nukeop

Chinese have different sensibilities than westerners. It's completely normal and accepted for them. They have a word for self-important westerners who are obsessed with politically correct speech and behavior - baizuo. It's a different world there.

There's a section where you can download all the data Google has on you.

But Facebook also tracks people who do not have accounts, and people who pay for services. No way out.

I subscribe to a couple of newsletters that send the most popular repositories in several languages to my email every week. There's been a trend of increasing Chinese activity for months now. The problem with Chinese programmers is that they very rarely bother to use English, as the rest of the world, rendering their technically "open source" code largely useless for most of us. There's clearly a niche for a Chinese language counterpart of Github, and I suspect it's going to be filled soon.

The American society has progressed so far it managed to bring back indentured servitude, what an achievement.

Until you fall victim to clickjacking.

This exact mechanism is already used for linking scripts/stylesheets from third party websites.

Years pass, we have sci-fi level technology, and the main method of distributing programs to users on Windows is still downloading .exes from random sites and being on the lookout for the browser toolbar trying to sneak by when installing. I don't know what's worse, this, or Google trying to wrestle yet another group of website owners into obedience.

It's still no proof of existence of black holes. It's like saying that a lightning storm is proof of Thor, because the legends say he wields the very same lightning. The cause could be something entirely different (spontaneous spacetime ripples, alien generators, whatever really).

There is still zero evidence that there exists such a thing as a black hole with all its fantastic properties. We have a picture of a red-yellow accretion disk and that's it. Black holes remain a mathematical artifact of general relativity and there is as much evidence of their existence as of crystal healing and astral travel. There is at best some evidence of very massive objects at certain points.

7 CSS declarations and you too can include a Google tracker in your website. No thanks. Host your assets yourself.

Mozilla is almost fully financed by Google. Any day now, Google can retract its funding and effectively fully consolidate its iron grip on the fate of the Internet.

The more websites use Google's "captcha", the more pointless it is to resist fingerprinting. And since that "captcha" is built into Cloudflare's "spam protection", it blocks you from half of the internet already.

Why the scare quotes? Because the purpose of recaptcha isn't to tell humans from bots, it's to punish users who do not wish to be tracked by giving them an endless stream of challenges to solve no matter if they keep getting them right or wrong. It is especially obvious when they intentionally delay the loading of subsequent images if you have too many privacy features enabled, because it does nothing to prevent bots from solving them. It's grouped into several tiers, depending on the amount of frustration they want to generate:

1. Invisible captcha - you have Chrome, you're logged into a Google account, your advertising ID has a profile full of useful data. You go in with no hassle.

2. 1 click - maybe you're on a new IP or a new device, but you're logged into a Google account and use Chrome. Click the checkbox and that's it.

3. Regular captcha - You're not logged in but you don't use any privacy enhancements, so through a combination of fingerprinting, cookies, and other tracking techniques you're uniquely identified anyway. You get 9 images, select 2 or 3 of them and you're good to go.

4. Annoying captcha - you're blocking third party cookies, you're not on Chrome, looks like you're not being a good cog in the machine. You get a captcha with 9 squares that load more images, or you have to "select squares containing X", and you get 2-5 of these in a row.

5. Infuriating captcha - you're blocking third party trackers, cookies, all other storage methods, you block or mitigate canvas fingerprinting, you're behind a VPN, your fingerprint is not recognized, there's no data in your profile. Google won't squeeze a cent out of you, so you don't get to use the internet. You're getting an endless stream of slowly loading squares, or 5-7 objects to recognize. Even if you do all of them correctly, it won't let you in. Maybe after 4-8 cycles, but that will still waste ~10 minutes per try. You're barred from any website that links to reCaptcha.

These days websites using it are for all purposes dead to me. I can't visit them and I won't waste my time clicking their images or selecting squares or whatever.

The purpose of advertising is to manipulate you into buying things you don't need, not to inform you about a product that is useful. Turn on the TV, or the radio, or any website, and show me one advert that is purely informative.

The day jazz will reach the masses is when the reviews about it do not even mention the word "black".

It's created by emacs users, for emacs users, it should absolutely mention that word everywhere and stress its origins, it's already widely adopted and who really cares if somebody who is so superficial that he rejects a superior solution because it originated in a text editor he doesn't like doesn't use it?

This resembles orthodox rabbis discussing what is considered kosher.

I half expected to see my music player on the list, given it's popular, GPLv3 licensed and has no tracking, but I have no idea what the approval process is.

My fingerprint is different every minute. That "very strong signal" is discarded by every surveillance engine as useless noise.

Just block scripts and randomize the useragent, here's your new fingerprint every minute.

On the new internet, this tired adage is already outdated. You're still the product even if you're paying.

I'd rather be surveilled by the Chinese government than Google/Facebook and other FAGMAN companies.

At least I don't live in the Chinese jurisdiction, while the tech giants do whatever they can to slip their tentacles into every website you visit, even if you don't do any business with them and actively fight their spyware. The Chinese government doesn't want to sell me anything either.

This doesn't matter, even if it were paid they'd still spy on you, because they can. The list of paid services that still do a ton of spying is neverending (Netflix, Uber, Spotify, I could list them all day).

Google is pretty much useless for anything older than a few years, as well as for many less popular topics. I can't even remember how many times Google decided to drop a crucial word in my query to show me something, anything, instead of admitting it pulled a blank. Instead of playing the endless game of "intitle: filetype: inurl:" just use something else (DDG maybe).

BPA plastics? Bad diets? Roundup? Chemicals in the water that make the freaking frogs gay? It's funny until it happens to you.

The term "LAMP stack" is at least 15 years old and even RMS commented on it a long time ago. That's as mainstream as it gets.

It's because being the top dog feels great, duh.

Making videogames is a great hobby though. One of the traditional appeals of writing roguelikes is that you can spend minimal effort on graphics and related cruft and boilerplate, and jump straight into implementing any fun mechanic you can think off. If you like the idea of creating games, do something less stressful as a day job, and make games as a hobby. A single person can release a game made as a hobby. This way you have full control, no stress, and don't need to take financial risks.

Astonishingly it turns out that bad programmers are everywhere and aren't made any better by handling a different domain of problems. Truly shocking.

Using Dynamo is the worst thing we've done for productivity and costs in our product. It introduces onboarding overhead, unnecessary implementation time overhead, costs a lot, and is always a bottleneck in every operation. Using DAX requires paying for VPC which already costs more than a server that could power many small to mid-sized products. Resizing table throughputs requires lots of manual work to keep it cost effective, because the default settings are designed to nickel and dime you to death. If we just used a simple SQL or MongoDB server attached as a container we'd save literally months of development time and thousands of dollars per month.

And now you have to trust the plugin author that he won't steal your passwords.

Just use Bitwarden now. It has everything Lastpass has, used to have, and more. And most importantly, you can run your own server.