woah geez really escalated it

Sorry i didn't mean to do the thing where you restate someone's OP. It's osmething i've been thinking about for a while and it seemed like a good time to express it, thank you for giving me a chance to do so

If you describe the process of building a phone in fantasy terms you can see that it kind of is a sort of dark magic.

Thousands of slaves spend their days digging up the earth to produce a tiny quantity of rare metals and elements. These are etched into intricate runes by automatons, themselves built by scholars and technicians that have spent their lives studying these secrets.

Legions of our brightest minds spend their days writing incantations that allow these rune devices to perform new tasks, and sometimes, subtly alter the way those who use them think so they spend more time looking at them. Sometimes, people stare too long at them and lose their grip on reality.

I really believe if you described what smart phones are to a medieval peasant they think you lived in a horrible and profane empire under the control of dark wizards that create lovecratian madness runes. And they'd be right.

I think discord is good usability wise i just wish the replacement to IRC was something you could self host.

I'm worried about what happens when discord stops being free or if it goes away.

would you appreciate an optimistic advice-y reply

yes!

I'm being a little hyperbolic but I've really been struggling, and sort of stewing and mad all the time, about the genocide against Palestine, about the abandonment of caring about the ongoing pandemic and treating it as a past tense thing, about the ongoing climate Apocalypse and failure to mitigate it, about the fact that every time I'm driving or walking around town I see a new place that a homeless encampment has been destroyed and all the trees cut down to stop them from being able to come back, about all the gestapo shit going on at the border and in our cities, and I want to do something, but I don't know what to do about any of it, anything I can think of doing seems so pathetic in the face of the scale of any of these problems, and how can anyone see any of these things and not want to do something but yet half of what you hear day to day is people cheering on this cruelty and inhumanity and callous disregard, and I just want to scream and cry and shake everyone by the shoulders and say how can we let this go on like this!!!!

This is beautiful, thank you!

I love you?

Just, Post!

I'm gonna build a secret house there and get it registered and steal all your misdelivered packages.

I'm GMing a rifts campaign and this is a session diary, most of the writing was done by the players i'm just committing it to paper :)

Sound volumes are a construct of the mind, maaaaan

you're absolutely right, they're not the same, at least not yet.

I still use firefox, because they still allow adblockers and also partly ideological reasons; i don't want there to just be one rendering engine that exists. But i'm not under any illusion that mozilla is not evil.

If we take Cory Doctorow's framework, they're still in the "be good to your users to get them to use you" or early in the "slightly enshitify to please your business clients" phase, and aren't nearly as far down as chromium is yet.

Mozilla gets (got!!!) most of its money from google to use google as the default search engine, but they've seen the writing on the wall for a while and have tried to diversify their income stream from that.

Unfortunately that means they've kind of abandoned their main claim to fame, "we respect your privacy more than chrome does" because they need to make money and they've chosen to get in to the same business as google. Sort of rational for them but a terrible shame for all of us.

There's now basically two browsers and web rendering engines and they're both maintained by spyware companies.

I'm a backend engineer, and UIs frighten and anger me

I strongly urge you to reconsider this idea!

I would NEVER borat voice your poor wife. What did she do to deserve that?