For ethics in games journalism.

Dude hipsters don't exist anymore. The kind of young hip dude or dudette that would qualify as a hipster is so thoroughly beaten down these days they've just faded into nothing. They're busy putting 60 hours a week in at Uber for just enough gas money to do it another week.

The core market for this is neurodivergent people who are being actively harmed by.. I don't want to call it social media because it's not. We need a new word to describe the kind of nastiness that Twitter and Facebook do where they actively keep you in a state of panic and fear and misery for the purposes of engagement so they can serve up advertisements and slurp up your data.

It's like how we tend to call right-wing extremists "conservative". When somebody's going to do something really awful they make sure that they pick a word to describe it or a phrase to describe it that is the exact opposite of what they're actually doing. Otherwise they couldn't get away with it because well, it's like you wouldn't buy a bouquet of dog shit would you?

It's not the approach that substandard it's the quality of the phone. It's a $500 device that you can buy the equivalent without the blockages for about 150 bucks.

I mentioned Twitter and Facebook has the kind of places that someone who is having trouble with doomscrolling wants to avoid and therefore wants a device that refuses to install those apps. That's presumably the selling point here you can't install the kind of apps that you would use to Doom scroll with. You're not searching Twitter you're wasting time on it while it makes you angrier and angrier and more frightened and more upset. You're not enjoying yourself but you can't stop because the algorithm has trapped you and you know this and you know you ought to just uninstall the app but you find yourself uninstalling it and then going back to it for another hit off the pipe.

The point is that sites like Twitter and Facebook use complex algorithms to take advantage of people with a variety of problems. It would be one thing if they were offering them something positive and good but all they give a shit about is the next engagement and the next opportunity to serve up and advertisement or the slurp up some data they can resell. They are more than happy to help you feel horrified and miserable as long as you're generating revenue for them in some capacity.

There's a bunch of neurodivergent people out there who know that they're being manipulated and they would be interested in a device like this because it makes it harder for them to fall off the wagon and reinstall the app. But the app shouldn't be allowed to be that addictive and destructive in the first place.

It's literally one group of ghouls profiting off of people's misery and another group of ghouls selling a potential solution to the first group. That's what sucks. And that's why it's peak capitalism

I just buy my phones directly and throw a Sim in them so I can uninstall anything I want.

I remember years ago I had one of the old Huawei ascend phones which was the first really cheap Android. It could just barely run angry birds and that was a big selling point. I didn't care about angry birds but it was nice to have a cheap Android phone back then but it barely had enough storage to run the operating system and I remember being pretty pissed off that some stupid bubble bubble clone was marked as a system app and could not be uninstalled. So I couldn't remove it to save space.

It has been for some time. That's why I said Chrome is the default.

From what I can tell Chrome will use less ram if you are someone who uses 1 to 10 tabs. The kind of lunatics around here the keep 100+ tabs open at all times are going to benefit from Firefox. It's a difference in design philosophy. Chrome is catering to the more average user that isn't going to keep a shitload of tabs open. I don't understand why people keep all this tabs open you can't possibly use them all and 90% of websites are going to figure out that you haven't been on that tab in a while and reloaded anyway. But I guess you do you. I know it really bothers people to have their tabs fucked with

You know that the industry is hurting.

To see commodore or the husk that is commodore taking advantage of people who have mental issues when those people with the mental issues are looking for something like this because another company is taking advantage of them.

There's just something uniquely fucked up about a clearly substandard product that exists specifically to cater to someone who can't just uninstall Facebook and twitter, and again I am not blaming people for that Lord knows I have my own mental issues as my detractors will no doubt a test to. But there's something really fucked up about selling what's very obviously a $150 device, I mean for fuck sakes it's a cheap Media tech phone with a cheap display, and charging a premium because the phone blocks apps that the person buying it knows they can be tricked into installing even though those apps make their lives objectively worse.

It's also possible that this is going to get marketed to kids but again you have a bunch of people doing a fucked up thing and another bunch of people selling a product to solve the problem caused by the first fucked up thing. How about we just don't do the fucked up things in the first place?

It really is peak capitalism though I'll give them that. One group of capitalists Selling me a substandard solution to a problem created by another group of capitalists.

Doge wasn't all him. It was just project 2025. And he didn't make big decisions, he made stupid and easy ones to kill children in exchange for tax cuts that made him a trillionaire.

In the real world he has teams of people whose job it to prevent him from making decisions at his companies.

It's about bribes. Anything this administration does is because they didn't get their cut. We put a guy who hung around Russian Mafia in charge. What did anyone expect?

So the good news is that won't happen with SpaceX satellites because they come back down to Earth every 5 years like clockwork. You could potentially wind up in that scenario for a few years you just have to wait it out which is frightening but it wouldn't be the end of space.

The bad news is that the high cost of maintaining that satellite fleet and the need to have big fat juicy government contracts in order to make it profitable means that SpaceX is not a viable company. Go watch the tail end of the last video Patrick Boyle put up on youtube. He takes a while getting there but he explains what's about to happen. The SpaceX IPO is structured so that if you bought it as a retail investor you can't sell for 120 days and after that every single index fund in the country is forced to buy into it whether they want to or not. That means your 401k is going to be heavily invested in SpaceX, Grok, Tesla and Twitter and any other crap Musk does.

It's possible that corruption will keep government contracts going his way and therefore keep the stock price up. But without that it's going to slam headlong into your retirement savings in a few years. And it's a corruption does keep going it's going to wreck your retirement savings another way. It's kind of a heads Musk wins tails you lose kind of thing...

Meant to be and is are very different things.

Starlink is technically profitable but it's heavily subsidizing the actual rocket business which is a huge money loser. It's expensive to put shit in space especially when you have to replace it every 5 years. And starlink is always competing primarily with wired internet.

So they're going to be very sensitive to having their satellites knocked out of orbit.

It is kind of funny that Musk books 7 billion in profit on starlink and 5 billion in losses from SpaceX even though they're basically the same company. I guess it does technically make it net profitable until you start mixing in the AI bullshit. Also it's very likely that Europe is going to start cutting starlink and SpaceX out for national security reasons. Never mind what's going to happen if the Republicans don't win in 2028.

So in your state the lady at the DMV actually does the inspections? She gets the car on a lift and starts poking around herself?

Hey President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho had the good sense to give the smartest man in the world a cabinet position and when he had a suggestion he listened to him. Better executive management skills than what we have now.

Aww poor widdle fella upset his big strong man with his big strong army couldn't get it done. Lil' gup learning that geopolitics is more than "drop bomb, make demand"

oh so this is this the new talking point? got your marching orders already to sweep for JCPOA but worse, exactly like I predicted? arm the resistance? with what? this is worse than I thought this really must be a bad deal, even you know it!