admiralteal

You mean Half Life: Full Dive, followed by Half Life: Full Dive 2. The second in a trilogy never to be finished.

I, for one, could not be made to care one iota about what Jack Dorsey has to say. He’s a weird little fuck, and only getting weirder.

Time long past to be a lot more honest about these tech billionaires – pretty much every one of was just immensely, immensely lucky, and until they can talk honestly about how nearly everything to do with their success compared to any other mid-level software developer was just blind luck, we should assume everything coming out of their mouths is pure grandiose delusion.

Google loves to have entirely ai-driven moderation which makes decisions that are impossible to appeal. They are certain that one AI team lead is more valuable than 20 customer service agents. Meanwhile, YouTube shorts is still a pipeline to Nazidom and death by electrical fire.

Might be the worst customer service in the tech industry, though that’s a highly competitive title.

They also don’t offer replacement parts (even major parts like the charging case) for their headphones. So I guess they’re intended to be a disposable product. Evil shit.

If you’ve ever had an entirely positive interaction with Google customer service… you’d probably be the first.

The user above is just one of those guys who looks at anything the dems do and thinks, look at this bitch eating crackers.

Nothing good can ever be celebrated or praised. It has to always be bad.

This is the exception to prove the rule that the other interests are definitely illegitimate. This is the website telling you that they give away your data for illegitimate purposes.

It’s not a surprise. We knew this was true. But seeing it’s spelled out like this is a little galling.

Illegitimate: not authorized by the law; not in accordance with accepted standards or rules

The website is basically admitting that they’re using your data maliciously, intentionally, by having this distinction.

Yeah, there were historic cases dating to the prohibition era/early 20th century. And there were historic laws – largely unenforced – that stayed on the books for a while. Laws based on total nonsense. It just got caught up as part of garden-variety moral panic.

There’s definitely still an air around the spirit that it is somehow more illicit and special. Which it… really isn’t.

Absinthe is such a strange mythos.

The thing is, absinthe was quite strong (often ~120 proof – nothing you can’t get today by any means and there’s a lot of popular whiskies that bottle even stronger). It had a whole ritual around drinking it involving fountains/bloom. Importantly, in its heyday, it was popular among the young and arts types because it was just a regular old fad. It was trendy.

But most important, it was popular during a moment in history where alcohol abuse was RAMPANT. One of the drunkest times in history. It was a really bad time that often gets elided over, but the mid 19th century had bonkers alcohol consumption. People were routinely drinking a pint of strong spirits with breakfast and then continuing through the day.

So the tea-totalers slandered it. They made shit up. They said it made you hallucinate, abandon all virtues, go into rages, blah blah blah. Every known thing any drug could do to you, absinthe could too, according to the anti-alcohol lobby. People were literally dying of alcohol toxicity routinely, so the stories were easy to believe. And absinthe developed this almost mystical reputation for being different from other kinds of spirits in the effects it would have on consumers.

A reputation it still has today. People STILL think it is/was illegal, even recently, because it was a hallucinogen. The urban legend that some particular ingredient in it – often the wormwood – is a unique and special substance capable of things nothing else can do. It still has this weird mythology around it.

Meanwhile, anisette spirits much like it are honestly super common all around the Mediterranean and likely the world. Herbsaint, Ouzo, Pastis/Richard, Sambuca, Arak, and any number of Aquavits or Aguardientes. Most of them involve the same kind of ritualized drinking/bloom that absinthe does, too. But none of them have the mythology (+ frequent highly artificial coloring) that absinthe does, so none share it’s ridiculous reputation.

I do like it though. Absinthe limeade is my go-to summer tall drink.

I think a lot of people might be sympathetic to the idea that in wartime, you need to be stricter because of the incredibly high stakes. That Ukraine is at war, so they need to find and deal with these sources of disinformation.

I think those same people need to realize that the policies never get rolled back to a more liberal state when the war is over.

It sucks that this is a systemic advantage for authoritarians. It really sucks. It feels bad. But it’s the handicap you have to accept to resist authoritarianism.

Absent an idiotic carrier/mfg skin that disables the feature, you just long-press power then click “lockdown”.

Or reboot the device. Rebooting the device will also leave it encrypted if your device has encryption (the PIN/password is needed to decrypt, essentially).

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Preventing the collection of data by the state may be impossible, but they should be accountable for who has it, who it’s given to, and they should need to go through proper due process to use it against you in any kind of official proceeding.

It might be impossible to get everyone out of the databases, but we can at least force warrant requirements and the like.

Also, how can we be assured the privacy practices of their subscription/payment platform are at least better than the (likely blockable) trackers?

Forming a financial relationship with a website is, theoretically, infinitely more traceable to your personal identity than all the cookies in the world.

Or any of the nearly-unavoidable-because-it’s-a-monopoly evil big corpos like Amazon. Chase handles their credit card and definitely significant other financial parts for them.

Also known as a SASSS

They are very useful for outlining and similar “where do I start” writing projects. They help break the dam and just get some damn words on the screen, at which point it’s often easy to continue and flesh things out to a complete thought.

Apple innovates in new and exciting ways to not support devices. They invent new antirepair technologies and have pioneered locked-in walled-garden app stores that prohibit users from doing what they want or need to keep their devices working.

They don’t get to wear the white hat just because they do some shit well. They are the bad guy. And they could change posture pretty much immediately if they were at ALL serious about their devices having long-term support. They control basically their whole tech stack and could make it so their devices can continue to be maintained indefinitely even if they aren’t doing it. But control matters more to them than support.

I really don’t think anyone should be giving them credit here, not even as a backhanded compliment.

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Why does it have to be a company?

Tons of old hardware continues to be useful to its owners just by virtue of being on open and maintainable platforms.

But Apple continues to push harder and harder for planned obsolescence while claiming they support their devices better than the competition.

Apple earns unique hate in this category because of how strenuously they fight against things like right to repair. Failing to support old products isn’t the end of the world but intentionally making it so that old products aren’t supportable is very bad and the Apple App Store is a major instrument for making sure old Apple devices stop being useful.