In the context of online dating, I actually agree with implementing the same level of KYC checks that banks and credit card issuers have adopted. I also think the FTC needs to step in and break up the monopoly Match Group has created.

All of these platforms are littered with fake profiles, scammers and foreign women searching for the means to a green card. It’s made them practically unusable.

Google tried to break regional US monopolies with Google Fiber, which to my surprise is still going despite Google’s best efforts to kill off projects that aren’t immediately successful and is active in 19 US states or around 40 different cities.

The only way I can see this catastrophe ending is one of three ways:

1. Satellite internet - Elon Musk would need to massively drop the price of Starlink to encourage others to switch, or a competitor would need to pop up and offer similar service at a lower price point, likely through Blue Origin or Virgin Galactic.
2. The US collectively vote the Republicans out of office by a landslide and bring in a left-wing Democrat leader. Won’t happen for so many reasons.
3. Mesh networks. Something like Freifunk but on a much bigger scale.

You had us in the first half, not gonna lie!

I use Firefox because Google killed Manifest v2 support and (with it) uBlock Origin. Unfortunately they seem to be heading towards the AI slop route.

Yes, Edge and Brave exist but one is maintained by Microslop and will likely also follow in Google’s footsteps, and the other I don’t particularly trust because they have a homophobe as CEO and did some crypto token shit with their ad system.

A bunch of y’all would have been ragging on Blender 10 years ago. Ragging on Krita. In 2012 acting like gaming in Linux was doomed. In 2015 acting like Kdenlive would never reduce crashes and improve functionality. Acted like Darktable would never be competitive with Lightroom. Godot would be no good for anything more than 2d sidescrollers and never compete with Unity 5. A bunch of do nothing fence sitters. Firefox and GIMP developers contribute more to the good of humanity than anyone crying about them in this thread

The last time I used Linux as a desktop OS was around 2008. Back then the state of FOSS was absolutely dire.

I used to have a shitty Packard Bell PC at home which was weirdly partitioned, 20GB dedicated to the C:\ partition and 100GB dedicated to D:. An asshole “friend” at school goaded me into pirating Norton PartitionMagic and using it to merge the two partitions and pretty much totalled my Windows installation. As I didn’t have a backup CD I had to use Ubuntu for a few months.

The only game I genuinely got working on Linux was World of Warcraft and even installing that was a pain. WC3 was supposedly “Platinum” on Wine’s AppDB but would often freeze and didn’t support using the mouse to move the camera. Some versions also couldn’t connect online.

Fastfoward to today and gaming on Linux has evolved by leaps and bounds, in large part thanks to Valve. The only games you genuinely can’t get running are those with kernel level anticheat software.

As someone who recently started getting into digital art, I’m genuinely shocked at how good Krita is.

This is a raster graphics editor that could could potentially rival the likes of Photoshop, Affinity Photo and Paint Shop Pro in terms of features. GIMP by comparison is dogshit.

Literally Spez right now…

(I’d post the uncensored image but IIRC Lemmy World is German-based and have strict laws against Nazi iconography)

He’s wilfully given the data of users who have criticized Trump and ICE, AND he looks like a spitting image of Tintin…

Why does he look like Steve Carrell playing a sociopathic big tech asshole?

Kids back in the eighties were coding in BASIC, running command line prompts and using home computers like the ZX Spectrum, Atari ST, Amstrad CPC 464 and Commodore 64. The most I did in terms of coursework for my IT classes during my secondary school days was make a personal webpage about my hobbies & interests using Microsoft Frontpage. Sixth form (where I did A Level Computing, basically 11th & 12th Grade equivalents) was even worse, It was 2010 and they were still fucking teaching us Visual Basic 6 and the Waterfall Model of system development!

Something like an introduction to unix and programming should be mandatory. They seem to think that kids need to “learn to use a computer and the internet.” It’s a fucking point-and-click interface. What is there to learn? The software industry is very skilled at making it all so easy that a chimpanzee can use it.

This may be infuriating or sad for you to read, but very young kids who have been brought up on smartphones, TikTok and YouTube Kids these days can’t even do basic shit like this. Like, I’ve genuinely heard about kids starting kindergarten and reception who cannot even turn pages on a book and try to swipe left/right on them like they’re a touchscreen. Some even struggle to work with a physical keyboard or a gamepad that actually has tactile inputs.

The only other group where I’ve personally seen such ineptitude with technology is in old people. I used to work in customer support for a major right-wing British newspaper, and it was mainly things like website account access issues, basic tablet/smartphone tech support, and promotion enquiries I dealt with. I genuinely hated that job for a lot of reasons, but a big part of it is that trying to guide a senile 75+ year old pensioner through a basic password reset or explain how to redeem an e-voucher.

My dad is 80 years old and as the younger autistic one in the family who got economically screwed and is still living with my parents, I’m left with having to continually explain how to do basic email or phone tasks to him.

We didn’t have graphing calculators in school. The most we used were scientific ones which had sine, cosine, factorials, that kind of stuff.

This may be the millennial in me talking but I’ve generally found schools to be fucking dire when it comes to implementing technology in the classroom.

During Year 10 (equivalent to 9th Grade for any Yanks here), our school enrolled in a government programme to start using PDAs in the classroom. So they offered every kid in our year a Pocket LOOX 720 at a heavily subsidized price.

They were never used in lessons.

Pupils instead used them as music/video playback devices and to play games, since it was 2007, smartphones weren’t yet a thing and YouTube was just in its infancy.

Maybe things have improved since I left secondary school.

The Machiavellian part of me thinks Ring screwed up by not raising the stakes. Search Party and the way they advertised it makes you go "awww’ when you see the golden retriever and then “wait, WHAT?” when they show all their Ring doorbells going full surveillance mode in locating the missing dog.

A lengthier ad showing a pedophile being tracked down and arrested by law enforcement mid-abduction, their victim rescued, then the nonce being served justice may have had a more positive response.

I mean, “think of the children” has been the perfect strawman argument to justify mass surveillance, after all…

Eww, Voat and Ruqqus.

Part of the reason Stephen Colbert’s show is getting cancelled is over the Trump Administration approving a merger between Paramount and NBC?

And then they decided to offer South Park Studios a $1.5bn deal…

I’m guessing the Charlie Kirk assassination isn’t the only reason South Park is getting delayed.

As disgusted as I am with the people that have been openly celebrating Charlie Kirk’s assassination, I don’t think death should automatically make somebody immune from criticism. All Kimmel did was point out that the MAGA crowd are desperately trying to characterize Tyler Robinson as a dangerous leftist, despite evidence so far pointing to him being a Gropyer (alt-right white nationalist faction that has openly feuded with Charlie Kirk.)

Kimmel deserves better than to be cancelled because Trump is a twiggered wittle snowflake who can take about as much criticism as a Reddit or Discord moderator.

Thinking of canceling Disney+? You’re not alone

I already cancelled mine over a year ago because Disney tried to dismiss a wrongful death lawsuit on the grounds that the family had agreed to a forced arbitration clause, all because their daughter signed up for a Disney+ trial. Do I even need to explain how much of a cunt you need to be in order to wave a forced arbitration agreement at a grieving family whose loved one was killed by the gross negligence of a staff member?

(also, the fact that I can type this comment on Lemmy and not Reddit says it all.)

Counter Strike 2 has a massive problem with cheaters because Valve refuse to make VAC operate at the kernel level.

Just a friendly reminder that the OSA was never about safeguarding kids from seeing porn.

Are the government seriously worried about a child being exposed to Break Stuff or So What on Spotify?

(NOTE: Any links to politician tweets in this comment are from Nitter mirrors, not direct links to Elon Musk’s nazi bar.)

The Technology Secretary, Peter Kyle, pretty much called Nigel Farage a paedophile in a news network interview earlier today because he opposed the Online Safety Act, by saying he’s on the side of sex offenders like Jimmy Savile.

He then went to Twitter and doubled-down on this stance:

If you want to overturn the Online Safety Act you are on the side of predators. It is as simple as that.

This of course generated a lot of fury among the site’s users.

For context, the Online Safety Act has been used to censor and age-gate anything and everything deemed “illegal content” under Ofcom guidelines. Any social media platforms must comply, else risk getting fined up to 10% of your annual global revenue. This is so broadly worded that it includes anything related to illegal immigration and people-smuggling (literally quoted in the GOV.UK page I linked.)

Twitter had genuinely been forced to censor all coverage around anti-asylum seeker protests behind age verification requirements, which has riled up a lot of right-wing politicians here. The reason for these protests is that the previous (Conservative) government had been paying exorbitant amounts of money to house asylum seekers in hotels, effectively lining the pockets of hotel chain executives - all while we deal with a massive housing and cost of living crisis.

This was meant to be a measure to give asylum seekers temporary accommodation which was put in place at the start of COVID, but has been government policy since 2020 with no end in sight.

Labour have also done jack-shit to resolve our skyrocketed (legal) immigration levels since they got into power, except for scrapping the Rwanda Deal which would have deported any illegal migrants to a third country for processing (which as the name obviously suggests, is the East African state of Rwanda.)

Zia Yusuf (head of Reform’s DOGE division, yes they’re ripping off Trump and Elon Musk) had this to say about the OSA on Twitter:

Britain is now a country which you can enter illegally without ID, but need photo ID to watch a protest against people entering without ID.

Let that sink in.

Labour have fucked up so catastrophically hard with how they’ve handled this legislation, that they’ve straight-up generated bipartisan sympathy for the leaders of a right-wing populist party - who are the only political force that have vowed to repeal the legislation because it is being used for mass surveillance and censorship.

Also, if you’re thinking of voting Reform UK in 2029 (and it has honestly crossed my mind because age verification checks are a major sticking point for me), then you should take the pledges from Nigel Farage and Zia Yusuf with a grain of salt. Richard Tice (the party’s deputy leader) openly tweeted support for pushing through mandatory ID checks on social media four years ago.

If Labour don’t get rid of Keir Starmer, do a full cabinet reshuffle and reverse course, we are going to see a Reform landslide in the next election…

Under the guidelines imposed by payment processors which were recently clarified by itch.io, Baldur’s Gate 3 would be banned, as it contains moments of non-consensual sex and bestiality.

The app is literally called Tea, as in “spilling the tea.”

Did I state that? No?

You can fuck off.