I see a lot of ads for ai slop on the subway and I refuse to engage with them. I don’t look them up. Fuck 'em.

Sometimes people vandalize them and if I saw someone doing so, I don’t know what you’re talking about.

The original oblivion was bad.

Current Microsoft is bad.

This is not surprising.

There are better games to spend time with.

Another way I’m a little insufferable but like… yeah the pandemic and quarantine sucked, but I read a lot of books, played a lot of video games, had a great online DND game.

Some people just seem so helpless and inept. They’d be like “I just need to see other people” and I’m like please develop some discipline.

Cars (well, the car-first infrastructure in most of the US) is already a pretty effective forment nexus.

Cool. Fuck cars. Take transit in NYC.

They could pay people to check, but it’s more important that they spend billions on slop and executive bonus.

Fuck Spotify. I’ll buy albums (drm free, mostly from Bandcamp), pirate, or go without.

Today is bandcamp Friday, too. Bandcamp passes their cut on to the band.

I feel a little guilty by not skipping work entirely, but I have the legal minimum of paid time off. So I’m technically on the clock, but I’m not doing any work.

Sometimes I make a conscious effort to think about what I would say to someone else in my situation. It’s helpful.

Meanwhile, the sheep and the goats part just gets ignored

34 “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. 35 For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, 36 I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

37 “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? 38 When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? 39 When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

40 “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

I’m sure they’ll do some backflips to say “the brothers only mean people I like”, but then there’s the “who is my neighbor?” part.

29 But wanting to vindicate himself, he said to Yeshua, “Then who is my neighbor?”

30 Yeshua replied, “A certain man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho. He was attacked by robbers, who stripped him and beat him. Then they left, abandoning him as half dead. 31 And by chance, a kohen was going down that road; but when he saw the man, he passed by on the opposite side. 32 Likewise a Levite also, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the opposite side. 33 But a Samaritan who was traveling came upon him; and when he noticed the man, he felt compassion. 34 He went up to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on olive oil and wine. Then setting him on his own animal, he brought him to a lodge for travelers and took care of him. 35 The next day he took out two denarii[b] and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, ‘Take care of him. And whatever else you spend, upon my return I will repay you myself.’ 36 Which of these three seems to you a neighbor to the one attacked by robbers?”

37 And he said, “The one who showed mercy to him.”

Then Yeshua said to him, “Go, and you do the same.”

But they’re not sincere, so the text doesn’t matter.

I miss my pandemic D&D¹ group. It was an 18 year old that just finished high school, two people in their mid 20s in grad school, me in my mid 30s, and one person in their mid 40s. Every once in a while we’d get some interesting generation-gap moments.

¹ I don’t even like D&D specifically, but that group really made it work.

It wasn’t working at first but now it is!

I assume management is free to do what they want with their phones, so they can fuck all the way off.

People are lazy and don’t think very much. Spotify is right there.

Also enshittification: it was better to draw people in, and then they made it shittier and people stay

I buy music (mostly from Bandcamp). Now I have a big library and no subscription fee.

I don’t know a lot about how fingerprinting works, but some of what i’ve read is pretty insidious. Some things could probably be obfuscated, but some of what the trackers use has legitimate purposes as well. Your application may serve different content based on the screen size, or fall back to an older library if such-and-such API isn’t supported.

Personally I’d rather make targeting advertising and tracking illegal, and gut the whole thing to avoid the arms race.

So you’re going to make it illegal to call getBoundingClientRect and then pass that information to fetch through any mechanism?

You’d have to kill a lot of JavaScript and CSS for that to work, and then a lot of legitimate function goes away.

Done much web development work?

I’m pretty sure for fonts they can tell because they have different widths, which affects page layout, which can be measured.

There’s a lot of stuff like that.

Best would be make it illegal and give the law teeth. Solving it technically will always be an arms race.

I learned in my youth not to read reviews of things I like. It’s unpleasant and pointless to read someone savaging your favorite albums or books.

(More critical analysis can be fine, but regular Internet reviews are not so worthwhile)