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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: August 9th, 2023

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  • Is it an advertisement trying to get you to buy something, or is it a public service announcement with no intent to sell you something?

    If the EFF bought up ad-space to push PSAs about net neutrality and garner support and person action, would you be miffed? I wouldn’t, because that’s not really an “advertisement” .

    Edit: Yes, I know VPN behind this has a profit motive. But sometimes businesses stand up and advocate for personal action for the betterment of all. Just like Pornhub in states & countries that are requiring ID verifications are redirected to a page advocating for personal action for your rights instead of complying with a security nightmare.




  • It’s 2026. Are people still that puritanical that they care about somebody else’s sexual activity?

    The places I’ve lived in the last 15 years have been extremely sex positive, which was a slight shift in mindsets from where I grew up, which was slowly coming this way.

    Is there a sudden resurgence in this behavior? Is it part of the man-o-sphere bullshit?


  • You also have to remember that Google has been switching their search tools over to AI search tools and the results have degraded as a result.

    Even before then, there was manipulation of the search algorithm by content creators, even on the YouTube side.

    It’s probably a combination of all factors tbh.

    • Google is slowly pushing on the scale of authoritarianism.
    • Search changes being a degradation in results.
    • Search algo manipulation.
    • Google intentionally showing divisive content due to the higher revenue opportunities
    • And the sheer breadth of right wing grift content.

  • You just described a sizeable portion of the FOSS community.

    As somebody that loves FOSS, the community around it can come off like a morally superior vegan/christian/other-commilunity-known-for-this-attitude quite often. “I DID IT, WHY CANT YOU!?” Is an attitude I’ve encountered frequently, and it’s hard to get them to understand that not everybody has the same tech knowledge level, or use cases, or can manage the loss that comes with stopping/moving away from corporate solutions.


  • So fighting against this new understanding of the term is either pedantry for the sake of it, or you have some sort of stake in Google perhaps?

    Great use of a bad reason fallacy with a touch of ad hominem in an attempt to discredit.

    Your claim is that the term has been used to mean something negative. You present no evidence to back this up other than your feelings.

    I don’t discredit that major corporations do evil shit.

    However, I presented you with the experience I’ve had with the term dating back nearly 30 years where I, and the people I talked tech with, was sideloading files onto our PDA and Rio MP3 players.

    The term started out as a technical distinction in the circles I ran in (Detroit area) back then.

    Aside from your feelings on the term, I see no valid justification to stop using it when I’m trying to clearly communicate something. I work in tech (and no, it’s not Google or Apple. Fuck publicly traded companies) as a lead on the platform support group, and I need to be able to clearly communicate with my peers and reports. Sideload is a widely recognized term in the spaces I have worked in.

    I’m not going to stop using a precise technical term because some internet strangers have unfounded negative feelings about the possible marketing connotations.

    Present me with evidence that it actually means what you’re saying and maybe I’ll consider working on making the language change. Just like I’ve done with actually real problematic industry terms (master/slave, black/white lists. Etc).


  • I’ve been using the term side loading since the late 90s/early 2000s for installing software or files to a device via a transfer cable. And by the time Android came along, the early app development community was using the term to push the app to your device via ADB. And from there it’s expanded from transfer cable push to download and install from an unmanaged 3rd party source on a mobile computing device.

    So the term has existed in some form throughout the tech/power user community before modern mobile computing. Now did Apple and Google usurp the term? Ehhh, possibly? I’ve yet to encounter somebody that uses sideloading to mean something negative, but I’m sure there is a group out there that does. I’m not convinced that group is large enough for me to stop using language I started using nearly 30 years ago to mean something specific. “Why use more, less precise, words when this single term says it already?”





  • To add on about using a knife for defense that you lightly touched.

    You never want to be in a knife fight. Nobody wins in a knife fight. Especially if it’s a pocket knife.

    I have a bright neon orange & green bush/field/combat knife that I take with me when I go camping. It’s largely a tool for managing my camp, but I have practiced defensive fighting with it, but I am no knife fighting expert. I see it as a last-ditch effort of defense against a wild animal or human where my life is already on the line. And wearing it on my hip around camp advertises “this person is armed” to any human that has ill intent that comes across my camp during daylight hours. I’d still rather grab my walking stick for a good head bonking and sternum busting, and I would do my best to do that before pulling the knife for defensive combat use.

    So, to be abundantly clear. There are no winners in a knife fight. The “winner” goes to the hospital.