Readit News logoReadit News
MiddleEndian commented on Europeans' health data sold to US firm run by ex-Israeli spies   ftm.eu/articles/europe-he... · Posted by u/Fnoord
immibis · 4 days ago
The problem with GDPR and cookie banners is that GDPR allows the cookie banners to be worded so indirectly. "To improve our service we share collected information with 5723 partners..."

If the law would force them to say "Do you want Larry Ellison to get richer by looking through your webcam? [Yes] [No]" it would be a good law.

MiddleEndian · 4 days ago
Ideally it would just be like the Do Not Track flag, with one flag for each category of opt-out tracking, but actually enforced (even if on by default) so no popups would be needed at all.
MiddleEndian commented on PeerTube is recognized as a digital public good by Digital Public Goods Alliance   digitalpublicgoods.net/r/... · Posted by u/fsflover
MSFT_Edging · 8 days ago
> I don't really understand why people use Twitter

The honest answer is that it isn't the content(RSS feeds), but the combat sport nature of the platform. It's the only place where you can tell a billionaire any kind of awful thing you can think of. It's also the only social media that drives important people insane. The wealthier they are, the more insane they'll be driven.

Facebook will drive your meemaw insane with AI generated ads of legless veterans being given a cake.

Twitter will drive the richest man on earth insane. It will drive every journalist at any paper of merit insane by interacting with the insane billionaires. Nearly every journalist who uses twitter enough will develop delusions of grandeur that their brand of psychopathy is the solution to the nation's woes. Since their bosses have also been driven insane via twitter, it's the kind of writing that gets published. This writing will take the insane delusions of the insane billionaires at face value. It will go along with conspiracy and never beg any question that actually needs answering.

It's truly a unique and addicting environment.

MiddleEndian · 8 days ago
I guess it's sort of amusing that this happens, but I have no particular interest in it lol

Pretty much all of my Twitter (and Twitter clones) interactions are involuntary when they show up on news articles or other media.

MiddleEndian commented on PeerTube is recognized as a digital public good by Digital Public Goods Alliance   digitalpublicgoods.net/r/... · Posted by u/fsflover
01HNNWZ0MV43FF · 9 days ago
More like texting, nobody likes the phone system, but everyone you know is on it
MiddleEndian · 9 days ago
When texting took off, it was the easiest (only) way to send instant text based messages between friends wherever you were, even if the phone system is now heavily used by spammers and there are better options.

When Facebook took off, every Myspace page was so full of garbage that they barely loaded on most people's computers, and Facebook was slick and shiny and easy. The real name policy made it super easy to connect with people you met IRL. Even if it's now confusingly slow and FB Messenger can't display your recent chats in the correct order for some reason, it was the easiest most obvious option at the time.

I don't really understand why people use Twitter (at its best it just seems like a worse version of RSS), but the site presumably loaded quickly at some point and was easy to use, even if it's presumably worse now.

And so on. They persist through momentum.

Some things continue to persist, some things get beat out and die. But if you start off more confusing than your alternatives, at least compared to when they started, you won't get picked up in the first place.

MiddleEndian commented on Kilauea erupts, destroying webcam [video]   youtube.com/watch?v=TK2N9... · Posted by u/zdw
egeozcan · 11 days ago
Probably this amazing capture is worth more than a hundred times the price of the camera, yet the geek in me feels really sad when perfectly functional hardware gets destroyed :)
MiddleEndian · 11 days ago
Think of it like a delicious meal or a grenade. You pay for it to be consumed once, then it's gone.
MiddleEndian commented on Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service   theregister.com/2025/12/0... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar
krashidov · 15 days ago
Isn't github a rails app that heavily uses server side rendering?
MiddleEndian · 15 days ago
I'll be honest, I don't use github often. So if they're wrong, well, they fucked up in their complaint that could be redirected to one of many other websites instead.
MiddleEndian commented on Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service   theregister.com/2025/12/0... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar
brushfoot · 15 days ago
The edit history of the announcement is quite a ride:

> [2025-11-27T02:10:07Z] it’s abundantly clear that the talented folks who used to work on the product have moved on to bigger and better things, with the remaining losers eager to inflict some kind of bloated, buggy JavaScript framework on us in the name of progress [1]

> [2025-11-27T14:04:47Z] it’s abundantly clear that the talented folks who used to work on the product have moved on to bigger and better things, with the remaining rookies eager to inflict some kind of bloated, buggy JavaScript framework on us in the name of progress [2]

> [2025-11-28T09:21:12Z] it’s abundantly clear that the engineering excellence that created GitHub’s success is no longer driving it [3]

---

1: https://web.archive.org/web/20251127021007/https://ziglang.o...

2: https://web.archive.org/web/20251127140447/https://ziglang.o...

3: https://web.archive.org/web/20251128092112/https://ziglang.o...

MiddleEndian · 15 days ago
More and more people should call out bloated buggy JS frameworks lol
MiddleEndian commented on EU Council Approves New "Chat Control" Mandate Pushing Mass Surveillance   reclaimthenet.org/eu-coun... · Posted by u/fragebogen
ax0ar · 20 days ago
It's not just the EU. OpenAI doesn't let you use their latest models via API unless you provide your biometric information. It's all about slowly laying the foundations of a repressive dystopian world.
MiddleEndian · 20 days ago
If the govt is to do anything, I would support laws explicitly banning this kind of biometric ID under most circumstances.
MiddleEndian commented on The realities of being a pop star   itscharlibb.substack.com/... · Posted by u/lovestory
MiddleEndian · 25 days ago
One thing I found clever about certain celebrities, like Dolly Parton and Guy Fieri, is that their public images are so distinct but transient (Dolly Parton has a wig, Guy Fieri looks like Guy Fieri) that I imagine if they dressed down like normal people, they'd be able to blend in with the public.
MiddleEndian commented on Ubuntu LTS releases to 15 years with Legacy add-on   canonical.com/blog/canoni... · Posted by u/taubek
unsnap_biceps · 25 days ago
It could just have been one with a very large check.
MiddleEndian · 25 days ago
It doesn't seem unreasonable to me if you have the resources. If I could've paid Apple to somehow just support OS X 10.6 forever I'd probably still be a Mac/Hackintosh user lol
MiddleEndian commented on Android and iPhone users can now share files, starting with the Pixel 10   blog.google/products/andr... · Posted by u/abraham
Telaneo · a month ago
The closest I've seen is 'send file over message service or e-mail', but this has a decently low maximum file size.

The alternative for larger files is Dropbox or Google Drive or similar and share a link, but there are limits to how full you can have those be, so sending a 5 GB file might be inconvenient if you don't pay for the upgraded service.

For anything larger than that again, I don't think I would do anything than pass a physical flash drive, since there's nothing else that has a lower barrier of entry and I can rely on a random person to be able to use and understand.

MiddleEndian · a month ago
I have upgraded dropbox and google accounts and also a VPS, so it wouldn't be hard for me. But for people who aren't big fucking nerds, nothing exists that's as easy as that. Email's limit is crazy low.

u/MiddleEndian

KarmaCake day3219March 11, 2014
About
middleendian.com
View Original