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  • 46 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • They’re not listening to your microphone, at least not while your phone is in your pocket or whatever, because they don’t need to.

    I don’t deny that fingerprinting is powerful. But, I also have started to wear a tinfoil hat on the “mic always listening” issue. I have experienced (several times) ads for random things that I have only discussed – never searched for or had other interaction with in any way.

    It wouldn’t be in my fingerprint, so the only other possibility is that others with a similar fingerprint to me had already searched for the same thing. Frankly, from an Occam’s Razor perspective, I just find it far less likely that we have such a hive mentality that everyone with similar digital fingerprints ends up having the same “random” discussions. At that point, “they’re always listening to your mic” seems downright practical.


  • And the really shocking thing is how easy that was to normalize.

    Talk about random thing at dinner, phone in pocket.

    Post dinner, hit up Insta and boom, ad for random thing… and at that point, some people go “heh” and keep scrolling. Some likely think it’s “the algorithm” being magical and just using other context cues to guess that they would have mentioned it at dinner. Many have realized that, in fact, the devices you pay for and subscribe to are actively spying on you. Constantly.

    And yet, the number of people who have opted out of using these devices and services is relatively minimum. There is a good reason for that: many of these services are so ubiquitous, they look and feel like utilities. And in some cases, they effectively are, as it can be impossible to use another service without a smartphone.

    Hell, I can’t even pay my damn rent without using some stupid app.



  • I don’t see YT being replaced in that sense any time soon. Federated text and image content is really still in infancy, and video hosting at the size of YT is a tremendously more complex feat, requiring, at the absolute minimum: a metric crapton of bandwidth and storage.

    For me, I just use invidious and similar for the foreseeable future, or peertube when there are things on it.

    At the very least, not being signed in to YT and having only a local watch history and subscriptions (=not on a YT or Google account) does starve the algorithm a bit.



  • Maybe you have just ended up with a lemon CPU. Though for random crashes like that, I’d almost always look to RAM first.

    I did have some stability issues early on when trying to enable Expo. Never quite got that working right so it is currently disabled. I keep my 7600x in Eco mode since it is air cooled and the performance difference is not that great anyway, so I haven’t noticed any major differences with Expo off.

    The Expo issues were also with a very early MSI BIOS. I haven’t tried it again after upgrading, but I probably should.






  • The goal was always that the user would be the product. It was less clear at the beginning, because the advertising was far less intrusive (if you even saw an ad at all, in the early days), and the service was “free” at a time when the internet was comparatively young. So it gained a lot of popularity from novelty and being an actually useful communication tool.

    But the communication tool portion was always a side effect of data collection. Any “free” service is ultimately just getting value from you in different ways. In the case of Facebook, once it had amalgamated enough data, the flood gates opened and the enshittification was extremely rapid. It will never go back to the way it was for many reasons, not the least of which being: it was designed to be the cesspool it is now.

    Ultimately, all these seemingly random posts are an attempt to get you to continue to interact with the platform. If you read through comments on such posts, they do tend to drive engagement, even if it is just a user going “why is this in my feed?”