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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • I remember having a conversation with a former friend a while ago, and he, as a guy who worked for a certain company that makes most of its revenue from delivering ads, spoke about requiring use of front facing camera and using eye tracking technology to ensure you’re actually watching the ads and not going somewhere else while the ads play. If you aren’t looking at the ad, it will play another ad afterwards.

    He spoke about it as something he is looking forward to, since it would increase revenue. Pretty sure he was pitching this idea to his boss hoping to get a promotion.








  • My first time trying to get my mother to switch from Windows to a Linux based OS wasn’t successful because there was too much friction and inconvenience for her, and she wasn’t willing to even entertain the idea of Linux for years after that. My second attempt was successful because Linux is much more user friendly than it used to be 13 years ago, and I changed my approach to make it as frictionless as possible.

    Firefox just set to block 3rd party cookies + some basic extensions like adblocking and some easy privacy stuff is a good way to go about it, because it’s better than what she used previously and it doesn’t become inconvenient to her. She doesn’t know what an operating system is, or what cookies are… She just uses the computer to browse the web, emails, and light office work. She even says she prefers the current setup (though that’s because her old computer was chugging with Windows and runs smoothly now with a less bloated OS)

    No need for noscript, deleting cookies, fingerprinting, or user agent stuff… Only introduce these to them if they express interest in privacy and are interested in learning more. If you try to thrust it upon them too suddenly they will just think “Linux isn’t a good user experience and is only good for tech enthusiasts and programmers”.


  • At least 60% of my internet time is YouTube. I rely on it for entertainment, news, education, discovering music, technical help, ETC…

    Could I live a meaningful life without it? Probably, people have been living meaningful lives before the invention of the computer in general… But I wouldn’t give it up because there is an immense amount of incredible content there that genuinely makes my life better.


  • I think it depends on how good your sense of smell is. Mine is really bad, so if I had my eyes covered and was wearing noise cancelling headphones, I wouldn’t be able to tell if there are people in my area unless they haven’t showered in a while… Being able to distinguish between people? I can’t even differentiate between the smells of popcorn and peanut butter.

    On the other hand, I know someone who was able to smell a “coppery” smell on someone which no one else notice. Eventually she convinced him to see a doctor and they found a rare condition that I can’t remember which.







  • Noticed that. It used to be easy to bypass, because old.reddit.com allowed me to go there with a VPN, but they recently patched it. I found that changing the user agent to make it look like you’re on Chrome and Windows, alongside with US/Canada VPNs tend to get around this, but it isn’t very reliable.

    Stealth used to work for a while, but not anymore either.

    They are doing it to stop scrappers scrapers and punishing people who use a VPN is just a bonus to them.