Unless a characters race or gender or ethnicity or (dis)ability is a key component of either their arc or the story as whole (e.g. the plot depends on it), who the fuck cares who's playing who? I saw the same thing happen when the Dune movie had the Liet-Kynes character portrayed by a black woman. It makes absolutely zero difference to the story what gender or race Liet-Kynes was and she was really good anyway.

It's ridiculously expensive. It's not private if you have to link your searches to a paid account and none of those payment providers are private. They don't seem to have open sourced any of their key functionality, meaning you have to trust them to not be collecting your activity data.

I spent a long time getting rid of software and using services that I either no longer trusted or was unable to make an informed choice due to their lack of open source code and I'm not going to take a retrograde step now. And that's without the issue with their choice (a continued choice I believe) to use Brave results, a company I'm personally not prepared to support.

Capitalist governments are pro-finance, not pro-people. Totalitarian gvmts (China etc) are pro-system, not pro-people. They're just different ways of maintaining classes of people who control the power/finances.

There's always been an uber-rich elite, all the way from the first tribal chieftain or Pharaoh or whatever until now and there's always been a huge underclass of the rest of us. The first law of any hierarchy is to protect the people at the top.

What we see today (in Westernised countries) is the natural, logical progression of economics driven democracy. Economic theorists say wealthy people create wealth by purposefully distributing it via jobs etc but in reality they do everything possible to minimise the loss of what they see as their money by abusing labour laws, privatising everything, trying to kill unions, creating convoluted laws to protect their fortunes, avoiding taxes and hiking prices up to the point most of us are just about surviving with enough carrot to ignore or pretend we don't see the stick.

And we're willing participants in that system. We know this is happening but we're dazzled by lotteries holding out the chance to join the rich, promises of work making us rich and a media which lionises the elite as some kind of fabulous aspirational status to the point we have people on social media faking a rich lifestyle for internet points.

The uber rich believe they're better than us and our acquiescence with this system really means we agree with them.

You'll start to decay, flies and maggots will infest you. When the smell reaches animals, they'll eat the meat. During that process the bones will get scattered. Insects will pick the bones clean and anything organic left (the bone fragments themselves) will eventually break down.

1. This story is about a Channel 4 appointment, nothing to do with the BBC.
2. It's not C4 who have rejected her, they wanted her - it was the gvmt who told C4 they couldn't appoint her.
3. She's the 3rd recent veto of a non-white appt by the gvmt
4. The gvmt provided no reasons for the rejection

In my own personal experience, Nextcloud;

• Needs constant attention to prevent falling over
• Administration is a mess
• Takes far too long to get used to its 'little ways'
• Basics like E2EE don't work
• Sync works when it feels like it
• Updating feels like russian roulette

Reddit was created as a Digg clone so there were no sub's and no comments, just links to up/down vote.

A lot of those links were scraped in an effort to make it seem popular. Both Aaron and Spez have admitted that.

"Your info won't be used for ads"

But we'll still be tracking everything you do and selling that on to everyone who wants it.

Nothing is open source and my days of choosing to trust companies upfront are long gone.

So much with anything privacy comes down to trust. Any piece of software's technical ability to keep you private is of course important but when it comes to a very large (in terms of code and use) piece of software, being able to trust the motivations and intent of the people behind it is also very important.

It's now reached the point that I personally don't feel I can trust the person leading the company, or the intent behind the software(s) the company makes.

Brendan Eich is a homophobe and an antivaxxer. It's hard to trust in the common sense of a man who thinks in these ways.

Brave has been caught inserting affiliate links and ads that track and just recently of selling other people's data. Any one of these things, taken in isolation is bad enough but this is now a pretty much established pattern of very questionable behaviour.

I also forsee a time when the browser is going to have to make some concessions to it's Chromium base. I know they've said the change from Manifest v2 to 3 won't affect ad blocking as their Shield won't be an extension but built in and that they'll also carry on supporting v2 but the issue goes beyond merely adblocking and they've been unclear on exactly how and for how long they'll support v2. As long as they're Chromium based browser, they are dependent on Chromium and the whims of Google developers. It's hard to see a good future for Brave.

The UK political cycle:

1. Tories elected because they made people think Labour were bad with money
2. Tories stay in power for a couple of decades
3. Rich people get richer, public services get shitter, prices for everyone else get higher. They coast along on a tide of right-wing populism for awhile
4. Eventually people catch on, Tories get voted out
5. Labour need to spend a fortune getting things back on track. Might get two terms.
6. Go to 1.

Is it possible to (at least temporarily):

1. Turn off instance image hosting (disable pictrs)
2. Disallow image and video posts across all communities
3. As in Firefish, turn off caching of remote images from other instances.

whilst longer term solutions are sought? This would at least ensure poor mods aren't exposed to this shit and an instance could be more positive they're not inadvertently hosting CSAM.