Obsidian can be almost anything you want it to be. Try searching out some videos from folks who use Obsidian for journalling.

This only really works in cases where people are making a free choice. But since people don’t live in a vacuum where consumerism, capitalism, advertising, greed, power imbalances, class divides, poverty, platform decay, planned obsolescence, geoblocking, price gouging, etc. don’t exist, a significant portion of piracy comes from either having little choice (I’m poor and I either pirate or I miss out) or making a choice based on ethical considerations (such as not giving money to a corporation that is known to engage in unethical behaviour). Or that we’ve had decades, if not hundreds of years of elites/corporate propaganda telling us that poor people are poor because they’re bad and we must listen with zero critical thinking to our capitalist overlords who are wealthy because they’re smart and know what’s best for us stupid plebs and here you go, have some bread and a circus so you can ignore your long work hours for pittance pay which is totally your fault for being dumb and not because the system is rigged against you, also don’t ever cross us because we control the politicians that make the laws that say piracy is worse than corporate fraud, even though corporate fraud and tax evasion costs countries and communities infinitely more than piracy ever did…

Yeah, piracy isn’t simple.

I used to be one of those people. It was a much different place then. It genuinely felt like a place to share useful information and help others or connect with folks from all over the world. If you had a question, or needed to fix something, it was usually pretty easy to find.

I used to prefer Altavista over Google as I found it served results closer to what I was looking for.

Now most of the internet is trash - pages and pages repeating the same crap, useful information or tutorials are hard to find without first wading through irrelevant search results or tutorials that are unhelpful but know how to capture the algorithms to generate cash, my ad blocker now telling me it’s blocking hundreds of ads instead of just a few, tracking and spying almost everywhere, clickbait hot takes, artificial and disingenuous lifestyle filtering, information desert eeeeverywhere…

Many days now I long for the internet of old.

They also monitor outbound streaming. I’ve twice had a documentary movie I was watching at a theatre stopped because so one was supposedly live streaming the movie to the internet. The second time it happened they stopped the movie until the person doing it stopped, only it turned out they made a mistake and no one was live streaming it at all - they just interrupted the movie for fucking ages because of wanky attitudes. What made it even more stupid was that it was a special screening for a one off event AND a pretty niche documentary that most people wouldn’t give a fuck about let alone pirate 🙄

Maybe break down by gender could be related to how accessible technology is to genders based on barriers like sexism and gender-based hostility? A bit like how IT jobs have less women (despite things like the first programmers being women and it originally being a “woman’s job”), non-binary folk and tend to be male-dominated? You have to ask why something that shouldn’t have a gender bias is gendered. In this instance, I would be looking at why there’s a difference between Western/W.E.I.R.D. countries and Indonesia - what in Indonesia is making it more accessible to women when the reverse is true in countries known to be hostile to non-males in the technology world.

(Possibly I have way overcomplicated what I’m trying to say lol but I’m a bit sick at the moment so not easy to think through a woolly head).

I used to almost exclusively pirate because I couldn’t afford much of anything. Steam has actually enabled me to purchase most of the games I use since I can wait till they’re on special and cheap. There’s also a huge amount of indie games that would never have seen the light of day if they could only release on physical media or through their own website or whatever.
no Steam isn’t perfect, I would like Valve to take less of a cut but in terms of making games more accessible, I think they’ve done a decent job.
No shade on my fellow pirates who still exclusively pirate and don’t want to feed the corporate beast.

We’ve used a couple of different Pis and a couple of different Odroids. The Odroids have been excellent and trouble free, the Pis not so much. Initially we got a Pi because we thought with the bigger community and better software support it would be easier to troubleshoot issues. Except that they have been regular problems that we haven’t always been able to work around or fix. One of them got relegated to a retro game ‘console’ because it was more trouble than it was worth. We’ve had little issues with the Odroids that wasn’t easily sorted.

That sucks to hear. Back when I migrated to the Fediverse, I chose Kbin just simply because the interface suited me better. Frustrating when aholes ruin a good thing.

I might just be really tired and feeling dense this morning, but what do you mean about kbin.social?

Kia ora! I would also like to know this. Been sailing the torrential seas for decades now without a VPN. Although I do remember some years ago about a law change (something something National something something The Hobbit something something DMCA something something tax writes off’s) where we got a letter from our ISP warning us about the law change and not to do anything naughty or we would receive a DMCA notice. Nothing has ever come of it since. 🤷🏻‍♀️

I didn’t mean that every single Google product is a acquisition, just a LOT of them.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Alphabet

That website shows how much Google buys up and then shuts down, centralising it’s power even more.

Not always. And I don’t see the key distinction you mean. Can you explain further.

Using the example of my city again, there’s no difference between the buses and taxis here in terms of contracted or not. The various bus companies are all privately owned. Some still have their own liveries. Some have the city council liveries. Some bus services don’t have regular contracts with the council/government at all and just run various private services. Sometimes the council will contract them for one off services. Regardless of how they look or the contract (or lack thereof), they’re all privately owned.

All the taxis are private owned. But the government/council contracts them for certain purposes. For example, if you are injured and unable to drive, ACC will pay for a taxi to take you to and from health services.

All of these companies are for-profita nd make profit from their contracts.

The profit made by some of the public services by private companies is a regular issue of contention in this country. As is the selling off by state owned public interest facilities (such as the rail system, power generation, communications, etc.).

In some countries the public transport is run by for-profit companies too. In my city, for example, ALL of the public transport are contracted private companies. They’re all liveried as public transport, but they’re still privately run.

This is less a problem about the actual scooters though and more of an issue with the people using them (or people setting them up) not giving a damn about where they’re left.

I have mobility issues and can’t use the footpath on Fridays because that’s rubbish collection day and people just leave their bins in the middle of the footpath. People in my area also park on the footpaths, across the foot paths and leave all sorts of crap from their property leaning out onto them. That’s despite it being illegal to do so.

If most people used the scooters responsibly (put their bins out responsibly, parked their cars on their property or road, etc. etc.) it would mostly be a non-issue.

I’m in this picture and I don’t like it

Drip looks great! I’ve been using Ovuview which says it keeps your data private, but being proprietary I can’t easily know for sure. I love Ovuview for its depth of tracking (Symptothermal plus any custom symptoms you want) and it’s accurate predictions.

But will be really nice if Drip works out well (gonna try it for a while first before ditching Ovuview) so I can finally use something FOSS.

This is satire, right?

https://www.stroustrup.com/ieee_interview.pdf

EDIT: Non-PDF flavour: https://www.stroustrup.com/ieee_interview.html

I was going to recommend Knock as an alternative to Adobe Digital Editions that can be used from a command line in Linux but I just discovered it’s gone as well 😢

https://github.com/BentonEdmondson/knock

As someone who has chronic health issues nd increasingly severe Memory Impairment (possibly early onset Alzheimers), I would give almost anything for the perfect health. Hell, I would be over the moon just for average health.

I can’t even begin to explain how much it hurts to be surrounded by people who could choose to be healthy but are just apathetic, uncaring, lazy or ignorant of how much of a blessing it is to be able to exercise, get fit, run, swim or even jut walk round without feeling utterly exhausted after or to remember the things they love and enjoy.