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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: November 4th, 2023

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  • Casey Neistat. Back when he was doing his daily vlog thing a lot of it was really interesting, covering him and his wife trying to make shit happen in the city as he was running and riding his powered skateboard around Manhattan. At some point his audience started drifting younger, way way younger, and I don’t know if it was him or me but I just kind of lost interest. It didn’t feel new anymore.

    That might be me to be honest. I actually don’t watch YouTube that much at all anymore, unless I’m looking for something specific. Their recommendation algorithm is garbage and it is so obviously going for raw time suck engagement that it leaves me with a bunch of unfulfilling clickbait / ragebait where I could watch it for an hour and then just want my hour back so I end up not returning. The whole platform used to be more full of interesting genuinely entertaining and educational videos, now it just feels like a giant time sink. And every other video is now some paid sponsorship or plug where the creator is basically just whoring out their own influence. Case in point, look up reviews of laser engravers. Every single one that I could find, especially of a couple major brands, the creator got the laser hardware for free. Some of them are just advertisements that reuse the manufacturer’s own stock footage, and some seem more like real reviews, but for one or two brands I literally could not find one video where the creator wasn’t sponsored by the laser manufacturer.



  • It’s a very simple answer Apple has guaranteed that your data will stay on your device and stay secure. This is generally trusted because Apple has a track record of keeping user data secure on the device or encrypted in the cloud even in ways Apple cannot access. Point is, when Apple says they are going to do this in a way that respects privacy, and they outline the technical details of how it will work, people trust that because there’s a track record.

    Microsoft has no such trust. They have a recent track record of being intrusive and using dark patterns to persuade users to give Microsoft their data, for example in Edge there have been new feature pop-ups that require data sharing with Microsoft and the two options are ‘got it’ and ‘settings’ so accepting requires one click and rejecting requires 4 going into the settings menu and changing a few things. Microsoft is also heavily pushing Copilot which is mostly cloud-based. Furthermore, Microsoft recently showed a system that would basically screenshot your computer at very regular intervals and store them in an insecure manner. Granted it was on the device, but the way they were going to be stored meant they could be stolen with two lines of code. And let’s not forget that Windows 11 cannot be set up without a Microsoft account, so to even use your computer you have to share your email address with Microsoft. In this and many other ways they just do not act like a company that respects privacy at all, they act like the typical big tech give us everything or we will make your life difficult type company that nobody trusts.





  • This 100%>. It’s why Reddit is way more fun than Twitter. Twitter is like yelling into the void and sometimes the void yells back. It’s good for publishers and content creation, bad for real conversation. Reddit supports real threaded conversation with voting to highlight the good parts of the conversation.

    The other thing is interest following. Twitter you have to follow people, and a person may be posting on things you have interest in and other things you have no interest in. Reddit you follow subjects, and you see good content regardless of who posts it.

    Mastodon and Lemmy are just decentralized Twitter and Reddit.


  • the top end models of the good brands are just scams, they just look a bit nicer and have some shitty “AI powered” app you’ll never use.

    This is literally a scam.
    There was an article a while back which I can’t find right now, a few of those product designers were saying that past $100-$150 they really weren’t sure what benefits could be added so they just throw a bunch of useless whiz bang shit in that serves no useful purpose but they sell it for $300 or whatever and enough people buy it to make it worth building another SKU.

    In most cases the super top end one has the same motor as the midrange or low-midrange one, and takes the same brush heads, which means it does exactly the same thing. Buy that one for $85 and be done with it.


  • Welcome to Clock 2.0, the new time and reminder experience from Microsoft! Powered by Bing AI and Microsoft OneDrive.

    • Sync your time zones, alarms, and reminders to all your devices via Microsoft OneDrive
    • Get suggested wake-up times powered by Bing AI and your calendar!
    • Use of Clock is governed by the Microsoft Cloud Connected Experiences Privacy Policy (click here to view).
    • Click I Agree to start your use of Microsoft Clock!

    and for all this, your alarm reminders become yet another datapoint for personalized ads, your phone alarm to wake you up then plays at full blast through the living room computer and wakes everybody else up, and you agreed to a 750kb privacy policy that displays in a 2"x3" window with 500 pages to scroll through.