It isn’t like it’s a niche secret that YouTube siphons people’s privacy and sells their personal information. Creators being ignorant about that might have been a excuse a decade ago, but not now. I don’t think we should be excusing content creators who collaborate with and benefit from the machinery of viewer-exploitative content distribution that is YouTube.

Edit: also, you’re here in a privacy community defending the violation of privacy that you yourself originally described as dystopian. I’m not trying to be confrontational with you, here. I genuinely do not understand how you can think that content creators bear no responsibility for the dystopian situation you’ve encountered. Certainly they don’t bear all the responsibility for what YouTube does, but they chose to support YouTube by uploading monetized content there.

I’m not saying they should be canceled for that, but appreciated for it? Let’s not.

can’t even show your appreciation without selling more information

The content producer you’re trying to show appreciation for is the one who put their content on a platform that forces you to sell your information in order to appreciate them. Maybe let’s not appreciate those who do that.

Your comments are not wrong, but also Trump is not the sole issue here. There would still be a problem even if he was removed from office today.

Proprietary software and services are an issue regardless of which government jurisdiction they fall under. It’s a good idea for the EU to be moving to open source instead of proprietary solutions based in the EU.

Calibre will work for this, but it almost certainly won’t give a good result. That’s not Calibre’s fault; Adobe InDesign produces exactly the same horrible output from a PDF. It’s just a reality that PDF does not lend itself gracefully to being converted easily to a well behaved EPUB.

Unless you are converting something extremely simple with no inline images or interesting text layout, getting a nice EPUB will almost definitely be a tedious process of fiddling directly with the HTML and CSS with something like Sigil (or Calibre, but it’s not as nice).

I last left this morning for work. The last I left for my own enjoyment was last weekend for the Pride parade. (State of GA in the USA celebrates in October for some reason.)

(I tried to spoiler this bottom part since you didn’t ask for advice, but I guess I don’t know how. Sorry.)

I suffer from chronic depression, so I might know something of what you’re going through. Hang in there, friend. It gets better, eventually.

Also, I know this probably sounds ridiculous (it does to me when I remind myself of it while depressed, especially since I’m also autistic and antisocial) but the safety of home makes depression worse for me. It’s the last thing that I want to do while depressed, but it really does help tremendously to get out and do something. Anything. Go to the grocery store and buy a ramen or whatever, it doesn’t matter. Go through the human line to checkout so that you have to interact with a person in some capacity. It’s silly, but it does help me a tiny bit.

The next day, try to do it again, it helps a tiny bit again. Eventually all the tiny little bits add up, maybe, but even if they don’t then at least it’s a tiny bit better all along.

The fact that other publications are more right leaning than The Guardian doesn’t make it left leaning. It’s a liberal paper, supporting liberal positions and routinely expressing opposition to leftists like Corbyn. In my book, support for liberalism and opposition to leftism makes it a right wing publication.

We USians often don’t realize that the Guardian is a right wing publication. A frustrating number of people in US circles (especially liberals who don’t know they aren’t leftists) think anything European/UK is ideal and that conservatives don’t have any influence there.

This is a good idea, except that it requires money. I already have an old Pixel right here that I can put Graphene on.

I guess my point is, it’s not necessary to harass people about their choice of phone OS before you know their situation. 🤷

It’s an issue for accuracy in the comparison images that were posted.

Because of investors needing a quick “win” with a game studio acquisition, and because gamers buy the slop that someone managed to shit out while trying to appease those investors.

The investors cash out and are emboldened to go burn some other game studio into the ground again. If the studio hasn’t imploded badly enough yet, the investors demand another game with whatever IP “worked” last time, but at a lesser budget with more aggressive deadlines, so the next result that is shit out is worse, but players still buy it.

The cycle continues endlessly, it’s the same pattern in every industry because it’s all the same tiny group of investors with “diversified portfolios” ruining everything in the name of profit.

That’s just language Nazis understand. You do eugenics at gunpoint because something something anvestors–your blood line ends.

You want to eliminate their entire bloodline because someone in their family advocates eugenics? What the fuck kind of a suggestion is that? Are we supposed to kill your entire family now because you’re advocating for eugenics too? Where does that end?

Intelligence is a difficult thing to measure, especially merely by interacting with a person for a little while.

Many of the answers in this thread amount to privileged assumptions that fail to account for the fact that what they describe as signs of lacking intelligence could also be symptoms of exhaustion and alienation inherent to conditions such as living under a capitalist system and/or neurodiversity and/or disability and/or sickness and/or…

For example, when someone works 16 hours a day for 5/6 days a week, they are far less likely to have the energy for using their little free time away from work to ponder deep questions at the same level as someone privileged enough to have a less demanding existence. This is not correlated with their intelligence in any way.

I dunno how familiar you are with the US military recruitment and training process, but they are very much selected for and drilled specifically to follow orders without question. I wouldn’t advise getting your hopes up that there’s going to be some sudden mass resistance within the military against fascist orders. It’s not impossible, but very unlikely.

How can you seriously assert that people are using the term too lightly when you apparently don’t even know why they’re saying it?

Could you define the words “fascist” and “communist” as you understand them?

Hmm, fair enough. I was just going off the dictionary definition of parasite which I suppose isn’t the medical definition.

If there aren’t any symptoms, then how is it a parasite? The presence of harmful symptoms is kind of central to the very definition of a parasite.

Going from needing Google’s permission to install apps to needing Apple’s permission to install apps. How would that help in any way?

Why would using Apple’s walled garden be a solution to Android becoming a walled garden? I can’t understand why this sentiment of moving to use Apple comes up so often lately.

The contractors would merely need to use/develop open source software if they want their cushy government contracts. Seems doable to me.