Why the hell did The Guardian include comment from an Amazon Spokesperson? ‘‘Nuh uh, that’s not true’’ no fucking duh that’s their response.

Got a secondhand Pixel phone and installed GrapheneOS. I love it.

I’m just now starting my degree is software engineering. I’m 31. I’d gotten comfortable enough with Linux that I wanted to try NixOS to avoid having my system get borked again (in my case, KDE Plasma started having shell crashes at log in).

If I was only using NixOS to run a basic computer set up? Sure, no problem. If I want to rice and customize it? No, I wasn’t ready.

I know it’s not for everyone, but my Light Phone III arrives soon and tech headlines of late aren’t making me regret my choice.

My take: if Rossman came out swinging as an anti-corporate revolutionary, his ideas wouldn’t have wide appeal right now, since many people still think the problem is just “bad” mega-corporations. So instead, he’s arguing for less-shitty tech corporations as a first step (symbolized by Clippy, of a less-intrusive software age), rather than “destroy all tech corpos now.” No, Microsoft wasn’t good then, but they were less awful.

If his video were starkly anti-capitalist, it would not have reached 2.5 million people, and I’d say getting that many people to start thinking about rejecting invasive software is a great step in the right direction, as opposed to ideological purism that would only resonate with those who already agree. The need for these baby steps is frustrating for those who already see the big picture, but a few chats with my coworkers quickly reveal how shockingly little some people have actually thought about the sins of big tech.

Precisely this. Leftist rhetoric about wages is often framed for other leftists, without addressing the core arguments underpinning centrist and conservative views on why the rich “deserve” their wealth. People say “theft” without making arguments for why our definition of theft needs to change.

I’m in complete agreement with this perspective, but rarely do I see discussions like this address the sticking point centrists and conservatives get hung up on: they don’t believe this is “theft.”

When I told my coworker about the historic productivity-to-wages gap, she argued (paraphrasing), “Could it not be that gap is reflective of the CEOs innovating ways to make their workers increasingly productive, while the value of those workers’ labor hasn’t actually increased, therefore explaining why the minds behind those innovations deserve the wealth?”

This conversation will go nowhere if we keep throwing around terms like “wage theft” and skipping step 1 where we argue the moral determination as to why that is true.

To say “that feeling” of indignation (at the letter’s inclusion in a gallery) is the same as other things that make him roll his eyes, is reductionist. We regard things as stupid for different reasons; they’re not all the “same feeling.” As others have said, the artist’s intentionality in presenting something is part of its message. So the indignation he felt about a piece being put in a gallery is part of that piece’s effect on him, born from the artist’s choices. That feeling is different than hearing a moron say something dumb and thinking it’s stupid.

Intentionality is the key. Case in point, “language evolves” is a silly thing to say after a mistake, but many subcultures start misspelling things on purpose, and that intentionality is how language evolves.