It’s just fishing. For every 10 users that notice the deceptive “free trial then bills per week” model, there’s a guy who doesn’t notice until he’s been charged $15 and cancels. And for every ten of that guy, there’s a guy that doesn’t notice for a month, and for every ten of that guy there’s the rare whale who looks at their $700/mo “google bill” and goes yeah that sounds about right.

There’s also just the naming problem. Social media works best when its name sounds like a place and its verbs sound like normal actions. Mastodon is a three syllable elephant (or a metal band), versus a sky or a book (note: this isn’t a hard and fast rule, since Twitter and Instagram pulled it off). And they call their posts toots. Officially, too, unlike the user-made meme of “Skeets”. Toots are farts. No politician or business professional is going to say “retoot” with a straight face.

If you block somebody that quote posts you on Bluesky, their quote post no longer has your post in it or anything pointing to you. You also can straight up delete people’s replies to your posts there. Hopefully Masto’s iteration on QRTs works similarly, though people always have the option to “screenshot dunk” instead.

Genie’s out of the bottle now though. The casual-attracting features needed to be in place before twitter exploded. They weren’t. Bluesky’s were. Casuals don’t care about what-ifs or principles, it’s a miracle Musk let Twitter get so terrible that the casuals even noticed. It’ll take a monumental event now to get the casuals to switch again from the blueskys they just made and got invested in.

There is a constitutional amendment that protects porn though. The first. What’s changed in Texas isn’t porn’s legality, but restrictions on distribution (though yes, Texas’s law is useless and completely misunderstands the internet’s dynamics)

You can use pinchflat or tube archivist to “self-host” youtube as well. It still obviously gets the content from Google’s servers but lets you manage the videos locally (and even apply Sponsorblock if you like)

Nintendo’s stuff is free on day 1, or a few years after release if it’s their Wii U stuff. I think the first Wii took a year before the Twilight Hack happened.

Let’s hope they fuck up again on the Switch 2!

Well, there’s an oddly existential argument to be made that “funny” AI answers like this or adding a pot of Elmer’s Glue to pizza sauce to get the cheese to stick are valued. Simply because those are the posts I’ve seen from Google AI, and I’ve never touched the feature myself.

By letting a language “speaker” learn from Reddit and forums, we created an approximation of “that guy who thinks he’s a comedian” because that guy is always there and always drowns in upvotes. Clearly, he’s a valuable part of the discourse!

The equivalents for Android, precompiled ReVanced APKs, are commonly used to spread malware. Following the instructions to patch the app yourself isn’t hard. Google taking down precompiled modded versions of YouTube but leaving patches and the the tools anybody can use to apply them is a neutral thing at worst.

Also I don’t see anyone in this thread glad that Google did this, aside from the first half of the joke / fakeout / pun post about IPA beer.

I’ve seen them in the wild, I live in the bay area. They look worse than in the pictures. The brushed steel catches every speck of dirt and oil. It’s like they’re driving a damn crock-pot.

Ingredient quality does. The employee gives no fucks but if better beef is getting slapped on the grill the food will be better.

It’s almost certainly easier for an app like duolingo to support a conlang like klingon, elvish, etc than it is to research a real language that matters. If they add something like Cherokee it’s imperative that it be near-perfect, since any errors stand a real chance of causing damage to the “endangered” language. See the whole Scots Wikipedia fiasco.

That’s the point though. It’s really good to have a website selling DRM-free FLAC music instead of “streaming” it to you for a subscription fee. If “Songtrdr” fucks up bandcamp I’m going back to pirating indie releases which sucks but if they aren’t gonna sell me DRM free uncompressed files…