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I played around with old iPads for a bit and then gave up. successful vendor lock for sure. I just wanted a home assistant front end without having to sign in to apple or use safari

Adventure

“somebody get this freaking duck away from me”

with matter devices, you can possibly do some fun networking, and block them from reaching the outside world completely. then you just need to trust your firewall

etckeeper, and borg/vorta for /home

I try to be good about everything being installed in packages, even if Im the one that made the package. that means I only have to worry about backing up my local package archive. but Ive never actualy recreated a personal system from a backup, and usually end up starting from a fresh install, slowly adding back things from the backup if I missed them. this tends to cut down on cruft and no longer needed hacks and fixes. also makes for a good way to be exposed to new paradigms (desktop environments, shells, etc)

something that helps is daily notes. one file for any day Im working on my system and want to remember what a custom file, confg edit, or downloaded/created package does and why. these get saved separately and I try to remember to grep them before asking the internet

i see the benefit to snapshots, but disk space is expensive, and Im (usually) careful (enough) not to lock myself out or prevent boots. anything catastophic I have to fix is usually seen as a fun, stressful learning experience! that rarely happens anymore, for better or for worse

shoutout to USAA banking app that detected my root, but just showed a warning and allowed me to continue. that’s how it ahould be imho

because workers don’t collectively own the means of production.

not to be like that, but once some new hotness graduates from 2 people in a garage, the controlling interest is never the workers who have a vested interest in products, daily work (and a brand) they can be proud of, but investors with only short term profit on their mind. innovators- and inventors-turned-C suite executives jump ship when bought out, leaving the real meat and potatoes, the real work behind the brand, to be offshored, profit prioritized and picked clean.

buy from worker-owned co-ops. buy from local crafters and people deserving of the label ‘artisan’. flat out refuse to buy from brands that are a sad, hollowed out husk of their former selves. more importantly - most importantly - do what you can to keep your retirement investments away from quartly-profit mills who couldnt care less about workers or customers beyond raw sales numbers. and definitely, definitely never agree to work for them.

one of my absolute favs. it’s a co-op where one player is randomly, secretly a cylon, sabotaging the groups efforts.

you can toss people in the brig. theyll protest “Im not the cylon!!!” and if youre wrong (youre often wrong), the group suffers by losing the jailed character’s special ability, while trying to fight off an attack until managing to jump.

best part? half way through, you draw new loyalty cards. sleeper cylon activated!!!

its genuinely hard not to run out of food, or water, or just get overrun by a boarding party. some of the best fun losing Ive ever had

can’t labels and artists pay for some kind of premium placement in discover weekly, release radar, and playlist recs?

ok, after some research, found this:

In some cases, commercial considerations, such as the cost of content or whether we can monetize it, may influence our recommendations. For example, Discovery Mode gives artists and labels the opportunity to identify songs that are a priority for them, and our system will add that signal to the algorithms that determine the content of personalized listening sessions. When an artist or label turns on Discovery Mode for a song, Spotify charges a commission on streams of that song in areas of the platform where Discovery Mode is active (Discovery Mode is not active in our editorial playlists). This signal increases the likelihood of the selected songs being recommended, but does not guarantee it.

so, at the very least, the recs you get are definitely not organic, and favor major labels, rich folks, and if Spotify can make any money off streaming the track in the first place

not saying the algorithm doesn’t get it right most of the time (they’d be shooting themselves in the foot if it was all sponsored), but if it’s favoring big labels and drowning out everyone else in the name of revenue for Spotify, I prefer to choose other ways to find new stuff. if Spotify needs more money to pay the bills, imho they should plainly be asking the consumers up front

I find myself immediately opening the video transcript for many videos. creating a well made video that offers more than a few paragraphs of text is often a challenge

They care about being able to hire labor, which we provide, and they care about revenue and profit, which we also provide. Not defending any behavior, but the consequences in a healthy economy would largely come from customers, potential and current employees. Failing that, large issues would be overcome by regulations, or at least enforcing existing ones (codified rules against monopolies, for examples, are just words if not enforced).

Without consumers willing (and able) to make sacrifices (like paying higher prices) to reward good corporate behavior, and to avoid companies with purely short-term profit motivated behavior, this is what we can and should expect. Nevermind companies are rewarded by shareholder and investor support based more on profits than.how those profits were made, especially when many of those shareholders feel forced to turn to the stock market to fund their retirement, as pensions are so increasingly a rare option.

Would voting for fresh representatives possibly increase instability in out daily lives? Is that instability a possibly necessary cost of maintaining effective regulation of the investor class that has captured our legislative system to their own benefit?

There are systemic problems at play here- not to downplay the choices this individual company made, but the focus could be on the larger forces at work. If your first reaction is that boycotts and choices by consumers and employees, no matter how organized and widespread, do not work, then I ask you, dear reader, to consider what might work to make the necessary systemic changes, and what, if anything, you can do to help make them happen.

The investor class has made it clear what their playbook is, as they have time and time again thru history: explotation, and as much of it as they can get away with. The question then becomes what us, the ever-increasingly exploited, are going to do about it.

no war but class war.

ed:I hope that didnt come off as disagreement- just trying to voice frustration with a side of “everyone who agrees with you please take a moment to think about the big picture, and what you can do about it” because I’m also tired of this slide into an increasingly boring dystopia