Shopping

If you ask Google what to buy, it wants to show you the products from companies which have paid it the most, or products that it owns, such as Google's Office suite.

Friends & Activities

Someone posts up an event - skating, clubbing, or gardening - whatever it is, the algorithm correctly detects that this …

I wake, and enter my algorithm-free RSS feed. It is perfect and pure.

I see a list (in the order I select) of everyone I want to follow. YouTube channels show up just like everything else, and I see only the name. With a quick shortcut-key, I tell the computer I want to watch the video later.

Onto the next feed, I find …

My partner watches YT videos in the background while working, and the nonsense I hear is unreal.

• People stop to discuss the algorithm, and request audience intervention, persistently.
• People use code-words for drugs, death, suicide, and anything else they think the algorithm may dislike.
• Sponsorship ads last minutes, …

Tumblr will soon attempt to join the Fediverse, and I'm going to argue that this is - overall - a good thing.

Methodology

I'm going to assume a consequentialist outlook, because I'm a consequentialist, and because other schools of ethical thought have no ability to do anything but argue over methodology.

I also want to …

The most efficacious piece of Philosophy written this century was buried in a software licensing agreement, and the Philosophy faculties of every major university have missed it.

While clicking 'I agree', to all those licences, everyone will have come across this piece at some point.

 1## Preamble
 2
 3The GNU General …

We're all going to die, so we have to share passwords.

When family die, we already have a mountain of nonsense to deal with, and I have no doubt that we'll see a growing number of people wrestling with American corporations, attempting to regain access to Coinbase accounts, banking apps, et c.

Clearly, we would all …

The GPL states that any users can use the source code under the GPL, or any later version released by the Free Software Foundation. So the entire FOSS movement hinges on the continued sanity of the Free Software Foundation.

Theoretically, a GPLv4 could come out, allowing people to not release the source code, which …

Games

I hear Linux podcasts and bloggers pulling themselves back, with an eye to keeping things realistic, and too many end up with unwarranted pessimism.

'You have to admit that computer games are just better on Windows'.

And I won't disagree, but I don't see why they phrase the situation like that.

Linux is the …

My phone bings three times, and I really want to tell it 'listen, matey, if I haven't answered the first three bings, I won't answer the next'. I wander over and tell it to shut up.

Of course if I forget to turn off silent mode, I could miss something important in a few hours. The entire approach here misunderstands …