I grew up without a phone

Same. All my friends had one, but my parents refused. In fact, the moment I left home, I got a phone.

And I’ll probably let my kids have a phone at some point. But every morning on my way to work, I see kids glued to their phones on the way to elementary school. We live in a very safe, middle class neighborhood where the crime rate is among the lowest in the area. I let my kids ride to the grocery store, which is a half mile or so beyond the school. The sketchiest area is near the school, with some lower middle class housing where parents don’t have the time or money to keep up on the yard. When I moved in, my neighbors warned me to keep my doors locked because there was a burglary a few years prior. One burglary, and was a neighborhood kid.

I’ve lived in a third world country where people got stabbed in front of the police station. I’ve talked to and made friends with people in sketchy areas. I think I know a thing or two about the struggles there, and I don’t think smart phones and smart watches are what they need.

I’m not sure it’s good for kids or parents to be that connected.

Agreed. And that’s my main issue, parents seem to be using “safety” as an excuseto spy on their kids. Kids need to be able to make mistakes, and that needs to happen while the stakes are low.

Sure, I absolutely get that. I just don’t think there’s as big of an intersection between people who give their kids smartphones and smart watches and people who live in crappy areas as there is with helicopter suburban parents. I also don’t see phones and smart watches as safety devices, at least for kids under 14 or so (that’s when they go out on their own more).

The manufacturers of these devices lean hard into FUD targeted mostly at mostly at those who with means, as in lower middle class and up. That same group is plagued with depression and suicide, and I think the proliferation of these devices is a big part of the problem. If you don’t have the latest gadget or aren’t on the popular SM app 24/7, you’re “left out.” But itf you are, there’s a good chance you’ll be cyber-bullied or even targeted by criminals.

So that’s why I reject the premise. In the majority of cases, smart phones and watches don’t make you safer, they arguably increase risk, and they’re expensive to boot.

Instead of opening my kids up to that, I prefer to be the “bad guy” and say no until my kids earn that privilege. And they earn it by showing that they’ll come to us with problems, because that’ll be necessary when they run into problems on these devices. If they haven’t earned my trust, they can borrow a loaner phone when they need it.

The safety thing is just an excuse. The vast majority of people could move if they needed to, just look at first generation immigrants living on nothing just to afford rent in a good school district so their kids can have a better future than them. Those were my friends growing up.

You got me, I guess? But don’t tell my POC SO that I’ve been happily married to for >10 years.

Seriously though, this is the kind of extreme take I’m pushing back on. I strongly disagree with the Lemmy devs’ politics, yet here I am on their platform. I’ve even contributed bug fixes. I strongly disagree with Eich’s politics, yet I use Brave as my backup browser. Why? It meets my technical requirements. Firefox is my main browser though.

I’m not a centrist either, whatever that means, but I guess of you average out my extreme takes it could look that way. Conservatives call me socialist, Progressives call me far right, so I guess the middle of that is centrist?

It absolutely is a competitor. Yes, it uses the same engine, but it blocks their ads. And at the end of the day, serving ads is what Google wants to do.

But again, Firefox (and forks) is my main browser, and it’s what I recommend to everyone. But Brave is on my list of acceptable Chromium browsers, assuming you need a Chromium browser (I do for web dev at my day job).

I was pretty confused when reading because it sounded like you were thanking me for calling our far right BS from the person was talking to, but I was calling our far left BS instead.

But after a couple paragraphs, I realized it was me you were talking about. So thank you for giving me a chance to see this and respond.

professional far right fire hydrant apologist

Everything here is incorrect. I’m not being paid, I’m not far right (I hate Trump and voted for Biden in 2020), and I call out far right BS all the time (had an argument w/ my boss the other day who supported Trump’s tariff and immigration policy).

ignoring extremely glaring issues

I’ve tried to cover all of them, but my posts get long as is, so I try to combine a few. I don’t follow Brave news much, so I’ll miss some things.

funding intolerance isn’t intolerance

If I donated to an intolerant PAC or something, sure, I’d get that. If I bought products from a corporation that openly funds intolerant PACs with a large chunk of profits, I’d get that as well.

But if the CEO uses their personal money on it, I have more trouble connecting that with the company. As long as they keep personal opinions personal and don’t drag the company into it, I’m fine. The VP seems worse than him honestly (from the article).

A CEO is not the company, and if you disable ads, don’t use their search engine, and don’t engage with their crypto nonsense, you’re not giving them any money. I do all of that for the handful of minutes each day I use it.

I use Firefox as my main browser, and that’s what I recommend to others. I use Brave as my backup browser, because I need something that runs on the Chromium engine that doesn’t have ads. I think people are overreacting about Eich. I disagree with his politics, but as long as he keeps that outside the company, I’m okay with it.

crypto scam was essentially malware, and did cause performance hits to devices using Brave (part of the reason why it was caught).

I assume you’re talking about the referral link thing? Yeah, that was bad, and I think I mentioned that. At least they quickly reversed course.

I can see an argument for them thinking it wasn’t that bad, so I’m willing to chalk it up to naïveté. It wasn’t quite as bad as Honey, which removed other referral codes. It’s still bad.

I didn’t hear that it caused performance issues though.

false equivalency between something like hard drugs and gambling - things that literally statistically bring literal harm - to marriage

I never claimed they were equivalent. I merely pointed to them as fairly unpopular things that I support, and gave reasons for it.

And I agree, they can absolutely cause problems in marriage, as well as non-married people (addiction is real), hence why I said they are “bad.” But “bad” doesn’t necessarily have to mean “illegal.”

I have never used drugs, gambled, or hired a prostitute, and I don’t think anyone else should, but I will absolutely support legalizing them. In fact, I’m quite religious, and those things are 100% against my religion, but I believe personal morality shouldn’t really impact politics. My religion and moral code is for me, and I’m not going to force that on anyone.

In short, I support these probably for the same reason you oppose Eich: I believe in freedom. I guess I define that a bit more liberally than you do.

that’s why Teslas are burning

Teslas are burning as a symbol of opposition to Musk and DOGE. And I completely respect that, I also don’t like Musk and DOGE.

That said, this isn’t going to change anything. Musk has enough money that even if Tesla disappears, he’ll still be filthy rich. He does seem to care about the “richest man in the world” title, so I guess it will hurt his ego a little.

The ones that’ll suffer more are regular people who bought a Tesla years ago and are getting caught in the crossfire. Some idiots will burn privately owned Teslas, insurance coverage will get dropped, etc. That’s not worth it IMO.

Protest at Tesla dealerships, or better yet your state capital. I might even join you. But wanton destruction isn’t the way.

It’s not that bad, it’s a handful of seconds.

It sounds like you need to step away from social media and touch some grass.

But let’s say you’re right, pretty much every big company is sucking up to Trump, and you’d be hard pressed to find something in your shopping cart that doesn’t benefit someone that supports him. That’s an untenable position.

The better approach, IMO, is to avoid products from companies that mistreat their employees. That’s why I avoid Walmart, Amazon, and a few others, because that sends a clearer message and funnels my money to a better cause.

Avoiding Brave is just virtue signaling, it doesn’t actually accomplish anything. If Brave goes under, Eich will still be conservative and probably still donate to causes you don’t like, but we’ll have one less competitor to Google’s absolute hegemony over the web browser market.

Use Brave if it solves your problems, don’t if it doesn’t. Don’t base that decision on the personal views of the person who happens to be in charge.

Sam Walton

Oh yeah, I absolutely respect the man, I just don’t respect his business choices. There needs to be a balance between cutting costs to bring prices down for customers and providing for your employees.

if a CEO deeply ingrains himself in the political process, I can probably take a pass on his products

But why? He doesn’t need your money anymore, and if everyone stopped buying his products and Tesla went bankrupt, he’d still be ridiculously rich.

I get that it’s sending a message, but what does that accomplish? Maybe the board boots him as CEO, but he’ll retain his ownership stake.

I don’t see it. That’s why I focus on company culture, which often survives a change in management. If the culture is busted, I go out of my way go avoid their products.

Starbucks

Starbucks has actually been fantastic, at least in the past, with even part-time employees getting great benefits and pay being very competitive. I don’t know how things are with the CEO changes (Chipotle guy now, right?), so maybe that’s no longer the case.

That said, I don’t go there because I don’t like their products.

Chromium with uBlock Origin

Does that still work?

I mostly just need something to test on, since I’m a full stack web dev, and I don’t like having ads everywhere when I need to prettify some JSON or something. Also a fallback on the few pages Firefox doesn’t work on, once in a blue moon.

That’s really it.

What’s so nice about it? Have you tried quadlets or docker compose? Could you give a quick comparison to show what you one like about it?

My main complaint about Quadlet is that resources for it are fairly limited, so thanks for linking this post!

And yes, quadlet would definitely make managing Plex easier. That post seems to hit all the gotchas I’ve run into, so definitely consult it as you run into issues.

Agreed. But if you’re going to fixate on one era, you could do a lot worse than Roman history.

Other cool eras to fixate on:

• Joseon Dynasty and Sejong the Great in Korea
• Chola Empire - naval empire before navies were really a thing
• Ethiopian Empire - somehow survived with strong empire neighbors

There’s a lot of really cool history, Roman history is extra cool though since you can see so much of it in Europe.

That depends. If you have exposed services, you could use some features of the firewall to geoip restrict incoming requests to prevent spam from China and Russia and whatnot.

If you don’t have any services running on a publicly accessible port, then what would the firewall protect?

To be fair, Roman history is really cool.

You would advocate for and even donate to political reform for something you don’t personally believe in?

Yes. I believe in personal freedom, so I’ll support the freedom to do things that I believe are harmful like drug use, gambling, or prostitution. You doing those things doesn’t impact me or anyone else so it should 100% be your right to do it. In short, I believe principles should carry the day.

I may not agree with you doing something I believe to be bad, but I’ll defend your right to do it.

In the same vein, I believe governments should be as small as possible, and no smaller. The role of government is to protect me from you, and vice versa. It’s not to ensure I’m making good choices, in fact it shouldn’t be in the business of deciding what’s “good” or “bad,” it should merely enforce laws that protect people from eachother.

Does the government deciding which marriages are valid protect me from you? Not really, all it does is determine who can take advantage of certain benefits. That sounds exclusionary with no particular purpose, so the government shouldn’t decide that.

So I really can’t speak to why Eich donated to the prop 8 fund (or whatever it was). Was it because he hates gay people? Or because he thinks same sex marriage goes counter to the reason marriage exists as a government institution? Or something else? I don’t know, nor do I really care, provided it doesn’t get in the way of doing his job.

Got it, so being gay isn’t “wrong” or “invalid”, it’s just “bad”?

I didn’t say that.

My point here is that personal views can differ from political policy views.

Yes, that’s what I was referring to. You might call it a “contract”.

The issue is that it’s opt-out. Instead of that, people should opt-in only to the parts they want.

If you’re talking about injecting Axate ads where Google and other ads already are

No, I’m talking about creating a protocol where browser clients can inform website owners that the customer is using this separate method of payment. It could happen separate from the browser (e.g. as an extension), but the browser gives it a lot more visibility.

The UX here would be pretty simple: if the user has enabled this feature, websites would prompt users for payment or to show ads.

Browsers win because they get a revenue stream, Axate wins by having more customers, and websites win because they’re getting paid instead of customers blocking ads.

The problem with doing that with fiat is that there are transfer fees. You’d essential be paying a $3 to transfer 5 cents. That’s why everyone uses crypto for this.

That’s why you batch up transfers. General flow:

1. users load up a balance (say, $20)
2. service (e.g. Axate) tracks which payments have been made and bulk pays website owners monthly or whatever

Boom, total number of transfers are pretty low, no need for cryptocurrencies.

Both are responsible.

Sure, but the browser vendor has very little at stake, whereas the user has everything at stake. At the end of the day, it’s on the user.

Not good enough.

You’re welcome to your opinion. I personally don’t have an issue with how people spend their money, I only have an issue with how they treat their employees and choices they make about their product.

For those too lazy to click through:

However, on June 13, 2013, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in the Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc, that human genes cannot be patented because DNA is a “product of nature.” All gene patents were invalidated with this ruling. However, the ruling did not prohibit the patenting of DNA that is manipulated (i.e., no longer a product of nature) or processes for identifying DNA sequences.

Absolutely agree. This is one of my favorites.

Or if you’re a minority who could be framed for a crime.

They patented your DNA.

You can’t patent DNA… They can sell it though, with a simple TOS update (if they even need to).