is designed to consume and waste.

I actually thought this at first bc of the h3 drama and was like oh no shit a rich youtuber is on the side of “fuck fair use and free exchange of ideas”

somehow she found a way to be way worse tho

“if I can convince everyone these dumb glasses are cool my database will have so many videos of people going to the bathroom and that’s pretty cool”