_Understated_

> Advertising is lying. How can you trust anything the sellers of products say?

I firmly believe this. However, I try to be more objective these days and even if I hate/disagree with something I still like to find some objective facts/data about things to see stuff from other perspectives.

Even if I find research that says everyone on earth likes ads except me, I won't change my personal stance on them.

Edit: forgot to add that by lying, I was referring more to the click rates and returns and whatnot, rather than the claims of the products that are advertised.

> It’s not like you’re unbiased either. Correct, I'm not. I can't stand ads. And to clarify, I mean traditional ads like banner ads, billboards, TV ads etc.

Ads come with tracking now... that needs to die immediately!

And I'm not talking about sites like HN: I know who owns it but they're not actively forcing me to watch some claim that "This thing will stop you being an ugly bastard and make women throw themselves at you"...

In fact, UBlock Origin shows nothing on this site.

> This boils down to "rules for thee but not for me"

I don't believe that. Taking the building site example, I'd rather work on one that's got a bunch of site posters up and does all the right safety stuff than one ran by a bunch of cowboys with no regard for my safety...

> Nowadays, it seems that common people are mostly convinced by the rich to vote against their own interest.

Perhaps, but the rich have control over the propaganda machines like social media and MSM so it's no wonder people are convinced that they're doing the right thing.

Not really. I mean a study that's not from a company that sells ads or is in the chain somewhere! Any studies (I use the term very broadly) that I've seen are all net positive!

I want something from, say, The German Institute of Being Really Honest, who are government-funded perhaps... a few studies from entities who don't have a dog in the fight is all I'm after.

If their conclusion is that people are happier with ads then so be it... I'm happy without them, that's for sure.

I'm a fan of regulation where it's necessary. For example, when it comes to things like building sites they are incredibly safe now, thanks to many regulations. I'd argue that they're an absolute necessity.

However, for some things, like website I visit on the internet, the regulation should be all but nonexistent (for the most part, there are likely some things like child porn and generally illegal stuff that should be covered).

And I'm in Scotland, not the US

I went on the hunt just before posting this to find out more about how many people click on ads and how beneficial they are (for any party, not just the advertiser) and I can honestly say I think it's all lies: the whole industry are lying to one another and, by extension, to the customers.

Now, this is pure anecdotal but every result I found on DDG was from a company that either advertises, consults about SEO/ads, is Google, or otherwise part of the ad scumbaggery somewhere in the chain.

The thing that got me was they all said ads are brilliant (I know, odd, isn't it?). They all had click through figures ranging from a few percent to 35%. Are you kidding me? A third of people click on ads?

I couldn't find anything that said ads are shit or dangerous or even anything vaguely negative.

Now, I don't see ads. Ever. I have UBlock Origin and privacy badger and other settings to prevent them from showing on my screen but the odd time I setup a PC and have to open a gaping browser, it's such an assault on the senses.

I've asked on here before but is there somewhere out there in the internet that I can see unbiased research on ads. Something! Anything at all?

I have no idea why you are being downvoted... perhaps FB zealots fear the truth.

Regulation is exactly what large corporations want. Regulation prevents competition from ever getting started.

What's an extra £30 million a year for regulatory compliance to someone like FB, or Google, or any billion dollar corp? It's literally zero. Nothing at all. The (insignificant) cost of doing business.

For a startup? It's certain death right at the idea stage...

I would put money on FB actually helping government draft regulations _against_ FB themselves knowing that they won't be financially affected by them and that they will help kill any potential competition from ever getting started.

Wait a minute... I live in North Ayrshire.

I wasn't asked. This sounds like a pile of shite to me!

> But it’s unfortunate that “blockchain” is apparently synonymous with proof of work cryptocurrencies and NFTs.

I usually put stuff like that down to either lazy writing or just the wrong/badly skilled writer.

It's the same as MSM portraying hackers wearing hoodies!

It's Facebook! How can you trust them?

If you honestly believe them then I've got a bridge you might wanna take a look at...

I've always bought HP business laser printers.

They've always worked for me.

I also don't let it connect to the internet as it has a fixed IP and no gateway.

Also none of this cartridge subscription business and I've always been able to buy the cheap unbranded cartridges on Amazon or Ebay for a fraction of the HP ones that must be made from solid Platinum or something...

Your own quote mentions you can't hibernate it.

And we recently could close laptops, have them sleep/hibernate and not wake up until you open the screen again so sticking them in a backpack was fine.

Not sure if the issue is Windows or the hardware but it's a recent thing.

Ok, I'll chime in.

No menu!

Massive waste of screen space just to display a single word!

Making me scroll to find _anything_ of substance... and then finding there isn't actually anything of substance.

Each line has one or two words on it making me scroll to figure out what they are trying to say.

And I still don't know what the company/person is selling!

Please tell me this is the first attempt at a landing page or something?

Give me Geocities over this modern crap any day!

Edit: I guess I'm not the target audience then :)

For those that are saying things like "Google/Microsoft etc. are worse" and other such pseudo-justifications: You are missing the point!

Mozilla is now in exactly the same camp as Microsoft, Google and all the other spyware companies. There is no "worse" any more! Their rhetoric uses the same language and tactics as the others therefore they are the same now. Their plan is to monetize your web views, just like Google. This change is absolutely not for your benefit. Not even a little bit!

They have crossed a line. A massive line imo!

Firefox held the torch for companies in the "internet space" (couldn't think of a better term) on how to do things without bending your users over and telling them it's for their own good. But no more.

This is the end for Mozilla for a group of people that absolutely care about privacy and (total speculation incoming!) the beginning of the end for Mozilla in general. For a number of years, their userbase clearly was more interested in privacy over speed and features but if the playing field is now levelled (in terms of lack of privacy!), then the obvious choice is no longer FF these days as Chrome and Edge are faster.

I've watched them over the years become worse, bit by dark-patterned bit. This is a huge leap into a steaming pile of privacy shit though and a clear sign they are circling the drain.

Still, I have no idea what to do! Hopefully there sill be a way to turn it off but they've laid their cards on the table now...

If the issues is DNS-related or routing-related then since it's all owned by FB, they own the records too so it's likely that literally everything that has a DNS record under the FB cost code will be hit.

The WhatsApp servers will be sitting idle most likely!

I assume this means that anyone that uses their FB account to login somewhere can't login once their token expires...

Hahahahaha!

I'm convinced that this is all a result of Microsoft being a rudderless ship. That and their unkillable telemetry telling them shit like "n% of people spend x% more time in Settings than Control Panel" so that means that Settings must be better. Right? Cool, let's take 5 years to slowly destroy the control panel.

Many things I've read over the last few years about Microsoft is that it's utterly disfunctional. It's become so big that it's impossible to achieve any kind of coherence. As another comment pointed out: they've had 10 years to make the UI all look the same and still haven't achieved it! A single dev could have redesigned the whole thing in a couple of years at most so it can't be a technical issue: it points to them either having incompetent management or just being too damn big to actually manage!

Now I've worked mainly for large corporates over the years and they're never a single entity: they're always made up of multiple internal entities whether officially or unofficially. And they all have their own goals so steering a company as a whole is not an easy task but Microsoft are a fucking mess and thanks to all this forced shit, Windows 10 will be the final version of Windows for me.

So what does that mean? It means that Linux has 4 years to get its act together before I switch to it permanently, come hell or high water. Coz right now, Linux is not a replacement for Windows for a great many people. Myself included. Even though I've tried multiple times with Fedora, Pop_OS and Ubuntu, shit always goes wrong. Always: dodgy sound issues, Nvidia drivers issues, scaling issues etc... stuff I don't get with Windows! Ever.

> I think most people just don't want to be under someone's control

I'm not sure it's as black and white as that!

I've worked from home for a number of years and I used to think people were insane to want to go into an office but I've changed my tune in the last year or so for one simple reason: hardly anyone is set up to work from home!

At my last company (small, only 21 employees - they got rid of their office earlier this year), I was one of only three people in the video calls with an actual home office. Everyone else was working from a living room, bedroom, or in two cases, the couch with a laptop on their knees.

One of the couch-workers left at around the same time as me recently for a company that worked from an office for the very reason that she could work from an office.

It's horses for courses: some people like it and have an actual space to work properly and others don't. In my case I have a desktop computer, two monitors, a comfy chair, a motorised stand-up desk etc. I'd never get this level of comfort in an actual office.

As well as the physical space issues, there is the psychological aspect too. I spend 5 days a week in the house all day by myself. I'm a contractor so making office friendships isn't something that motivates me (doesn't mean I hate everyone, just some people :D). I'm fine with that. I have a couple of friends I've known for many decades and that's enough for me. I can also get work done no problem and still put the washing on, nip out for groceries etc.

I know of colleagues that crave the human interaction... which is fine. I don't. I get enough from my family and the daily (and mostly pointless) video calls.

However, if I had to work from a laptop at my dining room table, It'd suck hard!

Back then, I used to overclock the $hit out of my CPU. Any chance I could get to ramp it up I took.

This one I have now is the first one I haven't overclocked in at least a decade: i9 10900K.

I went from an i7 8700k running all cores at 5GHz to the i9 10900K running stock.

The reason was that I ran HWInfo and saw that it clocked to almost 5GHz on its own with single and dual-threaded workloads anyway. And given the 20 cores, it would hammer through anything that needed multicore.

In short, this is the first time I didn't feel the need to overclock.

What kind of ramp-up time are we looking at here? This can't be a quick process to get chips out the door I imagine!

When I worked in a fulfillment center (picking and stowing) I never once got told my numbers. Nor was I ever told what my numbers should be, just that "We'll let you know if your numbers drop".

And yes, we always tried to take the carts full of SD cards and memory sticks, rather than cauldrons and sinks!

Since when is it anyone's business (within the limits of the law) where I get my parts from?

> and the company themselves considers them a camera app.

Doesn't matter what the company calls themselves, it's a forum that people upload phone pics to and those photos/images are then displayed in an algorithmic form (used to be chronological with forums)... same as a forum!

Remember, Google is an advertising company but they'd consider themselves more of an engineering or search company... doesn't mean they're right!

Edit: Forgot to ask, how do Snapchat make their money? Is it all through advertising? It's a genuine question, I don't use it and have no idea! If it's all advertising revenue then they're an advertising company like Google and Facebook!

Spam protection has been around for years and years. It's nothing new. Sure, Reddit may have a handful of devs dedicated to perfecting it for their platform but there are a huge number of solutions to spam and I bet many commercial and OSS ones too.

DDOS is provided by many hosting companies now for free.

Now, I'm not trying to make this out like the Dropbox post many years ago comparing it to self-hosting, nothing of the sort.

But Reddit (and other tech giants) provide very little above basic forums imo and in any case, the price is too high!

> There are various features provided by Snapchat (camera, filters, games)

Of course, these are addons to the platform. But the platform is still the same fundamental application as a forum. Nothing more.

> But every platform you listed is significantly more complex than that.

I'd agree with that on the surface but those platforms you listed are basically forums with a new name! They provide very little over and above that. So, in actual fact, they're only made more complex as a result of rules added by the owners to squeeze as much data from every visitor as is legally (and illegally in some cases) allowed! So they provide nothing of value above a regular forum imo.

In reality, they are lists of submissions from end users that have been categorized, however the categorization engine happens to be algorithmically generated, rather than ordered by date. And the companies themselves are doing whatever it takes to monetize your eyeballs regardless of whether it affects your health or not! They are abusing every visitor to the maximum extent that the laws allow!

Their business model is to centralize all forums on their platform and for that there is a massive cost at that scale. That's their choice to host all forums! However to pay for that they are abusing every visitor.

Using Reddit, a single forum about Ubuntu (/r/Ubuntu) would cost around $5 a month on DO for someone to host themselves. Using something like BBForum or something similar would not require much in the way of maintenance.

The point I am making is that all this stuff existed long before the big tech platforms. It can easily exist without them too. They are not actually providing anything of any worth that couldn't easily be found elsewhere (well, used to be found elsewhere!).

What version of USB-C? There are several and they are confusing as hell!

I noticed there is a call to prevent members of Congress and whatnot to be prevented from holding stocks.

That won't happen. Ever.

What's more likely is that their transactions will be exempt from being made public... they make the laws afterall :)

I'm no lawyer but this looks damning - It says he lied to Congress.

I'm not in the US, but isn't that pretty serious (if proven!)?

As it happens, I have a USB stick with Fedora 34 on it. I tried it a few months back after Ubuntu and POP OS and found it to be great with one issue: Nvidia graphics! Too much fannying about to get them to work.

If i just used the built-in Intel graphics it was perfect. Every app worked (I'm a .NET dev), everything was fast and stable... it was great.

The issue with the graphics was to do with having an HDMI and DP connection at the same time and caused a crash in 46x version of drivers. 47x wasn't out at the time but it is now... perhaps it's time!