1. You should use a VPN or an tracker blocker like DuckduckGo. This is the only way to slow down the information you are sending out. You might not be able to completely stop Google and Samsung from tracking you, but there’s no reason to share yourself with all other data harvesting services.

2. You have to obfuscate the info that makes it through by using multiple, unlinked Google accounts that let you put separate components of your life into separate silos.

The goal is to move you to powershell

Why put up with their abuse?

It was October 20th 2014.

I left Windows because of the Settings nonsense.

12 years later you rubes are still getting fucked by this garbage. That’s why I’m here. 😂

Windows 8 came out in 2012. I switched to Linux shortly after.

If you’ve been suffering through this as a home user you have nobody but yourself to blame.

You’re not so busy you can’t learn a new OS in 12 years!

Plebs.

Google says Manifest v3 is being done “for security reasons” but what they don’t say is that it’s not for your security.

It’s a Judge Dredd situation.

Google is vertically integrating the roles of content provider (ads) and content server so that web pages load exactly the way the page’s developer expects them to. This necessarily excludes things that selectively filter content, like blockers.

They’re essentially taking an open framefork for the web and replacing it with interactive pdfs, that show exactly what the web developer wants, and collects exactly the information the developer wants to know about you.

If you think you should have more control, use Firefox. Anyone using Chrome is complict at this point.

I used the Mcdonalds app a few times and the drivethru was always faster, lmao.

They require location services and don’t start cooking until you’re inside their geofence, but IME they seem to still prioritize drivethru customers.

The road standards are designed to protect the occupants, not the other users on the road.

This is a critical flaw with current safety and CAFE standards.

You say that like a specific technology is inevitable, but it never is. The general march of tech will continue on, but no one thing is ever guaranteed.

e.g. 20 years ago everyone needed custom browser toolbars and now it’s not even possible to add one on major browsers. We eliminated the need for browser features by cramming 99% of what we need into a handful of websites that are constantly refreshed.

e.g. 10 years ago blockchain was surging and today it still doesn’t have a usable application. Turns out spreadsheets don’t really need to be distributed.

Machine learning is just an algorithm nobody understands. If I needed something to give me wrong answers to questions I’ll ask my dog.

It’s still popular because it was popular.

Also, it was simple and modular.

It was largely succeeded by monolithic and enshittified versions of iTunes, which have zero appeal these days. So it’s still remembered fondly for not enshittifying and not trying to build a walled garden.

Well, it is on Android…

But the main app is tightly integrated into the win32 api–moving it to linux would basically require a complete rewrite. DEADBEEF is an example of something like this. Parallel values and ideals, but open source.

There are wine-bottled versions out there. Of course, whether or not output is bit perfect would depend on the wine settings. Bottling it, of course, defeats the point of the program being highly modular/extensible.

Also, you have to remember that a lot of proprietary formats have proprietary encoders/decoders that are incompatible with the GPL.

Shipping Windows binaries are much less of a hassle for the dev than than trying to reverse-engineer everything they need or figuring out how to manage dependencies with different licenses across different package managers and distros with different goals.

tl;dl foobar2000 is an excellent sum of its parts; like Winamp was back-in-the-day. You start changing parts and you get a different sum.

How many mac applications are coded using win32 api?

Put a couple 18650 cells under the hingle like it’s 2008

Opera has always been do-do and always had a do-do engine. Now it’s spyware.

That dumb reason is Tether printing new phoney-bucks.

Advertising is a drain on society that encourages regular people to choose and act suboptimally.

There are absolutely allowed to be laws around advertising and people absolutely have the right to be annoyed when those laws are not properly protecting them.

Video games are no longer a wild frontier, it’s a 50 year old established industry and market that is wildly profitable and absolutely deserves to be legislated into polite and proper conduct.

We absolutely should bitch and moan that meaningful legislation is not being passed on this front.

Your username checks out.

Correct.

You can run linux on just any hardware, yet somehow the capitalist still manage to fuck it up.

They could remove the app from their app store if they cared.

This is practically nothing compared to doing that.

Why not remove the app from their app store?