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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Flock also said it launched a new tool that blocks impermissible searches in real time. “If a search involving Illinois camera data includes terms that indicate an impermissible purpose under Illinois law, the Illinois data will automatically be excluded,” the company wrote.

    Lol, I feel like this can be easily sidestepped. ICE and the other fascist fucks enabling them don’t give a shit about laws anymore. They can easily just change the purpose of their search to be one of the legally permissible reasons. Flock is supposedly working on a tool to automatically flag suspicious searches, but I doubt they’ll work hard on ensuring it’s effective.

    As much as I am loathe to abandon this kind of tech to help find missing/kidnapped persons/human traffickers, it’s way too easily corrupted when law enforcement is actively hostile to citizens no longer viewed favorably by the regime.








  • A hotel in Augusta, Georgia. I had to come into town for a 2 week training event for my job. Unfortunately, it was occurring at the same time as the Master’s tournament, so finding a hotel was virtually impossible. The one my work booked for me was easily in the top 3 grossest accommodations I’ve ever had, and I’ve deployed to combat zones in the Army. Waking up in the middle of the night to my bed and walls covered in roaches still haunts me to this day. And when I say covered, I don’t mean a few. I mean covered.





  • This. YouTube is extremely helpful for anyone who can’t afford to take their stuff to a repair service or hire someone to fix something at their home. Just a few months ago, I thought my washer was done for, but it turned out to be a super simple fix that no website mentioned except for a super obscure YouTube video with only a couple hundred views. Saved me hundreds of dollars. There’s countless other anecdotes like that over the years.

    This is what sucks so much about Google’s monopoly. I truly wish a cooperative of governments and/or academia created a publicly funded alternative as well as hosting an archive of YouTube on it. It would of course need to be administered by a non-partisan committee made up of representatives from multiple countries that had numerous safeguards against governmental political censorship. Hoping for a grassroots alternative is a lost cause, as the hosting and administrative expenses are just way too cost prohibitive, so publicly funded is the only solution I can see as being plausible



  • The problem is, nothing short of NA and EU governmental intervention will force Google to stop being such a nefarious, monopolistic, antitrust piece of shit. They’re just so utterly ubiquitous for Western businesses. You cannot have a small business* and hope to be successful without partaking in either Google or Facebook/Meta’s ad services. TikTok was becoming a huge threat to both those companies and look how viciously they were attacked.

    The whole thing is beyond fucked, man. Kudos to you for trying to break free for your business, but I feel like you’ll just be fucking yourself in the long run.

    Edit in advance: I should clarify that there will of course be exceptions where a small business can be successful just fine without advertising, but for those that rely on being discovered on a larger scale versus purely local, it is essential.