OK you’re China posting, we get it.

I disagree.

Don’t forget that China is an oppressive dictatorship that is actively antagonistic to Canadian sovereignty. Consider the risks that increased Chinese government surveillance would pose to Chinese Canadians who speak out against China, and the increased control their government would have as a result. Just because you don’t believe you have anything to hide, doesn’t mean that nobody has anything to hide.

Consider also, that on an atomic level, data isn’t powerful, but it is powerful in aggregate. Consider the realtime advantage a hostile foreign power would have in a wartime scenario with cameras and microphones in even a fraction of the vehicles on the road.

Chinese EVs are a very bad idea for national security and they shouldn’t be allowed in Canada under any circumstance. These concerns don’t extend to Japan, South Korea, or Europe, they aren’t actively antagonistic to Canadian sovereignty.

I hope this is a lever Canada uses to get China to fuck off with their foreign interference, and stop trying to flood our auto market with their trojan horse spy EVs.

No worries eh, we get it. Come on over!

Plus, if you need to buy absolutely anything, enjoy a nice discount on our non-tariffed goods - iphones, spices, car tires, fill your boots.

I like feedbro too. Haven’t found a standalone selfhosted solution that has the same degree of customization.

I’m trying out freshrss right now and don’t like it. Possibly my issues stem from user error, but, I can’t figure out how to automatically hide articles based on keywords, adding extensions is a pain, and the ui feels large and very in-the-way. By default it truncates article titles, which I find absolutely baffling.

Thanks for posting this. I was wondering about a way to filter posts.

Be careful about mentioning who you bank with on the internet, using an account that anyone can browse your comment history.

There are good RSS reader web browser extensions. Firefox has a few. Check out Feedbro.

ITER seems interesting to me. What gets you excited about ITER? Seems to me that their operational timeline is so far in the future, and the outcomes are unknown. As an engineering artifact, I understand its boner factor. From a broader human achievement standpoint, I can’t really see what all the buzz is about. I want to learn and try to understand.

Thank you!

I don’t want to call anyone out individually. But I have come across accounts with 7-8k comments in the span of a few months. I don’t really think it’s worth reporting them, and don’t have the time or energy to research and block them individually, I’d just rather have them automatically muted on my end via a tool or plugin.

I assumed this would be something I’d have to program myself, just wasn’t sure if it was clearly not possible or practical for one reason or another.

It’s not obscure, but, for me, Wikipedia is the ultimate example of the old internet that still persists today.

Free to use, no account required, ad free, non-corporate, multilingual, heavily biased toward text, simple and utilitarian design. Hyperlinks concatenate relevant pieces of information, which serve as the means to navigate the site. The code is very simple (seriously, view the page source of a wikipiedia article). It’s based on the human desire to learn and share knowledge with others, and has remained resilient to corruption by commercial interests that pervert that desire for monetary gain. It’s a beautiful thing.

One of the strangest elements of this story is that the Village People and Rufus Wainwright are on the Trump campaign playlist.

This is the sort of thing that the old internet could really deliver on. Chances are, a search query could lead you to some guy’s hoodie blog, and he just liked hoodies, and posted honestly about them.

Now, it’s all a mess of SEO pumped affiliate link lists filled with crapware. If the query is even thinkable, there will be AI generated pages stuffed with sponsored links, ready and waiting for you. And with search engines preferring recent results, that’s the type of page you’ll be served.

I’ve had decent luck using marginalia search to seek out some of those old internet type results. Obscurity works as a barrier to corporate infiltration. Plus you get page results that don’t have a million tracking and analytics scripts running on them, which is refreshing.

As a user, ‘privacy preserving attribution’ is unappealing for a few reasons.

1. It seems it would overwhelmingly benefit a type of website that I think is toxic for the internet as a whole - AI generated pages SEO’d to the gills that are designed exclusively as advertisement delivery instruments.

2. It’s a tool that quantitatively aids in the refinement of clickbait, which I believe is an unethical abuse of human psychology.

3. Those issues notwithstanding, it’s unrealistic to assume that PPA will make the kind of difference that Mozilla thinks it might. I believe it’s naive to imagine that any advertiser would prefer PPA to the more invasive industry standard methods of tracking. It would be nice if that wasn’t the case, but, I don’t see how PPA would be preferable for advertisers, who want more data, not less.

As a user, having more of my online activity available and distributed doesn’t help or benefit me in any way.

You’re right to point out the difficulty of preparing installation media.

Also, for the average person, friction will probably happen during installation - possibly having to circumvent safe boot to install and run a new OS (knowing how to enter the bios, feeling comfortable playing around in the bios, knowing how to even disable safe boot once you’re there, not exposing your device to security vulnerabilities by having safe boot disabled), the need for an existing understanding of how partitions work and how the partitions are structured on your specific device in order to test the waters with a dual boot setup on a drive that has data/functionality you want to preserve. Needing to know the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of swap, /home, and /root partitions. These points all came up on a recent installation, and I’m sure they would scare some people off.

Installation will be easy if you have the time, motivation, existing knowledge and/or bandwidth for a learning curve. But not everybody has that.

And that’s just installation, to say nothing of the actual use of the desktop environment, which is not as intuitive as its often claimed to be.