Summed up concisely. I’ve unfortunately given up hope that anything can be done or can improve. It feels the fight, whatever fight there ever was, has been lost.

That seems like good news. Interesting to see US drug policy being more lenient than the UK in many instances.

I have to sometimes dual boot into windows 11 and it’s pretty meh. Will directstorage be exclusive to win11? Then that might be a reason to keep it around.

Excellent point. I completely agree and should have perhaps put more emphasis on the fact that these practices are of course egregious and the onus should not just be on the user. There should be more public awareness of these privacy nightmares, however. Somehow people need to learn to start caring about this stuff, because if nobody uses Facebook, Facebook doesn’t have the power to act the way it does.

Has that ever been independently verified? I remember the WhatsApp founders quit over FB policy to use messages for advertising, but perhaps they’ve changed course on that. You’re right, the metadata alone would be insanely valuable.

I’ve worked in advertising for a decade and, while on the one hand, the industry indeed tries to track your every move, it’s rarely done well or in a coordinated fashion. Ever wonder why it’s still not possible to switch off ads for products you’ve already bought? Online advertising is mostly blind spam, which is why you will be advertised the thing you’ve just bought ad nauseam. If they had these ultra-accurate profiles of everyone, they’d advertise you something you haven’t bought. Using a basic adblocker instantly kills 99% of an advertiser’s ability to publicly gather your data. It gets more complicated in the walled gardens: Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Microsoft etc. have an unbelievable amount of information about you, but they don’t willingly share this. They use it to milk you within their walled gardens (do note, that in order to avoid Meta, you cannot use Threads, Instagram, any of their hardware, Facebook or WhatsApp).

Ultimately, it’s still your choice whether you let them surveil you and it turns out people give these rights up willingly.

If you have an Alexa, it’s your fault that Amazon can spy on everything your family says. If you’ve given WhatsApp your mobile number, then it’s your fault that Facebook can read and analyse everything you’ve said to anyone on WhatsApp, connected to a near-perfectly unique ID against your name.

It is up to the users to not willingly provide this information. Trying to do this the regulatory way is all well and good, but it takes decades and the industry moves faster than that. And many countries don’t care at all anyway.

You simply have to give up this dream of corporate ultra-convenience. You have to decide to live a slightly harder life: Linux instead of windows, open source instead of proprietary. Mastodon instead of Twitter, Lemmy instead of Reddit, etc etc

(Some reasons) Why people vote for right wing populists:

• billionaires are above the law
• be it a pandemic, recession, whatever, billionaires profit from all crises
• there are two strata in society: people who have to work and people who choose whether to work. So long as the latter exists and invests all their time into ensuring that the former will forever be the vast majority of society, people will protest vote
• worse, the billionaires pay millionaires to tell thousandaires what the various classes in society are and who the ‘real’ enemy is and it will always be foreigners or the gays or some BS like that (an enemy that’s always simultaneously infinitely strong and weak)
• there’s billionaires in the first place

(I’m well aware that other things can be reasons, too, like perceived loss of living standards, increased political corruption etc. But honestly, I think it’s all down to rich people fucking things up…see below for some proposed fixes)

Approaches that could fix this (good luck trying that in the arch-neoliberal EU):

• ALL wealth above X amount simply gets taken from you. I know it’s complicated with shares in companies etc. But I’m sure where there’s a will there’s a way. Cap wealth at €100mil or whatever
• inheritance tax becomes 99% above £1million
• remuneration ratios: CEOs cannot earn more / hold more shares than 10x more than the lowest earning employee in the company. This has to include subsidiaries and 3rd parties, otherwise companies will just hire other companies to get around this

The above and the fallout from it, would instantly free up money for public services, free education and healthcare and eradicate homelessnes. You wouldn’t need a UBI, if public services were good enough and well funded.

Technically I’m far more radical in my opinions and think that housing should be declared a human right and all drugs legalised and all those fancy things, but honestly, it feels we have more pressing matters at hand, namely, inequality. Until that gets fixed, we can’t really progress as a society.

My main worry here being that it can’t be done. I simply don’t see how, as a society, we will ever gain the cohesion to implement decisive action against the ruling classes. They have become untouchable and would rather burn the whole thing down than give an inch.

The article doesn’t mention longevity problems with perovskite cells. I wonder if that’s been overcome as part of this research.

You are right, this fixes slow startup times for Steam, Firefox, Thunderbird and various others.

Unfortunately that’s the only reasonable advice. Did it myself a few years ago and it was painful for like 3 months and now having to use corporate BS à la Apple / Microsoft seems bafflingly limiting and counter intuitive to me.