I don't think they're owned by Amazon, but the shipping email gave me an "Amazon Logistics US tracking number". I guess that means Amazon handles warehousing and shipping? I don't know what the practical difference is between buying on their own site (which used Shop.com for payment processing, fwiw) vs buying on Amazon.

There are classes of products that are basically impossible to find locally now. Or if you can find the products, they're outrageously expensive. One example is computer cables. 20 years ago I could walk into any dollar store and get all kinds of cables and adapters for $1-5. Now the only things I see locally are, like, $30 HDMI cables. I'm not paying $30 for a cable, especially not when that money would be going to another huge corp like Best Buy or Target. I'm willing to pay a bit more to shop local but there are limits, and there are so few truly local places left.

If that fails I do a web search and buy from another platform

This is something where I think we could benefit from the wisdom of a community.

Naively searching the web will generally yield >90% results centered around Amazon. Even if you exclude all Amazon domains, you need to sift through all the listicles and "review" sites that are really just Amazon ads with Amazon affiliate links inside.

Same deal if you want to use deal aggregators like slickdeals. The overwhelming majority of posts there are from Amazon, or subsidiaries like Woot.

Heck, recently I bought something direct from a brand's own web site, only learning that they shipped through Amazon when I got the Amazon tracking number. I'm honestly not sure if I could have known that before completing my order.

It is getting ever harder to avoid giving Jeff Bezos more money.

Yeah. The newer versions of Dall-E, GPT-Image, and similar cloud apps seem to have subnetworks specifically for text. They're worlds better than they were just a year or two ago. Like, you can twist them into generating semi-coherent-looking text logos, or make a cartoon character wearing a T-shirt with some text on it.

I've seen some complex pipelines with open models, where people train loras specifically to fix the things the base models suck at, like hands, text, etc.

But it's still a really dumb idea to generate a whole presentation slide or infographic that way, for a wide variety of reasons. If you ever get decent results, just consider yourself lucky. I mean, even the people with the skills to do this well (who are few and far between) would find it way more trouble than just, you know, making slides the normal way.

The incompetence we keep seeing from Microsoft is staggering. I can only assume this is malicious compliance. I imagine some exec said "everyone needs to use AI for everything" and everyone below them said "okay you dumb fuck, here you go".

Sometimes I have to wonder, what's it going to take to make people leave X?

I mean, it was a shithole even before Musk bought it, 4 years ago, and it's gotten predictably and steadily worse ever since.

This is network-specific. It's been going on for a few months at least. yt-dlp itself still works without sign-in, if your network is not "suspicious".

Always worth making sure you're updated to the latest version of yt-dlp, but this is probably a network thing.

Gemini might be good at something, but I'll never know because it is bad at all the things I have ever used the assistant for. If it's good at anything at all, it's something I don't need or want.

Looking forward to 2027 when Google Gemini is replaced by Google Assistant (not to be confused with today's Google Assistant, totally different product).

Disgusting and unsurprising.

Most web admins do not care. I've lost count of how many sites make me jump through CAPTCHAS or outright block me in private browsing or on VPN. Most of these sites have no sensitive information, or already know exactly who I am because I am already authenticating with my username and password. It's not something the actual site admins even think about. They click the button, say "it works on my machine!" and will happily blame any user whose client is not dead-center average.

Enter username, but first pass this CAPTCHA.

Enter password, but first pass this second CAPTCHA.

Here's another CAPTCHA because lol why not?

Some sites even have their RSS feed behind Cloudflare. And guess what that means? It means you can't fucking load it in a typical RSS reader. Good job!

The web is broken. JavaScript was a mistake. Return to ~~monke~~ gopher.

Fuck Cloudflare.

Almost certainly, yes.

People on Mastodon are not happy about those statements, and called Proton out on it relentlessly with every post Proton made. This is Proton running away with their tail between their legs, back to platforms where they have more control and/or are already full of right-wing nutjobs.

If anyone's looking for secure email, look at tuta.com instead. The email service is very similar in terms of UX and offers better encryption. They don't offer the rest of Proton's suite, but...maybe that's a good thing? I mean, do you want to get locked into an ecosystem?

Racism in America is real. Anyone telling you otherwise is probably just living a charmed life and incapable of accepting that their personal experience is not universal.

I don't have the time or energy to prove this exhaustively, but here's a starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driving_while_black

In 2019, as reported by NBC, the Stanford Open Policing Project found that "police stopped and searched black and Latino drivers on the basis of less evidence than used in stopping white drivers, who are searched less often but are more likely to be found with illegal items."

Please refer to the citations on that page for more details. Lots of studies in various states showing the same thing. The fact that the mere existence of racial profiling in America is still debated, when it has been consistently proven again and again for decades, is itself a clear indicator of a different kind of racism.

Here's a little story that stuck in my memory, about how a white woman finally came to realize that racial harassment by police was a real thing. It's kind of hilarious, in a dark, face-palmy kind of way. https://franklywrite.com/2020/06/01/a-white-woman-racism-and-a-poodle/

Ridiculous.

He specifically started talking about American party politics, unprompted, making sweeping statements about both Democrats and Republicans. NOW he wants to blame us for...being concerned with his views on American party politics? Dude. Get real.

Saying stupid shit now and then is forgivable, but not if you take it in as the new nucleus of your public image. Why do so many public figures have this compulsion to double down combatively?

Link to Mastodon thread: https://mastodon.social/@protonprivacy/113833073219145503

I feel bad for this kid. That really is a bad warning dialog. Nowhere does it say it's going to delete files. Anyone who thinks that's good design needs a break.

Half the replies are basically "This should be obvious if your past five years of life experience is similar to mine, and if it isn't then get fucked." Just adding insult to injury.