Same with Google allowing literal malware to advertise themselves posing as legitimate apps that show above the actual app’s website.

They even let ads spoof the display domain name to match the official website (and do no checks for whether they actually own the display domain despite literally having the infrastructure to do that in their SEO tools) while redirecting to a different domain when you click the ad.

John Hammond video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nlnuk8W2A0Y (also a good video to send to anyone who still thinks Macs “can’t” get malware)

Even if this is genuine incompetence and not malice, they’re so disgustingly incompetent that they don’t deserve to exist just the same as if it was malice.

Yeah the malware is called Windows 11

Karl Marx. And never. Marx is immortal.

Run it in a VM? Maybe even one of those fancy ones that make it appear as a normal window in your Linux DE. Doesn’t solve the problem of the spyware existing but at least it’s contained and can’t touch your Linux apps.

“Hey Gemini write me a React app”

Academic tradition requires you to cite works…

Yeah looks to me like scaling artifacts from shrinking the image. AFAIK AI isn’t that consistent especially with high contrast shapes.

Just make sure you choose rich parents when getting conceived smh

OK, face of Karl Marx then. The German guy who never even set foot in the USSR.

Oh wait you think that’s bad too.

What about Mao-no.

What about Che Guev-no.

Ho Chi-no.

Venez-no.

What about the Paris commune? No? Still bad in your mind?

Marxist Austria? Nah I’m sure the army that put an end to that is preferable according to you. They called themselves socialist with none of the Soviet imagery after all!

Even if we completely rebranded socialism you’d make it your mission to add the Soviet imagery back in and remind everyone of it. Like y’all do for decidedly capitalist bandaids like student loan forgiveness or food stamps that don’t even have anything to do with socialism.

You’re a hypocrite for asking me not to or pointing it out.

No? I’m definitely what people like you call an “authoritarian seeseepee tankie” who supposedly loves suppressing speech for sport. My comment was perfectly inline (get it? cause I toe the party line?) with the totalitarian dictatorship aspirations I definitely totally have.

I mean, compared to what? Picking your nose on transit? The people sitting across from you is probably a bigger source of “spying” (and judgment) than the cameras in that case. IMO if you’re okay with being spied on in your car you really don’t have much more to worry about on a train or in a station.

I further submit that cars, being your personal space but still very much “in public,” give you much more of an illusion of privacy while in most cases being just as if not more invasive than transit.

Also, if we’re talking only the transit or road system and not the spying at your destination, driving gives much more precise location data than transit. They’ll know which exact house or building you pulled up to compared to which train station or bus stop you get off at. And if you do consider all surveillance, then they can figure out where you’re going even if you walk because there will be cameras at your destination.

So do roads, and your metal cage literally has a code on a plaque tied directly to your government ID, with a retroreflective background and each character carefully engineered to be machine readable from any angle and lighting. Hell, a good number of the cars you pass have 360 degree camera arrays pointed directly in your windows, or if you spring for a higher end model with all the features, you get the privilege of a camera pointed straight at your face and at your passengers’ faces.

Also, you can cover your face on transit with something like a medical mask and sunglasses. If you try covering your license plate you’ll literally get arrested.

The irony being that the boomers who say the “builds character” shit had a vastly easier life compared to their parents and grandparents, who fought literal world wars. They think all societal change before them was good (including stuff like colonialism which they see as “civilizing” the savage natives) but any progress after them is the devil because it means they might have to change their behaviour or worldviews, hell, or even the idea that people they think are less than them getting less disadvantaged and oppressed than before which I guess make them jealous or something?

anarchist erasure

You know you can just repost this with the anarchist symbol pasted over the hammer and sickle in response right? Like you think the OP presumably did to your symbol. If you care, there’s nothing stopping you from erasing us tankies right back, we can handle it. You could even snarkily title it “Perspectives about life (fixed)” or something. Go crazy, this is literally the meme community.

Also, ironic that an anarchist is protesting someone covering up their symbol to express a different thought. No kings or masters or hierarchy but an abstract symbol on a shitpost is sacred and can’t be touched?

how can I improve my privacy when buying a modern car?

Buy a train ticket with cash? Not guaranteed to be fully “private” in the cyberpunk shithole we live in but presumably more private than a car.

On that note, fuck every transit agency (including TransLink in Vancouver) who make it more expensive to buy tickets with cash compared to a transit card. And especially fuck you if your transit card system is a P3 with the data handled by a private company (again, including TransLink). You’re probably paying the money they thought they could have made selling your commute data to advertisers.

Bonus non privacy related rant: TransLink, the Earth and our decedents also say fuck you for using plastic RFID cards even for single journey tickets that will get promptly thrown in the trash when they expire in 90 minutes instead of a simple piece of paper that can biodegrade. They even waste more resources to wrap the plastic in paper to give the illusion of the ticket being made of paper when it absolutely is not. Yeah make single use microcomputers and antennas why don’t you? Can’t have transit being too eco friendly after all. They’re not futuristic, future generations will curse us for being so barbarically wasteful of precious resources while digging those RFID tickets out of landfills to extract silicon and metal from. Just print QR codes on normal paper tickets for god sake since the RFID cards probably only store a single unique ID that needs to be looked up against a database anyway, or better yet, just have coin slots on the fare gates and skip giving you a ticket altogether. Oh wait, but then they wouldn’t able to know which station you get off at and refuse to let you out until you’ve paid the upcharge for having the audacity to ride a fully automated train system even one station outside your home city.

“DUHH, IT’S BECAUSE SPEECH IN CHINA IS CENSORED AND YOU’LL LITERALLY GET SENT TO A XINJIANG CONCENTRATION CAMP IF YOU TRIED BEING A VLOGGER”

As a general rule of thumb, any in-store prepared food in a large grocery store (the ones that come in the store’s own packaging) was probably raw food that had been sitting for ages and they couldn’t sell in time. They’ll literally cut mold out of fruits and slice up the rest for those plastic platters. Every time they re-print a label, it resets the expiry date and you have no idea how many times they’ve done that and just shuffled food around by turning it into different forms.

CBC Marketplace video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxCT_D6HBd8

Define “doing things which enable you to survive.” In my definition, that doesn’t involve being king or exploiting others to hoard more wealth than you could ever hope to spend. You need some minimum amount of resources to survive but hoarding many times more than you need doesn’t help you survive and only harms others.

“If a monkey hoards more bananas than it can eat, causing its peers to starve while most of the bananas rot in its pile, scientists will study its brain to find out what the hell is wrong with it. But when a human does it, they get celebrated under capitalism.”

Also, it was once human nature to flee from fire, but once we learned to control it, it became an integral part of our lives. Human “nature” changes over time because your brain is pretty much a blank slate when you’re born and doesn’t fully finish structuring itself until your 20s. Your entire childhood is spent developing your “nature” that you’ll have for your adult life (and even then you can change it at will even in adulthood if you change your living conditions), which is why we’re more influenced by the conditions we grow up in than any sort of innate biology. What “nature” was best for hunter gatherer or even medieval times are totally obsolete in our modern day, so they stop being our default “nature” due to children no longer growing up in those conditions.

The idea that your nature is influenced by your conditions isn’t even unique to humans. Most animals are the same, a house cat or dog will learn from a very young age how to beg for food from their owners while a feral cat/dog won’t because that’s not beneficial for their survival when they’re not a pet. Hell, house cats keep making kitten sounds because their owners keep treating them like kittens, while feral cats stop meowing once they leave their parents. Animals born and raised in captivity in general often show completely different behaviors and personality compared to wild animals of the same species, because their brains are literally structured differently due to growing up in different conditions.

Yes. Because it benefited them over others. Humans are capable of choosing to do things that benefit them and it has nothing to do with their “nature”. Human nature is to not die and in the ages when humans could barely produce enough food for their own survival, it was beneficial to be in a position of power because it let you control the resources, ensuring you had enough for yourself and maybe some of your subjects as an afterthought. Marxism does not reject the notion that power benefits the people who have then, in fact that’s a core fact that Marxism is based on, and it calls out the fact that feudal/monarchist/capitalist power benefits the ruling class by subjugating and exploiting the working class, and proposes that fully collective control of resources will benefit everyone much more equally than the current system. I don’t think you have to agree with Marxism’s proposed solution to this to recognize the problem it points out. It asserts that because we have lived in such systems our whole lives, we think it’s human nature when in reality a person born and living in some other system (Marxist or otherwise) will think their system is human nature, because in reality no system is and they’re all abstract inventions with nothing to do with our neurobiology or evolution.

For a non political example, I write code all day because it benefits me and I think it’s the most normal and intuitive thing ever, even though I doubt programming was something humans evolved to do, we figured it out ourselves and it had nothing to do with our nature. You literally have to learn and practice abstract computational thinking while learning to program because it’s very unintuitive at times compared to how humans think by default, yet people learn it just fine and once you do, it becomes your nature.

The cool thing about humans is we’re not bound to natural instincts and can choose to live however we want. I think we should leverage this ability instead of using it as a justification for maintaining the same broken systems that have let us down over and over again.

Because humans experiment with societal rules as societies were developing and get into self reinforcing loops that go on long after everyone’s forgotten why it happened in the first place.

Human nature is to form societies. What happens in those societies and how they are structured are the result of chaotic interactions and competing thought that, again, are the result of material conditions those humans find themselves in.

There are plenty of societies that don’t strictly follow the Roman/European system of power. Japan for example had their emperor reduced to a symbolic position long before European contact, but even though the emperor had most of his real power taken away, everyone still called him emperor and worshipped him because he was so important to their culture, power or not. Meanwhile, in what would be modern day India, multiple different religions arose based on selfless sacrifice for others and rejection of indulgence and pleasure in favor of self reflection and simple living, with many people throughout history in the region (princes, heirs of family fortunes, etc) fully rejecting their very privileged lifestyles to embrace aestheticism. Same with ancient Greek stoic and cynic philosophers many of which came from rich and powerful families yet deliberately choose to reject all of it. That all seems pretty against “human nature” no? Then you had the Indigenous tribes of the world who practiced small egalitarian societal groups and did perfectly fine until Europeans intervened.

Any system predicated on obtaining as much wealth or power as possible will see people fixating on that and eventually divorcing the wealth/power itself from the material conditions that they arose from. Why do you think so many corporations turn into death spirals where they try to increase profits at all costs, abandoning their actual products and customers, and then act all shocked when they inevetably go bankrupt due to no longer having a customer base because they alienated everyone with their shitty profit oriented practices? The only way to solve this is to change the system people live under.