[-] Ashelyn@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 6 days ago

Early voting is an option in many places too!

Voting early is usually less stressful, and you can schedule it easier (because election day isn't a national holiday for some reason). Look up the dates early voting is running in your county, read up on what polling stations you can vote early at, and make a plan!

As far as changing minds though... yeah, everyone is pretty much locked in at this point. I just hope people in the US cast a ballot even if they don't plan on voting for the president. There are so many downballot positions for local offices that one's vote can have a huge impact on.

I think if people are resigned to not pick between outright vs lite genocide (understandably), the best thing they can do is research their local elections, make a list on who they plan on choosing for each office, and make the decision on the president (including the choice to do a write-in or leave it blank) when they get to the ballot box.

[-] Ashelyn@lemmy.blahaj.zone 23 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Years back, I had that happen on PayPal of all websites. Their account creation and reset pages silently and automatically truncated my password to 16 chars or something before hashing, but the actual login page didn't, so the password didn't work at all unless I backspaced it to the character limit. I forgot how I even found that out but it was a very frustrating few hours.

[-] Ashelyn@lemmy.blahaj.zone 29 points 5 months ago

The device wouldn't necessarily have to be constantly streaming the audio to a central server. If it's capable of hearing wake up words like "Ok Google" it's capable of listening for other phrases and having onboard processing to relay back the results much more compressed. Whether or not this is common practice is another matter, and yes the algorithms are scary good even without eavesdropping.

[-] Ashelyn@lemmy.blahaj.zone 39 points 5 months ago

Any time a news headline asks a question, the answer is almost always "no"

[-] Ashelyn@lemmy.blahaj.zone 48 points 6 months ago

A "privacy" company acquiring and centralizing various projects to be under its umbrella seems kind of worrisome to me even if it's done with pure intentions.

[-] Ashelyn@lemmy.blahaj.zone 40 points 7 months ago

Imagine a world where combined C-suite salaries were capped at the tax burden a company owes past a certain point. I think that would be incredibly funny to see the conflict of interest at play. Want your accounting/legal department to research tax loopholes to exploit? Sure thing, but it's coming straight out of your paycheck!

Oh, you "had a bad year"? Probably shouldn't be taking home a hundred million dollars then.

Combined with a "top pay can't make more than x times the salary of the lowest paid employee" with the exception being the tax thing, I could see it being a great double bind into making companies either pay their workers more or actually pay their share in taxes.

I know it would basically never happen in the US but a girl can dream

[-] Ashelyn@lemmy.blahaj.zone 20 points 7 months ago

This fits the "leftist meme wall of text" archetype to a T

[-] Ashelyn@lemmy.blahaj.zone 42 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

My boyfriend occasionally watches YouTube shorts, mostly for the occasional good joke or cat video. He's told me that the shorts algorithm seemingly goes out of its way to show him Andrew Tate type content as well as general Daily Wire/Shapiro/conservative 'libs owned' clips. More or less, if he doesn't immediately close out the app or swipe to the next short when one of these videos comes up, his shorts feed is quickly dominated by them.

I think the big thing is that these algorithms are often trained on maximizing watch time/app usage, and there's something uniquely attention-catching to a lot of men and boys about the way viral manosphere content is constructed. A random poor setup to a skit is likely to get swiped past, but if the next clip comes swinging out of the gate with "here's how women are destroying the West" there's a certain morbid curiosity that gets some to watch the whole thing (even out of amusement/credulousness), or at least stay on the clip slightly longer than they would otherwise. If one lingers on that content to any degree, the algorithm sees that as a sign that the user wants more of it—or rather, that it would achieve its "more engagement" goals by serving up more of it.

Plus, it's grabbing ideas on what to recommend based on user data and clustered associations. It's very likely to test the waters with stuff it knows worked for others with similar profiles, even if it's a bit of a reach.

Edit: minor sentence structure stuff

128
submitted 8 months ago by Ashelyn@lemmy.blahaj.zone to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

I use Firefox whenever I can.

On first install of the browser I usually end up following a hardening guide which includes stuff like blocking cross site cookies, setting a few things in about:config to disable Pocket/etc, and installing uBlock Origin. I've taken what I consider a relatively balanced approach, I don't use anything like noScript, uMatrix, etc that ultimately just cost a lot of time fiddling to get the 10th website of the week working.

I've been more or less fine browsing the web this way for years, but around the start of 2024 I've started seeing way more "Access Denied" pages than I used to. I think part of it is Cloudflare or similar, but I don't know exactly what's changed or what's triggering it to occur.

It usually goes away and I can re access the site in 10-30 minutes as usual, but I've had it occur in really weird instances, such as trying to change my Minecraft skin and getting blocked by the website. The server block often goes away immediately if I switch my user agent, so I know that it has something to do with how I've got everything set up.

Not sure what anyone else's experience with this has been. I'd like to hear some of your thoughts and tips

[-] Ashelyn@lemmy.blahaj.zone 40 points 8 months ago

I could comment on the notion that one owns one's girlfriend but regardless, you should definitely self host if you're sharing deeply personal information with a program

[-] Ashelyn@lemmy.blahaj.zone 25 points 9 months ago

Opera has been in the web browser playing field for a long time at this point, but haven't been super relevant until the last couple years due to GX

[-] Ashelyn@lemmy.blahaj.zone 23 points 9 months ago

Not exactly a post I was expecting to see slurs dropped in but here we are I guess

[-] Ashelyn@lemmy.blahaj.zone 37 points 9 months ago

But if anyone tries to open a new thread on the issue it gets marked as a duplicate and removed

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Ashelyn

joined 1 year ago