I'm really not sure "not actively promoting people who might make slightly more profit for this apocalyptically profitable megacorp that happens to have started out as an online bookstore" is "fucking the authors". It's certainly not actively *helping* you but "doing nothing to help you" is a long way from "fucking you over".

I'm not saying Amazon's innocent here, I'm quite sure there are *many* things they are doing that actively siphon money away from authors and publishers and towards Bezos' pockets. But "they haven't decided, unprompted, to start a regular e-mail blast advertising random books to their customers based on their preferences, and included me as the first example" is way under the threshold of things I'd say qualified as "fucking you".

We all know what the difference between a game console and a general-purpose computer is but I feel like the fact that there's multiple c64 emulators available on iOS suggests that Apple doesn't have an official ruling on where the line between one and the other is. I don't think anyone would boot up Speedscript or GeoWrite in their virtual c64 to get some writing done but maybe a few people like George RR Martin might be all over Wordstar in their virtual MS-DOS machines, and that could be enough to put it over the line.

Realistically I suspect Apple's line is more like "is part of this old system owned by someone with enough lawyers to make us give a fuck that we're making money off of it" but obviously they're never gonna come out and say that publicly.

None of these jobs are going to be endangered at all by "AI". Image generators are massively automating "creating by leeching off of actual artists".

The usage you desire is perfectly served by getting a suite, or by getting two adjacent hotel rooms and opening the door between them. I have attended so many room parties at furry conventions that were held in two adjacent rooms or in a suite.

You can also do things like go out to a park and chill together.

I have been running a Mastodon instance since late 2017.

There are several design choices that Gargron (Mastodon's main developer) has made that are pretty explicitly because he wants it to be Twitter, But I Made It. Feature requests to change these choices keep appearing and keep getting denied - if you want to up the character limit past 500, or have markdown/other rich text, you will have to fork them and add it yourself, or perhaps switch to the "Glitch" fork, which is maintained by one of the leading contributors to the main project who is not Garg.

Personally I would be delighted if the Fediverse ate not just Twitter's market share, but Facebook's, and Instagram's, and Youtube's, and TikTok's, and every other site that has strip-mined public conversation for profit.

You can occasionally find it at smaller companies. I worked at a company that had a 4-year vesting schedule. You got 25% after 12 months, monthly vesting afterwards, accelerated vesting if you were laid off in the first year. So if you were laid off after 6 months (which happened to some people after Covid hit) you got 12.5% of your options vested immediately. If within the first year you left voluntarily or were terminated for cause like for example for bringing hookers into the office after hours I'm looking at you Jerry then you got nothing.

Catalina didn't offer anything that felt worth the hassle of losing a couple 32-bit things that will never be updated, and of discovering if the new separate Music app is as much of a pain in the ass about hassling me to subscribe to their streaming service as iOS Music is.

At this point I think it is pretty clear that the only thing that's gonna get me onto a new version of MacOS is buying a new computer, and that's not gonna be until like 2022 or 2023. Which feels kinda weird given that I've been on the current OS once a .1 release came out since like Tiger.

I'm still using an iPhone 6s I bought around 2016 or so. I bought an Apple case when I got it and that absorbed a few drops, when the last iPhone came out I decided to sink a whole forty bucks or so into a new case because the old one was starting to fall apart. I can't remember how much I paid for it when I got it, it was shortly after the 8 came out so it was last year's model. Plus AppleCare. Which is expired now.

No battery swelling, still works with my old wired headphones/earbuds. Still does what I need it to. I'm hoping to get at least five years out of it, maybe more; all I really do with it is maps, check email, and the usual web bullshit.

Safari has been doing that for quite some time.

And I hate it.

Having said that, clicking in the address bar brings the whole address back. But I don't want it hidden in the first place.

1) Straw=man argument.

2) Repeat for the third time: YOU need an app. THEY don't. I get that this was awkwardly worded, but read the whole thing.

3) That's right, it doesn't go to Google. But Google was the whole point of what I wrote. So: another straw man. Further, courts have increasingly been ruling that even police need a warrant for that.

4) Apparently you are ignoring Google's history, because you wrote "I feel like I can trust this."

I know quite well how it works, as I have already established. Despite your efforts you haven't "corrected" me on a single point.

Nor have I been "shouting".

Not even in most of those.

Last I checked the stats, fully 80% of the U.S. has no real alternative to their ONE local cable company for broadband internet.

Even worse: the big cable companies, like Comcast and Spectrum, have those parts of the U.S. divided up into "non-compete zones", in which one company has pretty much exclusive domain over the whole area.

Which is illegal as hell. Anti-trust laws haven't been taken off the books. But far too often these days they have been ignored.

1) Not BS. It's on my own phone. Without my consent.

2) No, you do not need an app on top of this. I addressed that already. The app is to give YOU information. Not to collect it.

3) No, they don't already have my location data. At least, I haven't given them my consent to have it, it's not in their TOS that they can collect it without my consent, and I have all location settings turned off.

4) You can feel like you can trust anything you like. If you want to ignore Google's history in regard to things like this, feel free. Doesn't bother me a bit.

I already said that in my previous post: the app is for your use, not theirs. Who are you shouting at?

"Even better" but not by much.

And you neglect to mention that N100 are a lot more expensive.

The masks they are referring to here aren't even N95. They're just to prevent you from coughing/sneezing droplets directly on other people.

So... you can use the one I mentioned using reflected sunlight or even streetlight or yard lights.

That's completely passive too.

They don't need government. If you're on Android, you probably already have it.

Without your consent.

Go to Settings > Google Settings and see if it says "COVID-19 Exposure Notifications" at the top.

To turn it off, hit the 3-dot menu button, then "Usage & diagnostics" and turn it off.

Apparently the app you download is only used to give you information about it. They collect the data regardless.

If that's wrong, someone by all means correct me. But don't just tell me what Google says. They're not trustworthy.