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mostlysignssomeportents · 3 months

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Sympathy for the spammer

Catch me in Miami! I'll be at Books and Books in Coral Gables on Jan 22 at 8PM.

In any scam, any con, any hustle, the big winners are the people who supply the scammers – not the scammers themselves. The kids selling dope on the corner are making less than minimum wage, while the respectable crime-bosses who own the labs clean up. Desperate "retail investors" who buy shitcoins from Superbowl ads get skinned, while the MBA bros who issue the coins make millions (in real dollars, not crypto).

It's ever been thus. The California gold rush was a con, and nearly everyone who went west went broke. Famously, the only reliable way to cash out on the gold rush was to sell "picks and shovels" to the credulous, doomed and desperate. That's how Leland Stanford made his fortune, which he funneled into eugenics programs (and founding a university):

https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/malcolm-harris/palo-alto/9780316592031/

That means that the people who try to con you are almost always getting conned themselves. Think of Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) scams. My forthcoming novel The Bezzle opens with a baroque and improbable fast-food Ponzi in the town of Avalon on the island of Catalina, founded by the chicle monopolist William Wrigley Jr:

http://thebezzle.org

Wrigley found fast food declasse and banned it from the island, a rule that persists to this day. In The Bezzle, the forensic detective Martin Hench uncovers The Fry Guys, an MLM that flash-freezes contraband burgers and fries smuggled on-island from the mainland and sells them to islanders though an "affiliate marketing" scheme that is really about recruiting other affiliate markets to sell under you. As with every MLM, the value of the burgers and fries sold is dwarfed by the gigantic edifice of finance fraud built around it, with "points" being bought and sold for real cash, which is snaffled up and sucked out of the island by a greedy mainlander who is behind the scheme.

A "bezzle" is John Kenneth Galbraith's term for "the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it." In every scam, there's a period where everyone feels richer – but only the scammers are actually cleaning up. The wealth of the marks is illusory, but the longer the scammer can preserve the illusion, the more real money the marks will pump into the system.

MLMs are particularly ugly, because they target people who are shut out of economic opportunity – women, people of color, working people. These people necessarily rely on social ties for survival, looking after each others' kids, loaning each other money they can't afford, sharing what little they have when others have nothing.

It's this social cohesion that MLMs weaponize. Crypto "entrepreneurs" are encouraged to suck in their friends and family by telling them that they're "building Black wealth." Working women are exhorted to suck in their bffs by appealing to their sisterhood and the chance for "women to lift each other up."

The "sales people" trying to get you to buy crypto or leggings or supplements are engaged in predatory conduct that will make you financially and socially worse off, wrecking their communities' finances and shattering the mutual aid survival networks they rely on. But they're not getting rich on this – they're also being scammed:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4686468

This really hit home for me in the mid-2000s, when I was still editing Boing Boing. We had a submission form where our readers could submit links for us to look at for inclusion on the blog, and it was overwhelmed by spam. We'd add all kinds of antispam to it, and still, we'd get floods of hundreds or even thousands of spam submissions to it.

One night, I was lying in my bed in London and watching these spams roll in. They were all for small businesses in the rustbelt, handyman services, lawn-care, odd jobs, that kind of thing. They were 10 million miles from the kind of thing we'd ever post about on Boing Boing. They were coming in so thickly that I literally couldn't finish downloading my email – the POP session was dropping before I could get all the mail in the spool. I had to ssh into my mail server and delete them by hand. It was maddening.

Frustrated and furious, I started calling the phone numbers associated with these small businesses, demanding an explanation. I assumed that they'd hired some kind of sleazy marketing service and I wanted to know who it was so I could give them a piece of my mind.

But what I discovered when I got through was much weirder. These people had all been laid off from factories that were shuttering due to globalization. As part of their termination packages, their bosses had offered them "retraining" via "courses" in founding their own businesses.

The "courses" were the precursors to the current era's rise-and-grind hustle-culture scams (again, the only people getting rich from that stuff are the people selling the courses – the "students" finish the course poorer). They promised these laid-off workers, who'd given their lives to their former employers before being discarded, that they just needed to pull themselves up by their own boostraps:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/10/declaration-of-interdependence/#solidarity-forever

After all, we had the internet now! There were so many new opportunities to be your own boss! The course came with a dreadful build-your-own-website service, complete with an overpriced domain sales portal, and a single form for submitting your new business to "thousands of search engines."

This was nearly 20 years ago, but even then, there was really only one search engine that mattered: Google. The "thousands of search engines" the scammers promised to submit these desperate peoples' websites to were just submission forms for directories, indexes, blogs, and mailing lists. The number of directories, indexes, blogs and mailing lists that would publish their submissions was either "zero" or "nearly zero." There was certainly no possibility that anyone at Boing Boing would ever press the wrong key and accidentally write a 500-word blog post about a leaf-raking service in a collapsing deindustrialized exurb in Kentucky or Ohio.

The people who were drowning me in spam weren't the scammers – they were the scammees.

But that's only half the story. Years later, I discovered how our submission form was getting included in this get-rich-quick's mass-submission system. It was a MLM! Coders in the former Soviet Union were getting work via darknet websites that promised them relative pittances for every submission form they reverse-engineered and submitted. The smart coders didn't crack the forms directly – they recruited other, less business-savvy coders to do that for them, and then often as not, ripped them off.

The scam economy runs on this kind of indirection, where scammees are turned into scammers, who flood useful and productive and nice spaces with useless dross that doesn't even make them any money. Take the submission queue at Clarkesworld, the great online science fiction magazine, which famously had to close after it was flooded with thousands of junk submission "written" by LLMs:

https://www.npr.org/2023/02/24/1159286436/ai-chatbot-chatgpt-magazine-clarkesworld-artificial-intelligence

There was a zero percent chance that Neil Clarke would accidentally accept one of these submissions. They were uniformly terrible. The people submitting these "stories" weren't frustrated sf writers who'd discovered a "life hack" that let them turn out more brilliant prose at scale.

They were scammers who'd been scammed into thinking that AIs were the key to a life of passive income, a 4-Hour Work-Week powered by an AI-based self-licking ice-cream cone:

https://pod.link/1651876897/episode/995c8a778ede17d2d7cff393e5203157

This is absolutely classic passive-income brainworms thinking. "I have a bot that can turn out plausible sentences. I will locate places where sentences can be exchanged for money, aim my bot at it, sit back, and count my winnings." It's MBA logic on meth: find a thing people pay for, then, without bothering to understand why they pay for that thing, find a way to generate something like it at scale and bombard them with it.

Con artists start by conning themselves, with the idea that "you can't con an honest man." But the factor that predicts whether someone is connable isn't their honesty – it's their desperation. The kid selling drugs on the corner, the mom desperately DMing her high-school friends to sell them leggings, the cousin who insists that you get in on their shitcoin – they're all doing it because the system is rigged against them, and getting worse every day.

These people reason – correctly – that all the people getting really rich are scamming. If Amazon can make $38b/year selling "ads" that push worse products that cost more to the top of their search results, why should the mere fact that an "opportunity" is obviously predatory and fraudulent disqualify it?

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/29/aethelred-the-unready/#not-one-penny-for-tribute

The quest for passive income is really the quest for a "greater fool," the economist's term for the person who relieves you of the useless crap you just overpaid for. It rots the mind, atomizes communities, shatters solidarity and breeds cynicism:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security

The rise and rise of botshit cannot be separated from this phenomenon. The botshit in our search-results, our social media feeds, and our in-boxes isn't making money for the enshittifiers who send it – rather, they are being hustled by someone who's selling them the "picks and shovels" for the AI gold rush:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/03/botshit-generative-ai-imminent-threat-democracy

That's the true cost of all the automation-driven unemployment criti-hype: while we're nowhere near a place where bots can steal your job, we're certainly at the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/11/robots-stole-my-jerb/#computer-says-no

The manic "entrepreneurs" who've been stampeded into panic by the (correct) perception that the economy is a game of musical chairs where the number of chairs is decreasing at breakneck speed are easy marks for the Leland Stanfords of AI, who are creating generational wealth for themselves by promising that their bots will automate away all the tedious work that goes into creating value. Expect a lot more Amazon Marketplace products called "I'm sorry, I cannot fulfil this request as it goes against OpenAI use policy":

https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/12/24036156/openai-policy-amazon-ai-listings

No one's going to buy these products, but the AI picks-and-shovels people will still reap a fortune from the attempt. And because history repeats itself, these newly minted billionaires are continuing Leland Stanford's love affair with eugenics:

https://www.truthdig.com/dig-series/eugenics/

The fact that AI spam doesn't pay is important to the fortunes of AI companies. Most high-value AI applications are very risk-intolerant (self-driving cars, radiology analysis, etc). An AI tool might help a human perform these tasks more accurately – by warning them of things that they've missed – but that's not how AI will turn a profit. There's no market for AI that makes your workers cost more but makes them better at their jobs:

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

Plenty of people think that spam might be the elusive high-value, low-risk AI application. But that's just not true. The point of AI spam is to get clicks from people who are looking for better content. It's SEO. No one reads 2000 words of algorithm-pleasing LLM garbage over an omelette recipe and then subscribes to that site's feed.

And the omelette recipe generates pennies for the spammer that posted it. They are doing massive volume in order to make those pennies into dollars. You don't make money by posting one spam. If every spammer had to pay the actual recovery costs (energy, chillers, capital amortization, wages) for their query, every AI spam would lose (lots of) money.

Hustle culture and passive income are about turning other peoples' dollars into your dimes. It is a negative-sum activity, a net drain on society. Behind every seemingly successful "passive income" is a con artist who's getting rich by promising – but not delivering – that elusive passive income, and then blaming the victims for not hustling hard enough:

https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2023/12/blueprint-trouble

I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms/#four-hour-work-week

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

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sadesluvr · 3 months

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Dirty Little Secret

Even with a roster of sexual partners, Derek Danforth keeps coming back to you.

(Derek Danforth x GN! Reader)

A/N: I conjured this idea basically the moment Wallace started laying into Derek lmfao. You don’t have to have watched The Beekeeper to understand this (It’s chaotic and generic, but I had fun!) - Just know Derek is a coke and vape addicted, multi-millionaire crypto-selling playboy scammer who’s also the son of a president?😭

The place mentioned in this fic (‘The Warehouse’) is fictional and not featured in the movie!

Word count: 1.3K

Tags: SMUT / Gender Neutral Reader / Drug usage (Cocaine) / WARNING: READER DOES A HIT OF COCAINE / Oral sex, M receiving / Degradation / Dirty talk / Implications of cheating / A little angsty, if you squint / This is just Reader giving Derek a blowjob so Minors DNI

‘Need u. Meet me at The Warehouse’

You needn’t check the message twice to know who it was.

There was only one person in your life who spoke to you like this; who disappeared on most weekdays, only to show up on weekends between the hours of midnight to 5AM without a care in the world. The man’s name was Derek Danforth, a guy who ‘just happened’ to be the son of now President, Jessica Danforth.

You hadn’t met him through any lavish political gala, nor from a meet-and-greet after an inspiring TED Talk - no, he’d chosen the oh-so classy way to slide into your DM’s on Instagram. You’d come to know that fast and sleazy was Derek’s brand.

At first you’d thought it was a scam, not wanting to believe that a millionaire would even bother to speak to you, but a quick $100 transfer into your linked account had told you otherwise.

‘Think I’m real now?’ He’d messaged back, and it was from there that he’d sent a valet to your place for what was supposed to be a hookup.

He’d fucked you so good that night; the feel of his fingers gripping your ass as he pounded into you from behind still etched into your skin. He’d left marks; from marks sourced from his rabid teeth on your neck, to marks from the metal of his rings that had dug tiny scratches into your flesh. He hadn’t shut up the entire time, grunting and groaning in your ear about how much of a dirty slut you were, and how good your tight hole felt against his cock. He’d probably said that to all the people he’d fucked.

Still, it got to you, and apparently to him also. What started as an unsuspecting DM turned into full contact, with 3AM calls and erotic FaceTime sessions. Derek was often high off of coke, or drunk, or somewhere in between, all whilst puffing on his vape, huffing the thick white air like a dragon. Fitting, because he was dangerous.

And you’d been pulled into his shiny lair once again.

The Warehouse, or what you liked to aptly dub the ‘Whorehouse’ was an underground club, apparently run by Derek’s dealer. Yes, Derek hadn’t even had the courtesy to take you to one of his many properties to do his business, deciding that a sweaty basement would be best for you.

At least you could somehow remain anonymous.

“Knees, now. I want a blowjob,” Derek said in his usual dismissive tone as he slumped on a red couch before leaning forward and sprinkling a white powder on the table. You rolled your eyes as he snorted it, watching as he ran a hand through his mullet, absorbing the endorphins into his bloodstream.

He looked up at you with furrowed brows. He wasn’t one used to dealing with insolence.

“I don’t have all day.”

“Jeez, a ‘hey’ would be nice,” you grumbled. “I had to work overtime, I barely even got settled at home —“

“So? I don’t fucking care,” he scoffed. “There’s a couch, you can settle here.”

You knew damn well there wasn’t going to be any ‘settling’. And as much as you hated it, you loved it.

Derek spread his legs expectedly as you dived between them, struggling with his zipper to take out his hard cock. It didn’t matter if he was average sized - he'd more than proved himself to know how to use it. Still, it never got lost on you as to how thick he was, the filling sensation of his cock in your mouth for the first time becoming one of your favourites.

He was already leaking precum, and you wasted no time in licking the fluids up before moving down to the rest of his length, with your hand planted firmly on the base of his cock. You started off with slow, but deliberate motions, desperate to feel his girth in every crevice of your mouth, motivated by the male’s drawn out moans. His head was flung back against the top of the couch, arms spread as he basically gave himself up to you - one of the rare times he would only surrender.

Until he got impatient and placed his hands on the back of your neck, grip firm as he began to drag your head up and down his length, demanding you increase the pace. Pools of spit began to build up inside of your mouth as he did, accommodating to the sudden force. Every time you retracted from his length, the pink flesh began to glimmer; shine, even, as you serviced it. To some, it was a taboo and demeaning act, but to Derek, it was the ultimate act of your submission and devotion to him. To this day, even a year on from your first encounter, you couldn’t understand why he kept coming back to you.

“Fuck,” he drawled, clenching his teeth down on his bottom as he heaved. “You’re so fucking good at this - It’s like you were just made for my cock…”

The statement caused your stomach to backflip, only encouraging you to take him deeper. His thick head was now inches away from the back of your throat, threatening to make you gag. Unfathomably, you seemed tempted to take that risk, but Derek intervened.

“Here,” he said flatly as he gently pushed you off of him, leaning down towards the table. “Try this,”

He rolls up a fifty and guides your head along the white powder. Your nose tingles and your heart clenches a little, but there’s no immediate effect.

“It’ll take a while, but trust me, you’ll fucking feel it,” Derek smirks, drawing you from your thoughts. “Good thing we’ve got all night,”

It wasn’t long before you were back on his cock, vessel gripped firmly in your hand as you began to stroke him up and down, in tandem with the movements of your neck.

“You’ve never had blow like this before,” he laughs, hands frantic as they gripped at his thighs, trying to hold them still. “Then again, you’ve never had a dick like this before either, hm? Don’t you have a boyfriend to go home to? Poor guy. I must have you whipped…”

Desperate to respond, you popped his cock out of your mouth, but he held up a hand to

silence you.

“I really don’t need to fucking hear it,” he chuckled. “You’re such a slut, you know that? You suck my dick, moan like a bitch, and keep coming back for more, but here you are arguing with me…I’m beginning to think you like this little relationship of ours,”

Who was he kidding? You both knew the truth.

You hummed, and Derek ran his tongue over his teeth, his bouncing leg beginning to quicken. His hands found your head, gripping the back of your neck as his cock began to twitch, vein throbbing against the flat of your tongue. He was always his most animalistic in the heat of the moment; and even though you enjoyed the culmination of your hard work, it was also the time where he spouted things, words and phrases that you knew were nothing but bullshit, and yet clouded your eyes with hope.

“Moan for me,” he grunted, pupils blown as they focused on the pornographic display below him. “Tell me that I’m the best you’ve ever had,”

You let out a whine, and he hummed.

“Worship me,” he continued. “Show me how much you love me…Fuck – Open your mouth…!”

Swiftly, Derek removed his aching member from your mouth, eyes wide as he watched a bridge of saliva form from your raw lips to his skin. With a few slick pumps, his fell half lidded as he came over your face, streaks of white fluid coating your cheeks and lips, with some even falling in your lashes and dripping onto your nose. He convulsed, as if he were temporarily losing grip on his sanity and panted as he tried for air. He ran his hands across his beard before he cupped your cheek, an indiscernible look in his eye before he patted it.

“Clean yourself up. I want you nice and fresh for round two.”

It pained you that you were so enthusiastic to oblige.

#florence writes!!#derek danforth x reader #derek danforth #the beekeeper #derek danforth smut #josh hutcherson #mike schmidt x reader #x male reader #gender neutral reader #gender neutral fanfic

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bottlehawk · 10 months

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dave/vriska??

i know in canon they barely vibe with each other. but to me they should be like. bros number 1. everyone else thinks vriska is insane except dave who has been mentally conditioned into the same mindset that she has and therefore thinks that she actually kind of makes sense out of everyone there. if vriska brings up something dave should be there in the background going "yo but like hold up a minute... she got a point tho..." like a broken record. biggest grifters in the universe maybe. forever on that #grind. two of the most attention-seeking rambling conspiracy theory level opinioned people on the planet teaming up to host their own podcast. the ethan klein and trisha paytas of the meteor. dave's spine has the constitution and integrity of damp toilet paper and he bends to whatever vriska says so easily when she negs him it's insane. she'll get him to agree with her on shit he doesn't even believe in by saying shit like

which vriska thinks is funny that he's such a willing little easily manipulated minion for her. they should be making their own crypto-currency. selling snake oil on the street. going out on desert expeditions together on earth c for buried treasure and bones. dave accidentally admits in typical freudian fashion to karkat that he looks up to her and sees her as basically Bro 2 but healthier and the guy is jaw dropped open horrified. sometimes a vriska-ism will fall from dave's mouth when they're chatting as if it was as natural as breathing air and karkat will have to take a second and leave. no one's sure what their relationship is but they make out at christmas parties if they had too much eggnog and then act like nothing happened afterwards. nobody supports this.

#dave strider #vriska serket #davevriska #homestuck #bottlehawk text #karkat vantas #asks

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comradekatara · 7 months

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look. sokka IS a stem bro, but he’s not the kind of guy who would invest in crypto. he’d write all of crypto off as being for idiots who don’t realize they’re getting scammed. you know who would invest in crypto, however? who believes in diversifying their portfolio? believes, or at least claims, that bitcoin is the future? who would even buy an nft provided they knew that they could sell it at a later date to turn a profit? azula.

#tell me that sbf quote about shakespeare isn’t smth azula would say #THE BAYESIAN PRIORS ARENT FAVORABLE #in fairness azula probably WOULD make money off crypto #she’s lucky she’s shrewd she knows when to buy in and when to pull out #but she is also. cringe #modern au #sokka #azula

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acowardinmordor · 10 months

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Steddie Persuasion AU but make it modern and blur the edges, and eliminate homophobia. Steve turned down Eddie's proposal because his family put a ton of pressure on him to do so, even though he was mad in love and very very much wanted to marry him. He almost eloped, but his best friend Nancy convinced him that he couldn't throw his life away at nineteen for a guy with more arrests than opportunities. Eddie was heartbroken and furious, and took the risk he hadn't before. Ends up a rockstar. Not so famous everyone knows him, but if you're into music, if you watch the grammys, you know Eddie Munson.

Eight years later, Steve's dad has fucked up the finances and makes dumb investments (maybe crypto) and Steve ends up helping close out branches of the company and sell things off as they downsize, blah blah. His dad refuses to put his face on it, so he has it be Steve firing everyone and whatnot. Ends up meeting Dustin and some of the others who made bank on some tech thing who are coming in to buy off assets and take over parts of the Harrington holdings. Steve thinks the names are a coincidence until he sees Dustin smile, and realizes that oh shit, he's going to be in meetings with Eddie's friends, and oh shit, they don't know about the summer Eddie and Steve were together.

They'd just be so perfect for the dynamic. Eddie being all sideways insulting about Steve bc its been years and he's still so so mad at him about it that he refuses to look closer. Steve who puts on a show of being exactly what he's supposed to be, in this case, charming and untouchable and perfect, and no one sees through the mask. Bc his friends, other than Nancy, are all new since he and Eddie broke up. So they don't know how he used to smile. They think this is Steve perfectly happy in his life.

But obvs eventually Eddie actually looks and he can see how his Stevie is a husk of who he was, and he realizes that no, he was wrong for all those years. He thought he wanted the guy that broke his heart to be miserable. But now he's looking at the guy he still loves, and he can't stand to see that Steve IS miserable.

#persuasion AU #Steddie #again this is one I won't write #I just like teh vibes #no idea who Robin is in the original #but Chrissy is Louisa #Billy as the cousin maybe?#thats less important to me than the way these two would ache #and the way that letter would play out #with Steve racing to find Eddie #bc he has a chance to get him back #and he'd walk through fire for another chance

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sirfrogsworth · 1 year

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There is this common thing where people on Twitter will invalidate anything a person is saying just because they have "pronouns in bio."

As if this automatically disqualifies someone from discourse.

If you list your pronouns, you are not worthy of having an opinion and should be ignored.

The irony is that I have seen many theoretical physicists, world-renowned virologists, noted philosophers, and other intellectual experts with pronouns in their bio.

Whereas when you look at the bios of people who paid for their fancy blue checkmark, they are almost always up to something dubious.

"My dude" is a crypto bro who runs a poker tutorial site.

For the low price of $999 he implies you can learn how to make millions playing poker.

Though I feel like if he had the knowledge to win millions, he probably wouldn't be wasting his time selling poker courses for a thousand dollars a pop.

This man is a hundred red flags wearing a trench coat.

What would be funny is if Katie Mack trounced this guy in a game of poker.

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kremlin · 8 months

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it is really, really funny to see these bush-league never-was dumbfuck crypto losers go out and spend $300k of borrowed money on gray market A100s in an attempt to mine cryptocurrency (which they will have no success with) just solely on the premise that those things are called "GPUs"

i was reading one account of a guy on reddit with a throwaway account freaking out because he bought SXM socket A100s which, like, it was pretty clear his thinking was that because he could manage to put together a embarrassing gamer PC, he would have no trouble with this. even experienced datacenter techs will avoid SXM if they possibly can, that shit is meant to be installed by the vendor, doing it yourself (especially on 300% marked up gray market hardware) is completely bonkers:

if you ever had an AMD cpu back in the day (i remember way back when i had a top of the line phenom 2 lol) you might remember pin sockets:

you had to align all of these incredibly fucking fragile gold pins right above their corresponding hole on the socket, you had to drop it in just perfectly and if you didn't, you absolutely could not nudge it in place otherwise you'd bend a pin and the whole thing is fucked

(i remember fucking one up & freaking out, i had worked at a grocery store all through summer in middle school to buy it, i took it to a jeweler who couldn't fix it, eventually found the pinout, and the pin i bent was unused, by the grace of god)

anyways, SXM is this but a billion times worse. the vendors that sell the server packages have special jigs they use to align them properly, trying to install freehand is just, rofl

and that isn't even the end of the story, if homeboy gets past seating it without fucking a pin up, he'll 100% not torque the cooler down properly, it won't be flush, and the thing will cook itself the moment its powered on

not that any of this matters though, even if all done correctly, the core concept would not work. if you try and run vertex CUDA mining routines on these ""GPUs"", it'll be like trying to make pesto with your garbage disposal. that is how little foresight these people have. lmfao.

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autolenaphilia · 6 months

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Fuck Chromium (and that includes Brave and Vivialdi)

I have made multiple posts about why you should use Firefox, and of course I get the reply "not all chromium browsers are bad, they are not all as evil as Chrome." And sure, browsers who use the chromium code are not required to do all the shady things that Google does with it.

Still, I think it's bad that chromium-based browsers are getting close to total market dominance. By this point it has made Google's competitors like Microsoft and Opera drop their own unique proprietary browser engines for chromium. Browsers are becoming a fucking monoculture at this point. And Chromium becoming the browser code base of choice empowers Google, since they are the ones who mainly develop, maintain and fund its code. It means supporting them in their quest to become an internet monopoly that can do things like drm the web itself.

So let me be clear: you are still supporting google by using chromium-based browsers. By helping out in making chromium the de facto standard for browsers, you are giving google power. They are the ones driving chromium development, they will set the standards. And those standards will be in Google's favor. They are an ad company, their goal is to kill off adblockers by making them impossible to use, first with manifest v3 for extensions and now WEI, their web drm.

Brave is a joke.

The supposed "good guy" chromium browsers people recommend are actually shady as shit.

The one i see recommended the most is Brave, and it's fucking terrible. For one thing, it is funded by right-wing techbro Brendan Eich. He was Mozilla CEO for some time, but then people found he was a massive homophobe who funded campaigns against marriage equality, and Mozilla forced him to resign. And that's why he created Brave. That's who you are supporting by using Brave.

It runs off chromium because that's the easy and lazy choice for a browser. And it's literally funded through cryptocurrency, probably the negative environmental impact is a plus in Eich's book. And its adblocker runs off the same dishonest business model as adblock plus does, it will not block ads if advertisers pay them for the privilege. This betrayal of the users is opt-in at least, and you get paid for watching ads, but it's in the aforementioned worthless crypto beans. Brave is a joke.

Vivaldi and the importance of open-source

And then there's Vivaldi, it's a freeware proprietary browser run by a for-profit company, which alone should scare you off it.

"If you aren't paying for it, you are not the customer, you are the product" is a phrase that sometimes unfairly gets applied to open source projects to dismiss them. If it's open source and either community-run or run by a non-profit foundation like the Open document foundation for Libreoffice and or the Mozilla foundation for Firefox/Thunderbird, you are safe even if it's free.

But that phrase 100% applies to free products from for-profit corporations. These companies need to make profits at some point for for their shareholders, and if it is not from selling goods or services, it comes from things like selling your user's data or "attention".

That applies to Vivaldi, who makes big promises about how they will respect their users privacy and never sell their data. But promises mean nothing, Google also says they respect your privacy. And the thing is, Vivaldi is closed source. Not entirely, ironically the bits they got from Google's chromium are open source, but other parts of their code is closed-source. And what that means is, they can make any and all promises about what their browser's code does and there is nobody except Vivaldi that can check if their code actually fulfils those promises. Only Vivaldi has access to that code.

I'm no open-source fanatic, like I don't care if some random game i install and play is closed-source, as long as it is from a credible developer. But open-source is important for security and privacy, because that means someone else other than the company who develops the program can vet it's code for vulnerabilities and privacy violations. Your browser and e-mail client (vivaldi has an e-mail client too) should be open-source for your own safety, because those programs handle sensitive data like your passwords or your e-mails. Closed-source is not more secure, since Kerckhoff's principle applies to digital security and privacy.

And Vivaldi by being proprietary software fails that test. Their own justification is that being closed-source is "their first line of defense, to prevent other parties from taking the code and building an equivalent browser (essentially a fork) too easily." It's the same hypocritical argument that Red Hat used to justify making their Enterprise Linux distro closed-source. "It's fine if we use chromium's code to build our own browser, and expressly for making an Opera clone (that's the literal point of Vivaldi, that's why the name is a music reference), but if someone does the same with our product, they're evil." It's nauseating and alone justification to distrust Vivaldi as it is crying out to be trusted.

Listen to some Antonio Vivaldi instead, his music slaps. And install Firefox and Thunderbird instead.

#my writings #chromium #brave browser #vivaldi browser #browsers #technology

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rose-tinting · 9 months

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the amount of misinformation that has been circling outside of neopets circles I swear

I see a new rumor every time

“They’re free from nft bros” Nope. Owned by one!

“The original team rebought them” God fucking no and you should not want them to, Adam Powells little meltdown over neopets users criticizing his new crypto venture is reason enough lol.

“The company was sold to Neopets Internal Teams” They sold it to the guy who used to head the former NFT project and are promising this means TNT has more freedom “under new leadership“ with “no current plans for crypto/NFTs” (This is not a promise not to make them)

One of the “brand ambassadors” who is supposed to help TNT with the knowing and understanding the userbase is some celebrity who’s wife is also a celebrity who I’ve seen people CLAIM used to be a Neopets mod. Does that sound like a neopets user who can tell the neopets team what the average user wants? No call for users who aren’t celebrities to become brand ambassadors has been made afaik.

Current Neopets mods are silencing trans people for mentioning HRT as well as top surgery and ignoring cis people talking about pregnancy, death, and surgery. (Have seen these boards go on for several hours and never get deleted even after a heated debate on one one about abortion)

There’s items and backstory on the site that are racist. Neopets users have asked these be addressed. Do you think this “brand ambassador” will address any of that? Why does the ambassador need to be a celebrity? Unless the actual intent is to have “ambassadors” who sell neopets as a brand to the potential new userbase and isn’t about “listening to the users” at all.

god can one person with a huge following please for once just reblog and acknowledge the TRUTH. (doesn’t have to be from me I’d just like the actual info to be spread!) Awareness will help us keep the worst from happening! Pretending everything is fine until it isn’t is NOT the way!

If you want the actual info on the site Neopets has a fansite dedicated to reporting Neopets news including everything TNT tries to sweep under the rug

https://www.jellyneo.net/?comments=14391

A direct quote from their article on this

“ New CEO of Neopets is Dominic Law, who previously headed the Neopets Metaverse and brokered a "management buyout deal" “

Please if you’re reading this

stop spreading misinformation

spread the real information

make your own post even

this could go either way right now

this is not a “neopets renaissance”

this is a crossroads and we don’t know where we’re going yet. It could be great, or it could be the end of the site.

(Editing my reblog in so it can hopefully get seen too, I was provided with more accurate info on the brand ambassador.)

@pirakeet Thanks! Was actually hoping someone COULD correct this :3 Cause I was REALLY HOPING it wasn’t what it seemed since all I could find was a twitter post with an attached video where he accepts it (I immediately fled twitter may be why)

[Image Text ID] Posted by tumblr user pirakeet: I’m not correcting anything, but just letting you know the “brand ambassador” program has been made available - just presumably not in the ‘john legend’ sense: https://portal.neopets.com/brand-ambassador-program and for clarity, i’ve been popping off about the difference, this isn’t a “gotcha moment”. There’s more info when you click “apply” and it takes you to a google doc [End Id]

As I said I’m more interested in the truth being spread so I hope this can be seen!

#it COULD be fine right now it COULD be #but let's acknowledge the issues we're having instead of ignoring them!#esp if you DON'T EVEN USE THE SITE FOR FUCK'S SAKE #I'm so tired #I'm a small blog trying to get people with big followings to see me and acknowledge me so we can spread FACTS instead of Wishful Thinking #neopets #I wish people with big followings would just acknowledge the facts #I'm giving up after this I don't care anymore #I've been there for 20 years maybe it's time to just let it die

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wildgeese98 · 4 days

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Ok my absolute favorite case so far. Short selling against yourself on a sketchy investment app!!?? That's some good shit.

This fucking guy, I love him, he's so perfect. A beautiful distillation of the shitty finance/crypto bro mindset. Get rich my any means, don't worry about the consequences. Feeling like he's gaming the system, like he's a genius for taking advantage of the same loopholes and sketchy tactics people have been using forever. Completely incapable of quitting while he's ahead.

Gotta say there's a particular flavor to the episodes written by Alex that I'm really enjoying.

#also i always forget that what British people call public school is what we in the US would call private school #tmagp #tmagp spoilers #tmagp 13

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boxboxlewis · 2 years

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Something warm and comforting with maxiel?

Five career options Daniel considered and turned down after leaving F1, and one he didn't.

Adult entertainer

“My decanter sold out, right,” Daniel says. He’s sprawled on the sofa, staring up at the ceiling, high out of his mind: one of the few consolations of being out of F1. The vape is hot in his hand and he doesn’t want to get any higher right now, so he should probably just turn it off; it’s top-of-the-line, Blake’s baby, and he’ll be upset if it overheats and fries itself. But Daniel is so comfortable he doesn’t want to move, body heavy and syrupy, perfectly in tune with the sofa cushions.

“Yeah, mate. Well done on that,” Blake says loyally. “What, you want me to approach the vineyard about doing another partnership?”

“Nah,” Daniel says, “I was thinking more like. What if I did one of those things where I make a cast of my dick, and we could sell, like, branded DR3 dildos, but in the shape of my actual cock.”

There’s a pause, long enough that Daniel finally rolls his head so he can see Blake, who’s staring at him with an expression of ferocious concentration. “Mate,” Blake says, “you’re too high. Give me the vape.”

“I just think—people would love it,” Daniel protests. “I’ve got a nice dick. I mean, I’m pretty sure. Max—people have said. Five out of five stars on ratemydick.com.”

“Ohhh-kay, yeah. Yep. Give me the vape, Mr Adult Entertainer.” Blake wrests it from Daniel’s unresisting hand.

2. Crypto spokesmodel (again)

“...and that’s why we think you’d be the perfect brand ambassador for Gainz Crypto Exchange,” the smiling American guy finishes.

Daniel’s leg is jiggling underneath the board table. “Yeah,” he says, “thanks, but—”

Blake interrupts. “Do we want to like, talk this over privately before we make a decision?”

Daniel loves Blake, but man that “we” grates at him. He smiles, to paper over an awkward moment, and says, “Nah, I think we’re good.” He turns back to the American guy. “Look, I’ve done more some reading about crypto”—he’s watched a couple of Youtube videos and listened to half a podcast episode; close enough—“and it’s really not where I want to put my focus right now.” Because it’s a massive Ponzi scheme preying on unsophisticated investors, he doesn’t add. “Thanks, though. Good luck with the Gainz.”

3. Yoga teacher

“Breathe in, and create awareness to your chest,” the instructor says. She’s pretty cute. Very relaxing voice, too. Daniel breathes in, and thinks about his chest, as instructed: it’s definitely there. Chesting. Doing whatever chests do. Digesting air and shit. “As we reach for the heavens, imagine pure energy flowing down from the sky into your body.” Daniel obediently imagines a waterfall of Red Bull pouring onto his head, and he’s not an expert, obviously, but he’s pretty sure he could come up with some better soothing imagery than that.

After the class, he calls his sister. “Do I have a relaxing voice?”

“What?”

“My voice. Is it soothing.”

“What? No,” she says. “You sound like a millennial Australian guy who’s spent a lot of time abroad.”

“Ah, that’s too bad,” he says, disappointed. “You don’t think I should teach yoga, then?”

“Daniel, what the fuck goes on in your head, I swear to god." Michelle sounds affectionate but also is clearly laughing at him. "I mean, if you want to, I guess? I feel like the voice isn’t really the most important yoga teacher qualification though?”

This is a very good point. “Yeah, you’re probably right,” he says. “Thanks, Michelle."

4. Children’s book author

“What if I wrote a children’s book,” Daniel says. “Daniel and the Really Fast Car, or some shit. I bet kids would love that. They love cars, right?”

Kristen and Dax exchange a look, and then Kristen says tactfully, “Children’s books are actually, like, surprisingly hard to do well.”

“Yeah,” Dax says. “A lot of them are shit.”

“Dax!”

“Honey, relax! I’m not saying Daniel and the Really Fast Car would be shit. And you would like, hire a professional to help, obviously. Just… it’s probably not as easy as it looks, that’s all.” There’s a haunted look in his eyes. “I’ve seen scansion like you wouldn’t believe.”

Daniel doesn’t actually know what “scansion” means, so, maybe children’s book writing is a no-go. “Ok,” he says equably. “I trust you guys."

5. Memoir writer

Daniel watches as the ghostwriter his publisher hired thunks her head rhythmically into the tabletop. “Uh,” he says.

She stops thunking. “Sorry! I never get like this with clients!” She sits up, and looks at him. “Daniel! You are so charming and lovely, but has it occurred to you that maybe you don’t actually want to write a book about your life?”

“I mean… I do, though?” They already have a title: Daniel Ricciardo: Pushing to the Limits. He’s excited about it.

The ghostwriter says, “Daniel, I have spent the past two hours trying to get you to tell me literally anything about your childhood or early life, and you have given me.” She consults her notes. “An extended rant about Skittles. Your views on which candies have the most international appeal. A run-down of your favourite places to buy snacks in twelve different countries. A comprehensive explanation, with partial demonstration, of which UFC moves you think you would most rock. And an overview of your favourite bands.”

“Uh.”

“When I asked you to give me a memory from your school days, you said, “Oh, man, you have to hear this new single,” and then got distracted by your own Spotify.”

Daniel considers this. “Ok, so… ah, fuck it,” he says. “Maybe you’re right.”

“Yes!” the ghostwriter exclaims, relief in her voice. “And you know, this doesn’t mean you’ll never write a memoir! Just maybe that now’s not the right time.” She starts to gather her things together. “Daniel, thank you so much, I really do mean this—it’s been a pleasure.”

+ 6. WAG

“Daniel, I still do not understand why you’re so upset about not having a job,” Max complains. “You have plenty of money. And it does not mean, if you take some time out you can never work again.”

Daniel considers this, and tries to explain. “It just feels like—ok, how many years have I spent hashtag keep pushing? Fist emoji, fist emoji? And now I’m just, like, sitting around like a lump, doing nothing.”

Max says, completely deadpan, “Well, we can talk about fisting later, but right now I think we should not be distracted,” and Daniel lightly chokes, but Max is still going. “You are not a lump, Daniel. You are a man who has worked very hard for a very long time, and now you are having a rest, that’s all.” He moves over so he’s leaning against Daniel, and wriggles his shoulder until Daniel lifts his arm and wraps it around him. “You aren’t that old yet. You still have time to do things. It is ok to just sit, for a while.”

Daniel sits, with his arm around Max, and thinks about what it would mean not to push, not to try, not to hunt to find the next thing. “I would basically be your WAG, you mean,” he says, and laughs.

Max twists to look up at him, and he’s not laughing. “Yes,” he says simply. “I think that would be lovely, if you would not mind it. Just for a little while.”

Daniel pulls Max in tight against him, and kisses the side of his head. His heart feels all wobbly and uncertain, like one of those videos of newborn giraffes or whatever trying to stand up for the first time. “Do you really,” he begins, and then stops himself. Max never says things he doesn’t mean. “Ok,” he says, instead. Ok.

#maxiel #my fic #for our agonies #dr3 #mv33 #asks #5+1

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