Sea of Stars recently added coop I think

I use framaforms

Ah jeez, this picture triggered the earworm! Now that song is in my head!

Fuckin' Zuck. Seriously. Bezos too. Musk. They're all bootlicking, ass-kissing, apple-polishing, brown-nosed toadies.

And they get away with crimes on an hourly basis.

I file all of this under "I'll believe it when I see it."

• Qwant has claimed since 2016 that they have an index. That lie has earned them investments and funding. They do not have an index and they've said so after the fact. They also give data to Bing. They are not private but they say they are because the data they share is anonymized.

• Ecosia is just a Bing frontend like DDG. Caron offsets never work. In order for Ecosia to work you need to see and click on some ads, so anybody using adblockers will not be helping. Their servers aren't green either.

• This is because Bing is going to raise their prices and now these companies need to lure in new investors to keep the lights on. It isn't about sovereignty or data privacy; it's just about money.

The convo on HN about this article is worth a quick scroll.

The first comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39570137) launches a discussion about freedom filled with anecdotes. There are even more anecdotes (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39570364). And even some praise (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39570484).

I am not a dev. I don't rice, I don't game. I'm a FOSS user and have been for years. If I run into a problem, there is no way I will be creating an account on Discord to get help. It might not be worth the time and effort. A searchable forum is good enough. IRC logs are good enough. Email lists are good enough. But, also, some open source software makes onboarding seem more cumbersome than it actually is. Getting on Matrix is easy, but in he eyes of a new user it comes off as Herculean. And when a dev decides to use Discord we shake our fists instead of proposing a solution like operating the bridge for them.

ah zdnet, a waste of CO2 if there ever was

I've told this tale 3 years running now:

I work at an international business school. I try to stay up to day on world news. There was a paragraph written about "infectious pneumonia" in Time magazine or The Economist the last week of 2019 (so the issue published the first week of 2020, I think).

Returning to work a week later I mentioned it in class, because that year I had about 6 students from different parts of China.

They said, "it's nothing, just a flu."

The next week, as numbers started to be published they said, "no, it's an exaggeration."

The week after they were the first students to start wearing masks.

Week 4, they told us they hadn't heard from their families in several days. This would have been February 2020.

I felt so horrible for those students that year. They were only 18 or 19 years old. Sent to France in January 2019 (they are required to come several months before classes start in order to learn French and pass some tests). They were locked down March 16th 2020 and forced to take lessons on Zoom. Unable to return home for the summer. Took another semester on Zoom, etc., etc.…

I think they finally managed to head home in the spring of 2021.

The fake news, the misinformation, the amplifiers, the conspiracies, etc.. Losing Twitter would be a win. It would be wonderful to be able to crack down on some of the groups on things like Telegram and FB and WhatsApp. The blatant lies they spread. And lies about lies too.

My wife is part of a group like this. And over the past week, as you can imagine, the channel is rife with bullshit. They have posted fake things, then deleted them and claimed they were hacked to explain why the post was made or deleted. And people were like, "oh yeah sure that makes sense"

I've looked into this in the past and settled on Kobo. You can disable the telemetry and never use the the Rakuten account part and have a very good ereader... And you can install the open source KOReader software.

https://github.com/koreader/koreader

MobileRead forums and wiki are a good resource for ebook stuff.

For example, a breakdown of the hidden configs on Kobo devices https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Kobo_Configuration_Options

In case you don't want to read or you just want a quick list of the 5 scenarios...

1. ‘If we become the less intelligent species, we should expect to be wiped out'

2. ‘The harms already being caused by AI are their own type of catastrophe’

3. ‘It could want us dead, but it will probably also want to do things that kill us as a side-effect’

4. ‘If AI systems wanted to push humans out, they would have lots of levers to pull’

5. ‘The easiest scenario to imagine is that a person or an organisation uses AI to wreak havoc’

Check out some of these directories:

• https://blogroll.org/
• https://indieseek.xyz/
• https://personalsit.es/
• https://blogsurf.io/