That’s a good point. And to add to it, I’ve tried using Briar as an emergency option if there’s no Internet. And there seems to be a massive flaw in that scenario: you need the Internet to authenticate yourself on the app. So if there’s no Internet it’s useless. I just tried switching off WiFi and 5G on my phone and yup, can’t log in, so can’t use it.

The interesting thing for me is that Grok was originally pretty ‘woke’ itself. Then Musk lobotomized it and turned it into a Nazi.

100% agree about boycotting everything that toxic nepo-baby asshole touches. Tesla, Twitter, Space X, whatever.

I just went into my settings after reading this article (and getting a bit frustrated that it was a wall of text with no clear instructions right up front).

I did a search in settings for “gemini” and found the Gemini settings. There’s no clear ‘off’ switch. But there’s is an option to switch back to Google Assistant. So I did that. And not when I search for Gemini in settings it urges me to enable Gemini.

I’m taking that as a good sign that I’ve disabled it permanently. Thought I’d post this info in case it helps someone else. Or so if I’m incorrect somebody else can correct me.

This is a great idea, but it would be difficult to manage.

It reminds me of the instant messenger wars during the late 1990s/early 2000s.

AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) had a virtual monopoly on the industry, and so when Microsoft started breaking into it with MSN Messenger they cracked AIM’s protocol so their users could communicate with AIM users. This enraged AOL, and there was a wild cat-and-mouse updates battle for a few months. AOL would push an update to block Microsoft, then Microsoft would push an update to get around that. Sometimes there were multiple updates from both sides per day.

And then there was Trillian messenger just sneaking through the middle providing access to both, mostly unnoticed (at least for a while).

Anchor? I hardly knew her!

ETA: happy cake day.

Okay. But one of my points still stands that there are already a bunch of p2p Bluetooth-based messaging apps out there.

Oh great, yet another secure messaging app.

Getting people to move off Messenger or even WhatsApp is tricky enough already for to interview and resistance to change. But even when you can coax them to move, you then often end up in a debate about where to move to. Signal, Briar, Viber, whatever proprietary thing Apple is currently pushing, or the thousands of other options/apps. I guess we can just add this one to that long list.

I try to use local stores or other websites, and only use Amazon if I can’t find what I need there. But at least half the time I end up having to use Amazon because I can’t find what I need.

It’s probably a kind of vicious cycle: as Amazon eats further into profits of other companies they are more limited in what they can offer.

I’m genuinely surprised Utah isn’t higher on this list. I’ve driven in many states, and that state has by far the worst drivers I’ve encountered.

Why not both (and many other countries too)?

With tungsten cubes apparently. Lots and lots of tungsten cubes!

Of course he will keep it that way. He won’t have the time to continue sucking off Putin if he has to think about NATO membership. Hungary needs to flush that miserable turd down the political toilet once and for all.

I fucking loath LinkedIn! I don’t go on there much, but every time I do it’s 99% shameless self-promotion using vapid, one-dimensional content that’s wrapped in a thin veneer of motivational speech bullshit.

How do many people can’t see through it (let alone tolerate it) is beyond me. LinkedIn embodies so much of what’s wrong with modern society.

JavaScript, AJAX, and modern web frameworks have pushed us away from displaying information in a pure and clean way. We need to go back to a better time!

Looks at no-HTML websites

Shit, we’ve gone back too far!

Exactly!

Screw that. Give the government a way to track my vitals 24/7 and sell that information off to their cronies in the private sector? No thanks.

They could probably use some of that thermal energy to power lighting that would grow some veggies and other low-resource plants. Although they probably aren’t set up for that today.

ETA: Turns out they are set up to use thermal energy to generate their own food, which actually makes a lot of sense given how resourceful they are as a people.

That’s not how knowledge works. You can’t just have an LLM hallucinate in missing gaps in knowledge and call it good.

I gave up Reddit after the great API fiasco. Once in a while I check out Bluesky, about the same frequency as I look at Mastodon. But about 98% of my social media time is spent on Lemmy.

Especially that punisher skull motif with the Trump hair. That takes the cringe to a new level.