Yeah it pisses me off the way people are like “tech bros ruined the internet”. No, users ruined it! There was no reason to stop self-hosting webpages, forums and IRC servers. Users switched to Facebook instead because they preferred it and didn’t care about the downsides. There’s an alternative to every website and app which respects privacy, serves no ads, and has no algorithm to farm your outrage. Users refuse to use them because they aren’t cool enough.

Is this part of a series or something? I have no idea what any part of it means

All the answers you got show why this conversation goes badly. No one can come up with an actual problem that data collection causes, it’s all silly comparisons to giving people your credit card number or shitting in front of them.

For me, having my data collected is like having CCTV cameras in stores. Yeah, technically someone is filming everything I do. Yeah it would be bad if a private individual was filming me for nefarious reasons. But no one actually uses that data for anything bad, and it doesn’t actually cause any problems.

All that happens is I get more relevant ads.

Weird how it’s literally impossible to ever live without something no one had 100 years ago

It’s a shame the strategy is now failing because software as a service is so popular. Nothing in the GPL forces you to distribute your changes if you don’t distribute the program. So just put the program on a webserver and let users interact through an API and hey presto, steal as much GPL code as you like.

Everyone crucified MongoDB when they tried to create a licence that prevents this, and FSF have declared that the problem can’t be solved with licences and everyone just has to boycott non-free software (good luck!).

End of free software as we know it, IMHO.

I’ve never doubted the Tiananmen Square massacre before, but there are so many posts lately insisting it happened I’m starting to think maybe it didn’t

I suspect a lot of “breakages” were failed pacman updates due to signing issues, before pacman knew to update arch-keyring first. I know one person who moved to another distro when that happened.

if I take a hoop/window and place it quickly over an object

Then the velocity of the object relative to the “exit” of the hoop would be the same as the velocity of the object relative to the “entrance” of the hoop, which is option B.

In your analogy, option A would mean the object has a relative velocity of entering the hoop but suddenly no relative velocity exiting it, so the object magically starts following the hoop.

And never run commands copied from a web page, even if you do know them.

JavaScript’s copy/paste API means a website owner or an attacker can change the contents of your clipboard after you press copy, and you’ll end up pasting malicious commands into your shell. I think Firefox blocks this now, don’t know about Chrome.

I hear you with this, I’ve ended up doing a distance learning Maths degree just so I can understand all the Wikipedia squiggles

That’s definitely the intention. But for the guy on the left, “critical holistic understanding” amounts to “X isn’t worth it because it’s too complicated”, and he posts most of these memes.