raccoona_nongrata

Brave has been a decent chromium-based browser for me that has acceptable privacy features. Particularly, their anti-fingerprinting measures seem to be pretty decent (as far as a tech monkey like me could tell).

They obfuscate your fingerprint, but also do so in a way that makes it appear more generic than Firefox’s anti-fingerprint option. The irony of FF being that it made you more uniquely identifiable to use some of their security measures simply because they make you stand out as more of an anomaly.

It’s funny to me that they didn’t promise there would be no bugs, or even “not a lot of bugs”, just that there would be the least amount. It’s such a relative statement.

It almost reads like a bit of Fallout dialogue or something.

Oh, yes, good point, I think I misunderstood the nature of the sale.

Its interesting you describe Apex as a rage game, it was my go-to game for a no pressure activity to switch my brain off to.

Namely because it doesn’t require a lot of deep thinking and strategizing, your team just kind of roams around using “pack instinct” until you bump into some other group, and then you’re either fast enough to beat them or not. And if you didn’t then there’s literally another match ready in a few minutes, so no harm no foul.

I only stopped playing because I couldn’t be arsed to switch over to the new EA app.

But, I might have this perspective because I play a lot of heart-attack simulators like DayZ and Escape From Tarkov where your lizard brain basically always scanning for danger and the stakes are “high” by video game standards. So next to that Apex is a cakewalk even if I’m losing, but I can see how others might see it as frustrating, especially given the twitchiness.

It’s odd because a common argument I saw for why the Twitter board/ceo was ethically obligated to sell the company to Musk in the first place was to protect the value for shareholders. The idea being that if the board and CEO weren’t doing everything they possibly could to maximize profits at any opportunity, they would open themselves to lawsuits.

It’s an argument we see a lot when companies make some dubious sale or take some action that increases profits at the cost of consumers and workers. That the companies hands are tied and profit always goes above ethics, that it’s just the way of the world.

But if that’s the case, Musk should be getting sued into the ground by now as you say. It seems like a rule that gets applied very selectively.

There is also Bluesky Social, an invite-only beta that uses a different protocol similar to ActivityPub (which lemmy uses). It’s a project that originally merged out of Twitter but is an independent project now, with Jack Dorsey as a board member.

Bluesky itself is suppose to be a microblogging platform similar to Twitter, but the protocol it runs on (Authenticated Transfer Protocol) is meant to work the same way as ActivityPub, to generate diverse, federated social networks.

I’ve not used Bluesky, but I’d be interested to hear experiences from anyone who has. I’m a bit leery about Dorsey being involved simply because he’s one of the Big Corpo Boys, but his running of Twitter was fairly reasonable compared to the current regime.

Yeah, I like that you can overwrite with a message, rather than just delete. I left a link to PowerDeleteSuite in each comment.

Though I did notice that I needed to go community by community using the filter option to get the edit to apply consistently.

So just a word to anyone going to use this tool; it might require a few passes spaced out by a couple minutes depending on how many comments and such you have on your account.

Interesting, most striking is that ad blockers are most prevalently used among age 16-24, I would’ve expected millenials to be a bit more savvy too.

I used scripts like PowerDeleteSuite to overwrite my account data there, not everyone will do this but if people really want to see reddit’s grip on the internet dissolved that’s what they’ll need to commit to doing, as painful as it is. And probably sooner than later, as I would not be surprised if Reddit eventually blocks the use of scripts like PDS (there’s already a rate limit).

Reddit’s seeming invincibility is tied to the content that users created for them and the fact that they have served as a repository for all manner of knowledge over the last few decades. To my mind they’ve abused that privilege and, not to sound too grandiose, I see it as a responsibility to revoke access to the content I provided them.

Hopefully people generally learn the lesson about centralizing everything in this way. Perhaps its best to not have a front page to the Internet at all.

I think many large corporations like Alphabet/Google are making their money as brokers of peoples personal data more so than ads directly on their sites.

Not that I don’t believe ads are a big source of revenue, but YT has been chugging along just fine (and squashing its competitors) for decades without much trouble despite everyone and their grandmother having an ad blocker by now, so I find it hard to buy that they’re suddenly struggling to make ends meet.

If it were a smaller site without much reach I might be more predisposed to believe it.