BootlegHermit

“as well as — scarily — diseases such as COVID-19, hepatitis, herpes and more.”

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Simple solution: Eliminate karma points/reputation points/likes/dislikes, all of it. People are going to find a way to game the system as long as there’s a system to game.

Oh look, another useless vehicle. I want to see these things face off against existing traffic.

I get it, my cats are my biggest source of garbage/waste in my own household, and I wouldn’t give 'em up for anything. But when facing a problem, sometimes you have to weigh options you’d rather not consider.

Buy less useless shit. Less food deliveries, less “prepared” foods, less “made of the finest chinesium and thaitanium” products. Spend the extra buck for something that you’ll get more than one use out of. Adopt out the cats if you really want to reduce the amount of garbage. They’re a primary source of all that trash - food packaging, cleaning up their shit, all their fur…

Then of course there’s the obvious “sort your shit - recycle what you can, compost what you can”.

Strangely, I consider both events - the submarine and the refugees - to be equally heartbreaking, in the sense that both are pointless losses of life that could have been avoided.

However, I also consider both events to be equally stupid - billionaires being cocky stupid, and the refugees being desperate stupid; the kind of stupid wherein we make bad decisions with likely bad outcomes, on the gamble that it’ll work.

Looking at it from a more emotional standpoint, I think I might be biased in that I feel like that there are a lot more important events occurring around us, that effect us in a much larger way, that simply gets swept under the rug by these types of “news” stories.

I’m not lacking sympathy for the kid’s loss. Losing a parent for most people is terrible. But I’m not going to feel any more sympathy towards them, than I would you - being a complete stranger to me. Certainly not because “news” tells me to. It would be fair to say that the thoughts and feelings I have towards the negative impact of what it takes to accumulate that sort of wealth override the casual sympathy for the submarine situation.

The refugee situation is a whole 'nother can of worms. But as desperate a move as it may have been for them, I do in fact respect them for taking that risk for what I’ll assume to be trying to have a better life. That takes some amount of courage, so as individuals it’s mainly sympathy. Long way about it, those in the submarine represent why there’s a refugee situation.

As far as the eggplant parmesean goes, while I regret to inform you that it wasn’t fresh from a garden, I can make it up to you and vouch that the “heat n eat” in the frozen section at Aldi’s is pretty okay.

Eh, DDG is just as shady as most others. Starting with their contract with MS.

Basing their browser off of chromium (or Edge and “underlying OS technology” or however they phrased it) just helps to further the Google monopoly.

“DuckDuckGo uses clear gifs from the domain improving.duckduckgo.com. This is a tracking technique and can be used to collect analytics about your web browser. Whenever you use DuckDuckGo, several requests will be sent to this domain.[4] This is of course not the kind of behavior that you would expect from a privacy concerned website, but there it is. Do you trust DuckDuckGo to collect “anonymous” analytics about you?”
-- From: https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/duckduckgo

Not that I view that quote as fact of any sort, but something to look into before jumping on the bandwagon so to speak.

Then of course there’s also DDG’s CEO, Gabriel Weinberg.

“Gabriel Weinberg, the founder of DuckDuckGo, used to run the Names Database.[1] This was a website that aimed to connect people who had lost contact by gathering lots and lots of e-mail addresses. Getting access could be done by either paying money, or submitting lots of e-mail addresses of other people. Since the service revolved around gathering personal information, it is very suspicious for Gabriel Weinberg to start a business that is privacy-oriented.”
From: https://archive.is/20150624075735/https://8ch.net/tech/ddg.html and https://archive.is/N2qe8

So the real advice as to what browser to use? Use whatever one you want that has the features you like and enjoy. Anything else is a gamble in terms of support, security, compatibility, and usability.

“pretty sure I was on a private tracker” - well there’s your problem right there. You probably weren’t. Not saying that you’re lying or the like, but just so we’re clear, Im differentiating between “Demonoid private” wherein everybody could create an account damned near whenever, and “UHD private” wherein it relies on a system of invites and/or interviews.

This whole “rich people’s problem” newscycle is about as newsworthy as the fact that I had eggplant parmesean for dinner.

I find that most VPNs are so heavily shilled that by that very nature, makes them suspect. Since the days of Napster, WinMX, Bearshare and the like, I’ve gotten exactly 2 “Hey, knock it off” letters from my ISP. And they were both from new-release, mouse-affiliated movie releases from a public tracker.

Get in with some of the private trackers and 99.9% of the worry disappears. Try not to upload terabytes of data, and the majority of ISPs (I mean, two of the 3 that seem to have the monopolies at least) wont even bother sending the notices.

Hopefully it’s a fight to the death. Loser’s assets get donated to a good cause. Winner faces whatever other egomaniac wants to use their wealth to shit on the rest of humanity.

The battle ends when the last man standing has a net worth of less than $10 million.

As unfortunate as it is, migrant boats wrecking is common enough that it’s not really “newsworthy” in terms of what grabs people’s attention. Especially on a global scale. Similar to how a murder in somewhere like Maine would make the news, but in NYC it’s just another day.

@Sordid

Even then, there’s the theory/circumstantial “evidence” that Google’s indexing is a big farce. Forgot where I saw the video, but someone pointed out that the average person only relies on the 1st page or two of search results. To try to go beyond that, most searches very quickly drop from “millions of results” down to a few hundred/thousand at best. Going beyond the first couple of search result pages, the page count seemingly drops off a cliff.

However, there are independent engines out there. The first one that pops to mind is Gigablast, which does it’s own indexing/crawling.

If you’ve got some time to kill, check out some stuff related to the “Dead Internet Theory”. While I cant say how accurate the information presented may be, it certainly opens up the idea that there’s something funky about the internet and how we perceive it.

Uhh… not to be “that guy”, but I thought cattle grids were supposed to be bigger, and span the entire width of whatever gap they’re spanning. The whole point of them is to have a series of openings where the cattle would step, making them wary of it. If I were a cow, I’d be looking at the grids in OPs article as a free public dung receptacle on my way to the park.

It’s not really all that difficult to spin up your own “server”. Sure, desktop hardware isn’t exactly targeted towards running a web server, but for a purpose like your own Lemmy/federation, I’d imagine just about any old hardware from the last 5 years or so oughta be fine.

Meh, I’m not too keen on the change from simple checkboxes for options to the toggle switch style. Even though they’re functionally the same, the toggle switch just seems less intuitive.

Those are some pretty beefy recommended specs. It’ll be interesting to see how quickly mods outpace them.