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Cake day: July 11th, 2023

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  • [Richard Stallman] usually does not browse the web directly from his personal computer. Instead, he uses GNU Womb’s grab-url-from-mail utility, an email-based proxy which downloads the webpage content and then emails it to the user.

    If you’re not doing this you’re not properly paranoid.




  • This is one of the oldest and most effective tricks in politics. Every hack in the business has used it in times of trouble, and it has even been elevated to the level of political mythology in a story about one of Lyndon Johnson’s early campaigns in Texas.

    The race was close and Johnson was getting worried. Finally he told his campaign manager to start a massive rumour campaign about his opponent’s life-long habit of enjoying carnal knowledge of his barnyard sows.

    “Christ, we can’t get away with calling him a pig-f****r,” the campaign manager protested. “Nobody’s going to believe a thing like that.”

    “I know,” Johnson replied. “But let’s make the sonofab****h deny it.”

    Hunter S. Thompson, 1972. Politics never changes.



  • banazir@lemmy.mltoPrivacy@lemmy.mlHow do we replace YouTube?
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    3 months ago

    I refuse to accept that there is nothing we can do about it.

    I don’t think you quite understand just how stupendous the amount of data Google processes from YouTube alone is. There is basically no way for hobbyists to provide an equivalent service. Very few companies have those kinds of resources. If you want, you can of course try running a PeerTube instance, but you rather quickly run in to problems with scaling.

    I find it almost miraculous YouTube exists to begin with. It is no accident Google has very few competitors on that front, and I don’t think YouTube is even profitable for them. Without Google’s deep pockets and interest in monopolizing the market, YouTube would have withered a long time ago.

    Trust me, I want a solution too. But 500 hours of content are uploaded to YouTube every minute. All of that is processed, re-encoded, and saved with multiple bitrates. You can’t compete with that. YouTube might eventually keel over from Enshittification and its own impossibility, but replacing it with anything meaningful will be a challenge.








  • banazir@lemmy.mltoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.world10/10 kids books.
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    3 months ago

    Peter was not quite like other boys; but he was afraid at last. A tremour ran through him, like a shudder passing over the sea; but on the sea one shudder follows another till there are hundreds of them, and Peter felt just the one. Next moment he was standing erect on the rock again, with that smile on his face and a drum beating within him. It was saying, ‘To die will be an awfully big adventure.’

    Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie. Kids’ books are rad.