Sure, I do not have a Facebook account for similar reasons despite hearing that a lot of valuable information and networks are on that platform. Ten years ago I might have complained about it loudly, but nowadays I tend to think about things more pragmatically. Or at least that's what I tell myself after I caved and bought a smartphone after resisting for over a decade since they became ubiquitous :)
I didn't use Twitter for the better part of the last decade and don't feel like I missed anything important. Idem with Facebook that I haven't touched in over ten years. If I cared enough about defeating trackers I could spin up a personal Nitter instance with a pseudonymous account, otherwise I see it as the price to pay to have access to such a large volume of information instantaneously, and I would rather be tracked by private interests than by the government.
I also find it frustrating when any organization, government or otherwise, only publishes information on restricted channels, but that is nothing new.
From one bandwagon to the other it seems... Doesn't sound like they learned their lesson. Unless they're pivoting to embedding multi-modal shitpost generators. That might actually be popular.
I also remember the last time they sacked a bunch of people and claimed they were refocusing on Firefox.
I can't help but contrast this response with the dismissive reactions towards censorship and the Twitter Files. Turns out, it actually is an important source of information. Are we about to see op-eds about how it needs to be public or regulated like utility companies? :)
Aside from that, critical information is not exclusively posted on Twitter, although it used to be "locked" behind a radio or a TV receiver. An online account is not the insurmountable hurdle that you paint it as.
Public transit is also not a legitimate option in "less-populated areas" in my experience, see my cousin comment. But my interpretation is that Guilbeault, kind of like Trudeau, is a weird ideologue who sometimes spouts stupid unrealistic things, but probably isn't stupid enough to actually go through with it once he gets a reality check. I see that he walked back on the original statement somewhat.
With that being said I have no confidence in Canada's ability to develop a solid public transit network with people like that at the helm. Every project that I've seen recently has taken forever, ran well over budget, and barely covered any ground. If you're working from the idea of removing cars backwards instead of having a vision for a public transit system that is actually pleasant to use and would encourage people to transition organically, of course it's going to be a mess.
I lived in a rural area of Canada as recently as last year, and believe me I tried to use public transit. Once again, if you support it, try it yourself. Not in the middle of whatever city you inhabit. Go out into the sticks, spend a winter walking half an hour to the bus stop and working around the inconsistent schedules and delays, and we'll see how you feel about it. I bet you'd give up real fast after missing the last bus for the first time and having to find a taxi willing to get you all the way back home.
You need at least ONE reliable way to get around year-long, so you can't tell people that they will have to work around inadequate road infrastructure by biking around. Listing it as an alternative to driving in Canada is therefore a false equivalence. Work on public transit that serves people adequately and we can talk about disincentivizing people from driving, but Canada likes to do things backwards recently, which is why I no longer live there.
It's easy to talk down to people when you don't have to contend with their issues. But I don't blame you for doing so. I do blame politicians since it's their job not to.
By the way, I didn't say that I don't support better infrastructure for alternative modes of transportation. But you do it by investing there (and preferably not taking twenty years to complete every project with several extensions and exceeding the budget by a multiple), not with eco-fascist methods of threatening and withholding needed resources.
No idea why this is getting flagged, I guess some people don't realize that Canada has real winters. You have to be masochistic to suicidal to rely on cycling between December and March, sometimes longer than that depending on the weather that year. I would love to see eco-fascists practice what they preach; let's see Guilbeault bike to work all winter in a location without adequate public transit, and we will see what happens when he gets his first flat in the cold and dark.
Some places I've lived in the US made me wish to return to Canada, others made me thankful I didn't. If you've never lived there long-term of course it won't feel like home. I know it's tempting to make excuses for the place you live, but I think you're downplaying the damage that Trudeau's government has done to the country. The US has its issues too, but greater state independence and a stronger constitution help.
I agree, and I'm not one to believe that a CEO should be paid peanuts for the level of responsibility and time commitment it takes to be in that position, but that's assuming the CEO is actually taking responsibility for the performance of the company. If goals are repeatedly not being met the CEO should be the first to take responsibility and take a pay cut or fuck off. If the United States value merit, incompetent CEOs should be held to a higher standard than a rank-and-file employee.
Obviously your post has nothing to do with Twitter being for-profit before the acquisition and Musk prioritizing profit less than his predecessors, but I'll bite.
By complying with government regulations when displaying content in their respective regions to avoid getting the entire network banned there, right. While this hit piece from a notoriously biased outlet would like to equate this with ye olde Twitter's regular practice of of suppressing or deleting content worldwide at the whim of the US government, it's obviously more transparent and fair to comply with censorship locally and provide a reason for the missing content. Reeks of "it's okay when we do it".
Good to know a publicly-traded company known to censor content to be more advertiser-friendly and with notoriously predatory content discovery algorithms designed to elicit emotions to keep users coming is apparently not-for-profit if it happens to be unprofitable during the ZIRP period. Or is Facebook also not-for-profit?
If anything, Musk is less profit-oriented. Someone looking to profit off the platform wouldn't be actively driving off advertisers. But I suppose that because we must all believe that Elon Bad, he must also be the evilest capitalistest person in the whole world, and everything before him was sunshine and roses.
I agree this one goes into more detail than is useful for future reference, most of the explanation would be better off in a PR description. But in general I would rather people go into too much detail than the more common variant of not providing any contextual information anywhere (or only in a chatroom at best) and sticking to one-line commits. As long as the important information is near the top so I don't have to wade through the verbose "this is how I discovered this issue" thing, go crazy.
People can post all kinds of illegal things online and no one is suggesting that content should be approved before it can be visible on the Internet. It doesn't have to be strictly enforced to act as a deterrent. How effective of a deterrent it would be has yet to be seen.
> Support of Gamergate, racial supremacist groups, the redpill/incel movement, or any other hate group - including, and especially, hate groups that have gained political power such as the Donald Trump administration - is a direct challenge to the lives and well-being of other players and will result in a permanent ban.
I don't know man, I don't care about your TDS, this is just eyeroll-worthy. Pure political soapboxing.
They don't "require photos of woman", passport-style portrait photos are standard period. It's really no different from LinkedIn being the standard in Western countries where you're suspicious if you don't have a personal photo on your profile and where you can just as easily be discriminated against based on your looks or whatever other criteria you can think of. The only difference is that they'll use euphemisms or outright bullshit you, if they even bother getting back to you about your application.
Does it take anyone longer than a game or two to remember the rules of chess? I even taught chess to adults as a child and they caught on within a few moves. Which I guess explains why it remains more popular than FOTM overcomplicated board game #5000. It's not difficult to memorize. IMO this is a solution to a nonexistent problem.
So he missed the dotcom bubble and lived through a... housing market bubble? The tech bubble popping now is obviously going to hit closer to home. Case in point: this hysterical blog post. Perusing at his past posts it's a lot of far-left political rambling, so the lack of economic literacy makes sense. I doubt that he was criticizing the massive irresponsible hiring that occurred through the pandemic and is now being corrected.
I agree and I use public transit almost exclusively. I want better infrastructure for alternative modes of transportation, but every time the subject comes up it gets tangled up with ideological evangelism and comes across as condescending and authoritarian. Instead of framing it as some crusade against cars or using the political hammer of climate doomerism, argue for reduced traffic, better and cheaper options for people to get around, road safety... those are things that everyone can agree on and have been used to support mass transit projects in other countries successfully.
Those two products have nothing to do with each other, so the mention of Apple Vision Pro looks like clickbait, and the article is an obvious puff piece that makes Teenage Engineering sound like a much bigger deal than it is in reality. Is the author related with someone there?
If you only listen to music that is on streaming services, then of course you would think that they have "basically all music", since everything else is forgotten. I pirated music before Spotify was available, which exposed me to a wide variety of international artists, and I still periodically look up some of my favorites on streaming services, only to find that they are still absent. So I continue to pirate and buy albums from time to time.
Buying used records or borrowing them from the library does not earn artists money either, but no one bitches about that. As far as I'm concerned, downloading rips is the digital equivalent.
I've dealt with at least four different US banks so far, with a credit score ranging from "zero" (no history) to 750+, and none has engaged in predatory behavior. Some less scrupulous loaners that target people trying to pay their bills might qualify. I'm talking those that advertise with lines like "$5000 now, no credit check". It's probably true that you can borrow money more easily in the US, and I get ads for loan products or credit lines a lot more than elsewhere, but the banks don't conceal their terms or falsely advertise, so that's not grifting.
I doubt you've lived in other countries long enough to compare those systems based on what you're saying about banking, there's virtually no difference anywhere I've been and I still have a number of foreign bank accounts. Every time I see someone criticize US banking it's based on the assumption that poor people are too stupid to understand that interest is charged on loans or that withdrawing money you don't have incurs a fee. I agree with college and health care being ridiculous in the US and arguably mainstream news too (no wonder they're losing influence to podcasts). Everything else is either nowhere near unique to the US or exaggerated to the level of caricature.
Multilingual support sucks almost universally, and that is understandable when most of the innovation comes from countries with low rates of bilingualism, but it is becoming increasingly problematic as platforms like YouTube default to translating everything into a single language that takes several clicks to change. How hard would it be to implement a boolean option for "don't serve me translations by default"? Did they forget to add a column for the default language in their video database? It is particularly mind-boggling when some platforms offer a myriad of accessibility settings that cater to a very small percentage of the population, yet fail to account for people who speak more than one language. It is (or at least was at some point) possible to disable translations of YouTube video titles through a browser plugin or userscript, but the fact that no thought was put into making this toggleable in the first place is insane. Am I the only one who would rather have to translate a few things on my own than to see translations by default? I guess ultimately, it's user attention metrics that lead to such decisions. I imagine it will only get worse with LLMs.
I felt that way when I was fresh out of school, now I find that my life is greatly improved by spending less time on (or thinking about) computers outside of work and more outdoors, doing some kind of physical activity.
If Singapore's economic and social policies were successful, surely people would want to move there? Perhaps skepticism is warranted from teh evil republicanz - the subject of this submission, decriminalization of drug use, was touted largely by left-wingers based on a few similar, seemingly-successful, small-scale efforts in Europe. Now we know how that turned out.
I agree in principle, but in my experience quality is not nearly prioritized highly enough. There is not enough understanding of quality attributes beyond the most visible ones like compute performance and stability (i.e. lack of bugs). And even for those I work on projects where people complain about lack of proper test coverage constantly, but it is impossible to dedicate time to improve that.
I was actually thought how to build quality software (which is not limited to "having no bugs") in college, but I do not have the time or resources to apply this knowledge consistently in a corporate setting because of the pressure to deliver.