Don’t worry. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

Personally I feel like I’m too addicted to Youtube (and Reddit, which is what brought me back here), so if I can’t block ads, perhaps I’ll be able to quit. To be honest though, even just disabling watch history and reducing subscriptions makes a massive difference to how addictive it is.

Fuck Putin, the warmongering cunt. I hope Ukraine continues to get Western support and can kick Russia out of their country, however slim the chances might be looking right now. Russia extending its influence and things gradually going back to business as usual, only for them to do it again in another 10 years won’t be good for any Western democracies.

Haven’t really been following the Israel/Palestine thing much to be honest, but it would be nice if people would stop killing one another. Also really sucks that it benefits Putin.

Assassinating Abe wasn’t right, but when I heard the killer’s side of the story I honestly felt a bit sorry for him. Glad to hear something is being done about the Moonies.

I was watching a video by right to repair advocate Louis Rossman yesterday and he was basically saying that he’s fine to go after big companies and the government to try and get right to repair passed, but he doesn’t want to fuck with Scientology because they appear to be psychos that will harass the shit out of him and probably wreck his life if he gets in their way. Apparently they are anti-right to repair because they have some fake ass thetan reading machines they sell for $5000.

Anyway, he mentions some of the shit they did in his video, and while I’m not sure if it’s a fact or not, he does mention that they were going after the IRS for years to try and get out of paying taxes after laws changed and they lost their tax-exempt status. After a huge amount of harassment and other crime against the IRS over 37 years, they eventually got their taxes reduced from something like a billion+ dollars to $12.5 million… How did they not just end up in jail?

And it doesn’t even matter. I’m starting to wonder if Elon is just trying to see how much he can annoy people without them moving to another social media platform. Twitter wasn’t great before and is now much worse from what I can tell, yet its users don’t actually care because if they did, they’d have moved to alternatives, which hasn’t really happened.

God, I hate reinstalling Windows. Whenever I see “Try reinstalling Windows” as a serious solution to some tech problem on the Windows forums I feel so irritated because to get everything back to how it was (*hopefully *minus the issue) is basically a half day to full day undertaking because of all the bloat and annoying settings I have to change.

Linux never annoyed me as much as long as I put my home directory on a separate partition, though to be fair, I didn’t use it as much and was never quite as balls deep in custom settings and apps as with Windows due to Windows being a requirement for work.

Didn’t know that. I also got some kind of shady vibes from Kiwi, but never run into any issues with it. Firefox was causing all kinds of problems with pages failing to load so I bailed, but would be glad to return if they fix the bugs and add full extension support.

I’ve been using Kiwi browser for ages and it’s had extension support the entire time since I quit using Firefox on mobile. I would still be using Firefox if it hadn’t just kept randomly not loading pages anymore and requiring a restart, because it did at least support the one extension I can’t live without; ublock origin, but the bugs were just too much. I might give Firefox mobile another shot when this new version hits stable release.

I just wish they would fix the back gesture to never take me back to the home screen, or at least give me that as an option. It’s the one thing that frustrates me to hell on an almost daily basis when I’m using Android. I don’t need another gesture that takes me to the home screen, and especially not one that often closes the app I was looking at altogether, meaning it needs restarting.

So he bought the users and is hoping some of them stay while he rebrands? Or he genuinely just wants to destroy Twitter? I just have no idea what this man is doing, but perhaps he’ll prove us all wrong and show that he really is a genius in a five years?

I think listening to audio only (no video wasting bandwidth) with the screen off and Youtube Music seem like actually valuable things to have if you do a lot of driving. I don’t listen to Spotify at home, but when I was driving a lot I sure did.

I’d pay money to break my Youtube addiction completely to be honest. There is good content, but I don’t like the way it’s served. Not just ads, but recommendations. I don’t get addicted to Netflix in the same way, though I do sometimes binge watch shows. Certainly wouldn’t pay for Youtube, and if they made it impossible to watch for free without ads by preventing ad blockers working I think I’d rather just quit entirely and pay for Nebula, since it focuses on the kind of content I value more and don’t get as addicted to watching.

Uhm, so what extra value to subscribers did they add recently? Is it just a case of Google’s costs going up or simply their need to make more profit to delight shareholders?

This may be true, but I’ve seen basically zero ads in Vivaldi with uBlock Origin installed. However, perhaps there are issues I’m just not noticing, or problems caused by having uBlock active that don’t occur in Firefox.

I use Vivaldi on desktop, but due to having problems with Firefox for Android I switched to Kiwi on mobile as it has basically full extension support. It’s Chromium, and I’m not sure if it’s maintained well or what, but I haven’t had any problems with it, whereas Firefox would just stop loading pages after a bit and it didn’t get fixed for a year or so and I got fed up.

Does it matter if you use a Chromium browser that isn’t Chrome itself? I know Google has a large influence in Chromium development, but presumably they can’t just stick tracking in other Chromium based browsers, can they? I just really like Vivaldi.

I think he’s already been in trouble with the SEC over alleged Tesla stock manipulation (using Twitter to claim he was taking the company private at 420 a share or something), so maybe it could have become a real mess, so he decided to just go ahead with the deal.

He also manipulated crypto with his oversized influence through Twitter, though afaik the SEC can’t do shit about that as crypto was (and still is) basically unregulated.

It’s much harder to fuck up so quickly, since a Tesla is not a live service, so there’s not a lot that will change about the already sold cars.

I guess if Musk decides to save money by firing engineers and reducing QA on the car software, and insists on pushing really buggy software then it could get gnarly I guess, but I don’t think he’s that stupid, and I don’t think all these Twitter moves are entirely about trying to make a profit; It’s so bad I think there is a level of malevolence involved.

You don’t actually even notice that it has these features unless you turn them on. I use Vivaldi because it has really nice built-in tab features, such as tiling, stacking and workspaces, all of which I find invaluable on a laptop or single-screen setup. Its history screen is also quite handy and I find many of these features much more accessible than other browsers, which often streamline things to the point of being annoying.

I previously used Firefox, but it seemed really buggy at times, and the mobile version was especially bad on my old Pixel 4a for some reason, so I switched to Kiwi on mobile for extension support.

What actually happens when servers are federated with one another? Does the content of each server get mirrored for redundancy, or does it just mean that users can see users, posts and communities from servers that are federated? When they defederate, does content that was previously visible to users just vanish completely, or is it merely that new content (created after defederation) will not be visible?