Cut to a younger me looking at HDDs in Walmart, and wondering why the fuck they were using much higher numbers than what the drive actually had. That’s when I learned the difference, and started grow my hate for advertising bullshit.

Huh. I hadn’t thought about that. That’s not a bad point either.

Why would Reddit ban it? It’s an easy way for them to collect users’ IP addresses for their corporate overlords.

This is barely related, but I’ve recently discovered it using Firefox and just wanted to share my misery. If you’re not using Chrome with the Google Docs extension, then Google Sheets will REFUSE to let you copy and paste with a right click context menu. But you can just press the keyboard keys to do so, or use the menu options to do so.

Like…what? It works, but they refuse to let you do it with the context menu, despite including them in the context menu.

If you try, it pops up a window and tells you that you have to install their extension or pound sand.

Problem is that one day, it will. I’m old enough to be able to see the difference in how much freedom has been lost online.

It’s not impossible. North Korea exists. There’s nothing stopping the rest of the world from adopting the same authoritarian regulations and technology bans.

That’s why people need to be involved in their governments; elections, local regulations, and what have you. It’s easy to complain that things aren’t perfect, or that you don’t like any of the options; but being part of the process, long term, is the only real way to fix that. The more people that give up and say they don’t care, the faster corruption infects everything and ruins what good is there. And trying to be clever and say that “one side is just as bad as the other” is not only a selfish lie people tell themselves to feel better about not doing anything, but it actively helps the authoritarians claim power.

The only thing that staves off corruption and authoritarianism is when the people being governed get involved and stay vigilant. Even small things like school board elections matter down the road.

You want to have a free internet? Then vote in school board elections. Seriously.

It already is. For example, it’s basically impossible to run your own email server these days, because most big email providers just block residential IPs to reduce spam.

Lots of ISPs block or heavily filter things like torrents.

Your ISP might decide you having a personal server at home is against their terms and force you to make a business account. They don’t want people uploading, only downloading.

Some countries are trying to weaken or ban encryption across the board.

And this is only slightly related, but things like websites that let you watch movies or shows are dying. They either all share the same server for video, or they just copy the files from each other. If you find one and watch a video with a little glitch, you’re likely to find that same glitch in all the other websites too. Think things like TV logos, audio suddenly changing language for a few seconds, scan lines on old VHS or TV recordings, etc… There used to be a lot, but now all the small players are being sued or shut down, and only the largest ones are still alive. The noose is tightening.

Don’t forget Nintendo.

Step 1 - Push people to piracy.

Step 2 - Complain to lawmakers about rampant piracy.

Step 3 - Get governments to outlaw and shut down piracy sources, compatible technologies, and generally force more authoritarian standards and laws.

Step 4 - P2P starts to die. Piracy starts to condense around large hubs.

Step 5 - Make money suing the only large hubs of piracy that still exist, and shut them down.

Step 6 - Profit from lack of competition and ability to force DRM into everything.

Never heard of a minifier. It’s a brilliant idea though.

“I’m switching from Chrome because they killed ad blocking.”

“OMG! Firefox takes 5 seconds to even load webpages! I’ll just go back to Chrome.”

The goal is to prevent the competition from growing.

“5E3”

It helps a complete newbie like me get started and even learn while I do. Due to its restrictions and shortcoming, I’ve been having to learn how to structure and plan a project more carefully and thoughtfully, even creating design specs for programs and individual functions, all in order to provide useful prompts for ChatGPT to act on. I learn best by trial and error, with the ability to ask why things happened or are the way they are.

So, as a secondary teaching assistant, I think it’s very useful. But trying to use the API for ChatGPT 4 is…not worth it. I can easily blow through $20 in a few hours. So, I got a day and a half of use out of it before I gave up. :|

Holy shit. You just reminded me that I used to be one of the people documenting and updating the wiki for MyPaint. You’re 100% right.

Maybe I should try doing something like that again, start small and use the process of the documentation to help me learn and engrain stuff rather than flailing around trying to implement it from scratch.

Huh. I like this idea.

Basically, use Twitter or they let people impersonate you.

$50,000 is nothing to pretend to be a major newspaper and ruin their reputation.

Fuck Musk.

Basically small deliberate changes to the brightness or hue of chunks or even individual pixels scattered across the frame. Netflix would have the original, and would know where to look for the changes that embed the user ID data, or whatever.

They just get a copy of the leaked video, locate the ID, and take the user to court or ban them.

I’m not great at explaining it, so look up image stenography to get an idea of what I mean.

Anyway, I don’t have any proof they do that, but I guess I always assumed they did, because… why not?

For years I’ve assumed there was some kind of invisible image manipulation that effectively encrypts the Netflix user ID in the video feed itself, so they can use leaked video to pinpoint users that share recordings.

Same type of thing paper printers do, and AI giants are trying to push now.