Thanks I hate it

Most obvious monopoly since Ma Bell. Even worse than Microsoft which was also obviously a monopoly. Break them all up. Microsoft, ATT (for the… 4th time? Maybe just abolish them at this point…), Comcast, Verizon, Google, Apple, the list goes on. All those food corps that end up being 3 parent companies owning everything else. Break it all up. Force unionization also while going through the legal processes.

What if I told you… that’s a feature, not a bug?

It’s far too much to type and way too philosophical for anyone to give a shit about, but, tldr: the US (and arguably the world) is on a freight train speeding at absolute destruction. No one in power is pushing the stop button. (In the US) one party is (sometimes) pushing a slowdown button but the other party is always slamming any button they can find that doesn’t say stop on it. They know where it leads, and this is what they want. Everyone “knows” the current institutions and systems are failing, but the only politically relevant (so, in the US, not the actual left) force with power is the far right wingers who desire destruction and their only resistance is the left and right wing liberals in the middle going “noooo the institutions!” but no one actually cares about the institutions, besides other liberals. They lack any ability though, due to their political ideology, to actually fight for the beloved institutions. They can only rely on the powerful far right to “come to their senses” and stop pushing the death button. Unfortunately for them, the far right will not stop without someone stopping them- forcefully. And since the far right and liberals effectively eliminated the far left and even the center left for the most part… there’s no one to counter that far right fascistic death drive.

But you don’t even need that accurate assessment of things to understand the situation. Just know they want to abolish public education, medicine, doctors, anything related to “science” broadly, any non-Christian religions, non-white people, LGBTQ+ people and anything tangentially related to gay stuff (imagined or real), etc. pretty much infinitely.

These people are the proto-Nazis of our time. Not everything will align perfectly, but it doesn’t have to. They want to burn medical information, they want to destroy what they see as “perverted secular society” burn it all away and cleanse the land for some great rebirth of a Christian Nationalist theocracy where white men are elevated above everyone and your white male status plus property owning status is all that matters. I know this all sounds cliche and overstated at this point… but they keep proving it true every chance they get.

The worst part is that ultimately they’re the only side making progress towards their goal because their goal is aligned with the way things are going and must go. But the difference is we can arrive at that destructive moment, whenever it is, and come out the other side in some Christian theocracy nightmare world or something much better than we can currently imagine possible. As it stands right now, that nightmare vision seems to be the only viable conclusion. Which is rather depressing…

(Not that person)

1 File transfers can be done via apps like localsend, pairdrop/snapdrop (selfhosted, I wouldn’t use the public servers), or simply putting files on a shared server, etc.

2 This is impossible to correctly answer until the new phones are actually out. Reason being we don’t know the restrictions (or hopefully not) that Apple will arbitrarily apply to the port. The iPad, for what it’s worth, can easily mount USB C drives and other accessories, so, hopefully Apple continues in that vein of sanity

3 no

4 my iPhone is my actual phone phone and the pixel is wifi only.

I let people play on my lawn just to bring balance to the universe. Unless they don’t clean up their dog’s shit. Then old man mode erupts.

Normie is incredibly common online in general. It’s not just relegated to weird right wing sites either.

I’m in my mid 30s and even I gotta say… you sound a bit like “old man yells at cloud” with this take. Just chill out a little bit. You’re making the rest of us approaching-middle-agers look bad.

And if you’re somehow younger than me then I gotta say… actually, keep it up. Your apparent lack of being terminally-online (oh no, I used a recently coined term…) is definitely healthier than whatever the fuck the rest of us are doing.

Revanced has sponsorblock though and has for a while

I was using Heimdall and it was having some weird corruption(?) issues. Switched to homarr when I saw it the other day and it’s great. It has small icons (for phones) medium (for like tablets) and large (for desktops/laptops) all can be changed independently so you can optimize for mobile and desktop usage. Très bien

Which is annoying tbh.

Would be nice if the smart whatever (see I forgot their app name already while typing) team would… team up somehow with the revanced team and they agree on one name, one app. Having two apps for what is essentially the same OS with a different skin is… silly. Like an app for Apple TV and a different app that does essentially the same thing for iOS.

I see updates from as recent as last week on github?

On that note, if anyone sees this comment or another and wants to try YouTube revanced (or extended) DO NOT JUST BLINDLY GOOGLE AND CLICK THE WEBSITE THAT COMES UP FIRST

I have no idea if that site is owned by a legit dev or not. What I do know is the legit devs directly say on github, where the source code can be reviewed, to NOT download from any other place than github.

Sorry for the PSA but I just don’t want people downloading possibly malicious code from random sites. It’s easy to fall into the blindly search, blindly install hole.

I think it’s just the ease of GUI for people. This isn’t to shit on anyone, btw. A lot of people don’t like dealing with the keys and IPs involved, few as there may be, with setting up wireguard.

If someone else has a compelling difference or reason to use tailscale then I’d be happy to hear it. I tried it once and it worked fine enough. But wireguard works just as fine and takes the same time to setup if you already know what to do. Like wireguard seriously takes 2 minutes.

Americans: just remember for rough mental computations. Keyword rough

1M ≈ 1yard ≈ 3feet 1Kg ≈ 2lb

You can almost basically just convert yards to meters directly. For kilos just 2x in your head for easy math. 2.2 is the actual multiplier, but for estimations, 2x works for most cases.

They only read what is presented to them and as we all know the “official narrative” lacks a lot of details and includes outright lies. Any true telling of history would always result in “oh so we should probably do what the Soviets were doing… and improve it.” Instead the US being dominant after WWII has led to so much ridiculous and insane propaganda that can even the light suggestion to Americans to rethink their ideas on China and the USSR (and the US or Israel on the other side of that coin) is instantly smashed with YOURE A COMMIE FASCIST! Great world to live in…

I think this was all fairly well predicted by many people way before my time and smarter than me, but it seems kind of obvious that in a world of declining hegemony and in turn declining material conditions that the average workers of the world either push to the far left and embrace socialism or to the far right into fascism. It’s basically inevitable in the long run.

The problem is one ideology seeks more equality, fairness, etc. and to end exploitation by capitalists around the world so everyone can live lives of dignity and we can all work in our own and each other’s common interests of, you know, not destroying the world.

Fascism kind of plays on the same mindset of “someone is fucking me. But who?” and smashes in whatever ethnic or racial group is convenient to hate. Black people, “the Jews!”, Arabs (“Muslims” to Americans), South Americans and Mexicans, Chinese people, etc. Instead of the logic of cooperation towards a common goal it just sells cooperation but only within your assigned group for their betterment and the extermination of other groups.

given two paths basically, one which requires overcoming whatever baked-in resentment, fears, racism, whatever people all are raised to have in this world and the other which says “no, all that bullshit is actually correct. most basic primal urge to kill everyone else because you think you’ll die otherwise is correct.” Obviously there’s some amount of “some people are like that” because I don’t think I’ve ever really thought like that, but of course there’s also a learned and socially instilled component helped along by lack of education and straight up misinformation (propaganda) that can lead otherwise “good” people to just follow along, believe the zero sum game bullshit, and commit any atrocity in the imagined grand idea of defending themselves and their people from the others who they were purposely denied ever actually knowing and learning about.

We’re kind of at an unfortunate point now too where it seems like (and who really knows?) we’re heading towards some incredibly bad times. More wars and a shitload more deaths as the world transitions from US hegemony to sharing it with other nations, China being the biggest right now. It feels like we’re fighting an impossible battle of winning over minds already complacent to the right wing. The Marxist, et al. education in “the west” is essentially zero and the world can basically count on the US/EU to fight every step of progress along the way if any progress is to be made at all. I mean look at the whining over China who has explicitly pretty much stayed out of foreign politics. They have a few loans around the world and the west is in full-on baby crying mode. Just imagine where it’s likely headed (and this is not blaming China who has every right to do what any other nation does. The US/EU are clearly the ones in the wrong here).

So I dunno. Shit’s fucked, people are uneducated and falling for bullshit fascist shit, and the left seems unable to keep up with radicalizing people. Not for lack of trying or for lack of “being correct” but because of really too many reasons to go into… probably the chief reason being the fucking US lucked into its position post-WWII and that basically setup the world to get bent over and fucked by fascism sold under a different label. The US isn’t called “the fourth reich” for no good reason after all. I’ll stop rambling.

Lack of privacy and concerns around the government (FBI, CIA, NSA, etc.) spying and private corporations essentially spying too but calling it data harvesting and whatever else has been pretty widely reported on and shared for well over a decade. I’m in my mid 30s and clearly remember the patriot act being proposed and rammed through the first time with constant outcries about the blatant human rights and privacy violations it would lead to which of course Snowden confirmed explicitly years later. This stuff has never been a secret, really, it’s just people legitimately don’t believe it matters to them. They think either “oh it just has to be this way” or “terrorism brother!” or “but why doesn’t Zuck deserve to sell my butthole pics, you commie?” That’s why it’s incumbent upon those who are experts, which I am not for the record, to always be on the look out and propose enforceable laws to prevent private corporations from doing this (with personal liability for executive level officers ie Zuck goes to prison for 50 years) and to strip back and break the reactionary spy networks which existed before 9/11 but became insanely worse post-9/11. All that spying which has resulted in zero prevention of shootings or any type of terror plot. People gave up freedom and gained no security… just a thin veil of theater of security and daily indignities of half stripping at the airport so some Neanderthal can see your junk in the radiation spinny device. Or the knowledge that every thing you say or type online (and offline with phones everywhere) is or has potential to be recorded or monitored and if you stand against some key positions and offer solutions of actual change and intent to enact it… well, it leads to self-censorship. Just ranting now, but I think most people do broadly know about this stuff they also justify it to themselves in the delusion of “well, I gotta use something like Twitter!” when you obviously do not (I’ve never had a proper real Twitter account because the platform has always been dogass and a terrible idea for any real interaction. Useful for quick news updates but worthless and just harmful imo for anything further)