The EFF is probably the most important advocacy organization that educates and acts on behalf of normal people's digital rights, freedoms, and privacy. The legal actions they take in support of these are meaningful. Now that the CFPB has been dismantled and the FCC and FTC had their teeth and spines removed, groups like EFF are the only thing we have in the US pushing back against millions of dollars of corporate lobbying money.

I'm not sure what you're talking about regarding RMS. Aside from the open letter they published after he was re-elected to the FSF board, which is fine to disagree with (I do), I don't think EFF did anything to him. Plenty of people pointed angry fingers at him in 2019 but AFAIK his resignation from the FSF was his own decision.

Absolutely not the case. The Neo is essentially Apple's first attempt at a budget laptop, and the market segment they're targeting is entirely different.

Case in point: My dad has been a Windows user for 20+ years and has always decried Apple as "decent hardware that's overpriced and running a lobotomized operating system." However he hates Windows 11 more and decided to replace his aging Windows laptop with a Neo last week. So far he's been impressed, though is still dealing with a learning curve. I guarantee you he isn't alone.

I think the Neo is Apple's attempt at getting into a new segment of lower-priced computers AND taking advantage of Microslop dropping the ball hard when it comes to Windows 11 shit quality and bullshit hardware requirements.

Perhaps somewhat ironically, I suspect the market really being cannibalized is potential new Linux users who go with a New instead of installing Linux on a cheap Windows laptop.

Delete your account if you want to, but please don't delete posts and comments. I sympathize wanting to stick it to Reddit and not giving them free content to whore out to AI companies for training, but for the millions of normal people who might get value from comments it's really frustrating.

There are tools to mass-edit all your reddit comments and it's incredibly frustrating to see when people do it. I've thought I finally found the answer to some question or technical problem or whatever in a reddit thread, only to then see the original post replaced with something like "This comment was removed because Reddit made me angry. Lorem ipsum dolar sit amet shit." Perhaps unfair but it makes me hate that person's selfishness much more than make me dislike Reddit.

I live in Utah and get to witness this first-hand. Just yesterday it was windy enough that unpleasant dust clouds were coming off the dried parts of the lake bed. Utah snowpack is at a record low this year and peaked for the 2026 water year earlier in March. We broke several high temperature records this month (along with a bunch of other states in the west / mountain west). It's looking pretty bad.

Right now it's a lot like watching a slow-moving train derailment. Everyone knows what's coming, but 80% of the population, the majority being Mormon religious nuts, rationalizes it away or refuses to acknowledge it, but those that do see the problem won't take action to address it, preferring instead to "hopes and prayers". Brian Cox, the damned governor, has declared multiple "days of prayer for rain".

There's a sick fatalism amongst many religious groups, assuming that God won't let terrible things happen to them, but it's especially bad with Mormons. They think they're a chosen people, living in a chosen land, and that the "end times" are coming soon. All this adds up to "I don't need to do or sacrifice anything to deal with Problem because God won't let me suffer and it doesn't matter because the world is going to end soon anyway."

For any rational thinking person this is disgusting, but when 90% of the legislature, the governor, and all US congressmen are owned (mentally and financially) by the Mormon church, there's not much we can do. At best voting them out just gets a different lizard in the seat.

Tell us you don't understand how the government works without telling us you don't understand how it works.

Congress has the power to delegate it's authority to smaller expert groups. Passing a law that says "The FTC can set rules for trade and commerce in these ways..." is completely valid. Or sure, we could have Senator "series of tubes" Stevens write every single specific rule that controls Internet communications. That will work fine.

There are only two groups of people who want to eliminate regulatory authority: (1) people who are too dumb to understand the negative impact it would have on normal people, and (2) corporate hacks and simps who understand exactly that negative impact and see that as the goal.

As an aside: I find it hilarious that the same people who bitch about "we are a republic, not a democracy" and fight against, for example, eliminating the electoral college, are often the same people who bitch about "unelected bureaucrats".

I'm so tired of seeing this tired old red herring trotted out during debates about daylight saving time.

Using local time versus UTC has absolutely nothing to do with DST. You can get the same effect by eliminating DST and keeping a static UTC offset for local time. There's a reason that Britain, for which GMT/UTC is local time still has British Summer Time (UTC+1) during the summer.

The problem is how the rising and setting of the sun affects schedules. Using UTC everywhere means you'll have people saying "schools need to start an hour later in winter so the babbies don't have to walk in the dark" -- the exact same argument used against permanent standard time.

Well-stated. I can't fathom why this is modded down to zero. Wish I had points to spend.

I have to assume the majority of people have no idea what "neoliberalism" means. Seeing "liberal" in it pisses off progressives because they think you're blaming them for Reagan and his policies, and it pisses off conservatives because they think you're stealing credit for their golden-age accomplishments.

All true, but natural beef is so delicious it's worth those compromises.

Don't worry, I'm sure that the lab-grown stuff won't make those same mistakes.

Property taxes also increase regularly. Given it's ostensibly the same market forces driving both (supply and demand), in a fair system we should be seeing rent prices and property taxes increase by about the same amount each year.

And the other kind of idiot doesn't see the writing on the wall that points to a future where most features are subscription-only. This was obviously a test balloon sent up by BMW to see what the reaction would be to a hardware subscription service. They tempered it by making it optional but I'm absolutely certain they are talking internally about which features would be tolerable to most drivers as subscription-only.

What an absolutely wrong and completely "yes, please sir, use me as a doormat" take. Maybe you don't buy anything but the words on a page but most normal people buy a car, which includes everything bumper to bumper.

Besides, if this is all a nothing-burger, then I guess it's okay for people to hack their cars to enable heated seats for free? I'm sure nothing will go wrong when most people are driving around with modchips or softmods screwing around with the internals of their cars.

I'm pretty sure that's the entire point behind the exercise (well, except some bonus mild cruelty associated with thoughtless and shitty rules that will inevitably be biased against the poor and powerless). They want to create terrible regulations so that they can point at them later and screech about the TERRIBLE OVERBEARING REGULATIONS. This gives them a lever in 3 years to push against these AI regulations in addition to any others they want to excise.

This is just the techbro version of what Regan did in the 80s. He and his administration claimed the government was and had always been incapable and incompetent, and they proved it by being incapable and incompetent. Then they pointed at their own failures as justification for burning everything down, something we are still paying the price for today.

This is actually a pretty interesting topic, if you care about the facts and details and aren't just parroting right-wing talking points.

Obama’s pledge that ‘no one will take away’ your health plan

The oversimplified short version is that health care is complicated and Obama made some campaign stump claims that really needed nuance. The ACA did have provisions for grandfathered plans but it also required them to meet rules around coverage changes and price increases or they lose that status. Some states also have laws that conflicted with grandfathered plans that prevent people from keeping them.

Frankly, most of the plans that were no longer valid under the ACA were shitty plans anyway and only provided the illusion of medical insurance. They didn't cover preventive care, had ridiculous maximum coverage limits, lacked coverage for serious illnesses, or didn't allow for expensive treatments. Basically they covered a runny noses and stubbed toes but not cancer or diabetes -- the exact kinds of things that drive people to medical bankruptcy.

Yeah, headings are one of the aspects of Markdown I dislike.

Numeric lists are also obnoxious, since you only have two choices: (1) use the real numbering in the text (1, 2, 3, ...) and deal with manually re-numbering everything if the order changes or (2) give up on the unrendered text and just use "1." for each item. Both options suck.

Oh, and single asterisks being used for italics instead of bold is just plain wrong, and this is a hill I will die on.

I guess I'm "the other guy" because I also liked Pocket (originally Read It Later), though I stopped using it a few years before it got killed. I agree that Mozilla buying it was a mistake, though I try to be charitable and hope it was partly because they wanted to improve the privacy and openness of a product that could, as you suggest, be used to harvest user information. An open web is their mission, if you believe it.

I've looked around to see how much Mozilla paid for it and can only find "an undisclosed amount". Where are you getting the $20M number?

One thing I think most people don't understand about Pocket is that it was more than just a bookmark database. When you saved a site, it really saved a snapshot of the entire page so that it was available even if changed or removed later, and pages were cached so they could be read offline. These were the unique "TiVo" features of Read It Later that made it more than bookmarks.html and also required backend support, which is why the "just make it an addon" argument doesn't really hold water. Someone has to host the service and data, and that (plus the existing userbase) is really what Mozilla was buying.

But all that said, it was a boondoggle and was probably just Mozilla trying desperately to find ways to be relevant in "mobile". They could have easily built this functionality themselves at a cost much less than whatever they did pay for Pocket. Eventually shutting the whole thing down was the shitty cherry on top.

Archive.is is usually pretty good at getting around paywalls.

Scientists Thought Parkinson’s Was in Our Genes. It Might Be in the Water