Guy behind Beeper fucked Pebble smartwatch users and developers on his way out.

So when Beeper isn’t making enough money and he sells it… Will you trust who he sells it to to keep it secure instead of aiming to use data for ads or some shit?

I won’t.

making (presumably) thousands of dollars off their users

I agree with this post completely but for some reason you finishing with this makes me chuckle.

Oh no! Thousands! They might be able to pay rent for a month or two!

I’m just being cheeky, and while its true what they did was scummy, it also feels like a really… smallish amount of money?

If we’re literally just talking thousands, and not tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands.

But yeah, fuck Brave.

Firefox gang and Hardened Firefox gang here to stay.

Mozilla’s got its own problems but that’s a story for another day.

I think this has less to do with Microsoft and more to do with the average human has no interest in learning something that only passively helps them.

I only know a handful of things about working on an automobile, while my father could practically take one apart and put it back together wholesale.

I can take apart a computer and put it back together wholesale, but I’m lost on an internal combustion engine.

I pay someone with expertise to handle the engine, because I’ve spent my time learning other things.

Look, unless the people you’re talking about are doing tech jobs, there isn’t a reason for them to learn the depths of it, just like there isn’t a reason for them to learn the depths of how their car works. Both a car and a computer are tools, and those tools are made to be used by people who may not know the depths of the internal workings of either.

This post feels like elitism and gatekeeping to me, as someone who thinks Windows sucks and prefers Linux. The idea that it’s the OS that is “holding people back” and not that those people might have more important things to do with their time than dedicate half their life to an operating system is absurd. If someone spends 20 years becoming a doctor, I’m not going to act like they’re a dumbass because they don’t know everything about fucking computers.

People don’t want to learn more because for most people not knowing more doesn’t impact their fucking life. Just like me not knowing more about my car doesn’t generally impact my fucking life. Because I’ve never had trouble finding someone to pay to fix it for me.

Surprise, we’re the people who are paid to fix computers for the people who are just using them as simple tools. Maybe we shouldn’t be so upset about that.

Also, last but not least, Android is a strain of Linux and it suffers from all the same issues listed above as Windows. Acting like you couldn’t pull the same bullshit in Linux if you wanted to is kind of a joke, because it’s already been done with Android.

All the ad infested bullshit we all hate about Windows 10 and 11? Blame Linux-based Android.

EDIT: Also, personal opinion, if we’re talking about which CLI is easier to learn and use. Microsoft has made great strides with Powershell being easy and accessible to people who haven’t faced a command line environment before. The things that make its command line better than Linux’s are two things, and only two things. (I hate that it’s object oriented instead of text oriented, Powershell has a lot of bad things, too)

First, human-readable commands whose names describe what the command does in a verb-noun format. This means instead of Linux with some very, very obscurely named commands that are not descriptive and you just have to sort of memorize, you can just sort of remember because the name is human readable.

Secondly, the get-command command is huge because it allows me to search these verb-noun names for the command I’m looking for. On Linux, if I don’t know the specific command, I have to search the internet, because there isn’t a built-in tool that will give me an idea of what each command does and allows me to search for them through a filter. Once you find a command you think might work, it has the get-help command which produces something similar to a Man page.

Linux has Man pages, but because there is no rhyme or reason to how any commands are named, it’s not very easy to find the command you’re looking for if you don’t already know the command. On Windows, if I know what the command does I may already have enough information to find the command using get-command instead of having to turn to Google and be like “what command do I use if I am trying to do X?”

So if we’re talking about the superiorly designed command line that’s easier for first time users. Powershell is where it’s at. Because Linux is a confusing fucking mess of 30 years of random decisions by lone programmers. Literally the only reason I know commands in Linux CLI is because I had to memorize them. I don’t do so much memorizing Powershell commands. If Linux was being built from scratch today, I’d practically demand a similar naming convention system to make it easier to understand what the fuck commands do.

PS C:\> get-help get-help

Agreed, but if everyone named things merely descriptively… we’d end up with like 200 apps named “Image Resizer.”

So it’s a bit of a conundrum, because descriptive names are clearly far superior, but if everyone used only descriptive names, most apps would be very similarly named, and then you’d have to filter based on author/developer.

And frankly a lot of us aren’t clever enough to make up a name that is both descriptive and memorable like “Resizeratus Rex” lol.

I’m looking square the fuck at Windows 11 removing “Cut” “Copy” “Paste” and replacing them with fucking infuriatingly not obvious icons in the menu instead.

Do not fuck with me like this, Microsoft. Please.

This is almost always because of some chump who wants to move up the corporate ladder and desperately needs something they can point at and say “Me, I did that.” When it comes to applications, that’s a lot harder to point at when what you did was fix some obscure bug that most people don’t deal with.

No, this is middle management fuckwits who have nothing better to do angling for a way to get a better position.

The fact that this happens at Google just shows how they’re no different than any other giant shitty corporation, because they’ve got idiots manning the controls who are more interested in moving up than doing a fucking good job.

Source: My sisters ex-husband who is a dipshit who works at Google and did exactly this while chasing a promotion.

There’s also a linux command line interface for at least business class cyberpower UPSs. (Not sure on consumer end.)

Worked like a charm for me on a headless machine.

Man you really don’t have shit else to do, do you?

Like seriously how fucking empty is your life that you can’t bring yourself to do anything but troll online?

You realize you aren’t getting that time back either, right?

EDIT: Shocker, when called out right at the outset, this giant fucking pussy just bails. Nice job being an epic master troll you absolute fucking idiot. Just like all giant pussies who like to troll, he can bring the fire but can’t stand the heat.

But will it actually be ad-free, or just personalized ad-free?

Because if it’s actually ad-free, you might find a decent number of people willing to pay it. (Especially those without the technical know-how to block ads, a small fee is probably worth it to them.)

If it’s just personalized ad-free, and still has generic ads, you’ll have basically nobody who gives enough of a shit to pay.

Your last paragraph is such an important one. One of the things I see most is people citing a source, but then the sources their source cites may be dubious at best. It’s so important to be able to keep going backwards in sourcing. Where did every little piece of information come from? Humans make mistakes, sometimes data can get misunderstood or corrupted over time. A mistake in the past may result in printing a falsehood that’s generally accepted as true in the future. People often struggle following a path of information gathering beyond the first few steps. I do think that traces back to, like you said, we were taught what were reputable sources (NYT vs National Enquirer) but never given any knowledge that their might be bias even in our trusted sources. So many people, instead of considering where the information is sourced when it comes to outlets with a “reputable” history, just stop at “it was in the New York Times” as if they haven’t had their share of scandals (like when they sat on information the Bush admin was illegally spying on US citizens for over a year at the request of the Bush admin).

I think, unfortunately, it’s also why some people turn to really ridiculous sources, because they’re just smart enough to see the bias in legacy institutions, but they don’t have the media literacy to accept what they can research as true from legacy media but also to be skeptical and looking for evidence for what is presented, instead of treating is as fact. This, I think, has fueled the rise in conspiracy theories, from people who know everyone is lying to them, but lack the ability to be able to parse or deal with that in any healthy way. Yes, there is a lot of bias in legacy media, but turning to online media grifters who are selling you survival kits isn’t the healthy or literate solution.

I’m over 40 and while I was taught to do research on a Microfische, I was regularly told not to trust anything on the internet.

As for media literacy, no way in hell. Especially after the Telecommunications Act of 1996 started allowing mass consolidation of media empires. In the 1980’s, majority of US media was owned by around 80 companies, in the modern era, it’s five that own the majority of the US media landscape.

You say the name “Marshall McLuhan” or even “the medium is the message” and you get confused fucking looks.

Might be fun to rig the power button so if someone presses it, that song from the Transformers animated movie starts playing…

“You’ve got the touch. You’ve got the power! Yeah!”

Alternately, pipe output to “Notepad” and speak by writing your thoughts on a notepad all night.

You could always just go as “End User” which is just a name tag and introduce yourself by quoting Taylor Swift (like the average end user):

“It’s me. Hi, I’m the problem, it’s me.”

Sly reference to PEBCAK.

Dealing with a criminal ex-president who is running for reelection has never happened before to the country, so there’s not an operating procedure to follow.

Bush didn’t run for re-election? Reagan didn’t run for re-election? The only criminal President you can say didn’t run for re-election was fucking Nixon.

Literally the point of this post is that we have, time and time again, chosen not to prosecute them, despite plenty of evidence.

Reagan making deals with terrorists in the Iran-Contra affair. Bush signing off on torture, which is a war crime. (We literally prosecuted low level soldiers for torture, but claimed it was just “bad apples” and not a painfully obvious systemic problem. Torture facilities don’t spring up from nothingness without anybody in the chain of command making a choice to torture people. The orders come down from somewhere and when you’re supposed to be the Commander in Chief of the armed forces, sorry, it kind of falls on you.)

It’s been a problem because we keep kicking the fucking can down the road to ignore the question of “can we prosecute a former President.”

I agree with that take, but this is an example of an “Oops I won’t do it again I promise” attitude in Washington DC politics in general. The “having documents you’re not supposed to” has happened with a lot of ex-officials, including Democrats, but it’s usually hand-waved away as long as they destroy/return them. I don’t think that is Biden trying to not appear partisan as much as it is Standard Operating Procedure with politicians, and they just didn’t expect an actual all-out criminal to refuse to give them back, like Trump.

So only the US can prosecute their President for war crimes, and it has to be based on US laws? That’s not a legitimate discussion, I’d say.

So the people who write the laws just write it so that they didn’t break the laws. That’s literally what Obama did for Bush, legalizing warrantless spying, ramping up the drone war, etc.

I mean, that’s literally the point of the ICC, is that governments can just be like “we didn’t do anything wrong” and then continue abusing the world. So you take them to a neutral third party… the ICC.

You usually send war criminals to The Hague and then it’s outside the hands of the nation in question. Many nations like to do a lot of “we investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing.”

I guess US law trumps international law and laws governing war, huh? No wonder the US refuses to join the International Criminal Court.

https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/war-crimes.shtml

Oh look, shocker, torture is in there.

And literally how you get yourself in hot water with copyright cops. They’re willing to turn a blind eye to pirates who don’t profit from their ventures, but the second you get money involved, you’re boned.