I don’t think so, the game critics video and the cyberpunk video and most videos other than the Starfield one I mentioned are older than that, but even if I am mistaken - I would be mentioning them because they’re fresh in memory, but my overall impression is that pre-“I’m done making good videos” he was doing a lot more in terms of quality of the essays, the humor and structure.

I guess he’s focused on running his publishing studio, doing music and streaming these days? Godspeed honestly.

I use F-Droid on Android and I don’t use Google Play at all. I’m really glad laws exist that prevent monopolization and I’m really glad the OS is open source so that if it were to ever change I will just use a different fork.

There’s no sign up or payment info required.

It works great for me. I don’t pay for any apps nor have I ever nor will I, but if I did, I would PayPal/Ko-Fi/Shopify/Patreon the money to the Dev without any further sign up required.

1. It’s your SO or kid accessing it and they don’t know any better.

Teach them or dont give them devices or admin privs on them. If all else fails they are free to use the apple app store where apple will now be exposed to the broader market and set the fees accordingly.

2. You just bought something (an appliance, a vehicle, an FPV drone, whatever) and it requires you to use an app, and that app is an exclusive on the shadiest App Store possible.

I would never buy such junk that it requires an app. Your decisions are your own.

hope you like signing up with all your personal data and credit card information on app stores that make Apple look like saints, because that’s where this is headed, and sadly you’ll drag me with you.

Isn’t that also a problem with Apple? And any specific app? In any case I’ve never signed up with any app store nor am I going to.

Because again this hypothetical thing you bought might be a family member buying it, so it won’t even be up to you at that point.

I mean, it’s their device, why do you care? You can educate them but you can’t make the right choices for them nor can I for you.

The way to avoid it is to get rid of app stores completely, and have users download and install apps one by one. Like that’s going to happen.

Do you mean like the way everyone installs programs on Windows and has for the last two and a half decades?

Event log for when it stops working?

yawn Delete the Apple App Store and install a third party replacement, the way god/EU Intended.

One of my fav funniest ones would be his Game Structure or the Game Critics and Remasters mini-videoessays. Japan World Cup is pretty funny too. I also like that joke from the Cyberpunk 2077 vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPW6fkcM-14

Out of more recent ones, Starfield was pretty funny, every now and then I’m washing dishes and the repeated animation of that “GENDER AMBIGUITY” guy with the boiling kettle pot sound effect keeps popping into my head and I chuckle.

Timestamp link for mobile users with fat fingers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4JWMxV8pz0&t=69

Really it’s hard to decide since his jokes are pretty well spread between his points, but I gotta say he really did stop making good videos for the most part these days.

No it actually is that.

Depression is not the same as Feeling depressed/ Feeling down. Depression is like a prolonged MDMA hangover (also caused by neurotransmitter depletion, namely serotonin).

I’ve never had depression or anything like that but as an ADHDer I feel intense solidarity with folks who have a medical condition caused by chemical imbalance that is not taken seriously because randoms without said condition muddy the waters by using it as a soapbox to talk about some bullshit societal/cultural thing they’re mad about at this moment.

All of this is far easier to subvert than tracking scripts (and cookies and port scans) which literally as evidenced by the article in the OP are not techniques that companies have “gone away” from at all, at least not by entirely replacing them.

I prefer nightly because about:config is accessible unlike on the mainline version. Does Beta also allow that?

So you got all your friends, family and coworkers and acquaintances using Signal?

Russian

Started learning it from video games at about 5-6 years old, had tutor classes paid for by my dad (for the whole class) from 7 years old. Then from 10 years old I had summer camp overseas every year until 13, then sent off to the UK.

Tried to pick up other languages along the way from Japanese to French to Italian to Spanish to Ukrainian to Polish, but none of them really stuck, shit just takes forever and it’s hard to keep coming back to it after the novelty has worn off from a few hours of translation exercises and flash cards and such.

History.

I had a great teacher and it was my favourite subject. I wish I could’ve demonstrated more gratitude instead of feeling the need to act like I didn’t like it for fear of being bullied about it by my classmates, and wish I applied myself more and wasn’t held back by ADHD, but it was a well-earned B on the exam.

I didn’t know it then, couldn’t have, but it taught me critical thinking then and there through the simplistic exercises of looking at old political cartoons and recognising the biases and influences there and to see symbolism and metaphor and allegory not just as purely confined to the “entertainment art” realm, but as a core part of communication in general and a tool wielded in politics and propaganda.

Good timing too, that was during gamergate, two years later it’d be 2016 and the first time I would be exposed to targeted propaganda that had any chance in earnest. Growing up in Russia I had already known not to trust, but it was easy not to trust the weird revanchism of a country I never liked that much anyway, compared to loud young and relatable people on the internet, which was my one and only space to socialise back then due to being bullied and ostracized a lot in school.

Not sure if it counts as “High School” though, idk the American school system, I did History for what used to be called “GCSE” in the UK, it was year 11 for me, out of 13 years total in school.

Honestly Immich image search is so much better it’s not even funny. Face detection too.

Like “No Google photos it’s not my dog, it’s a screenshot of an article with an image of a car in it.”

No WhatsApp?

Block all tracking scripts and use Firefox Nightly with ublock when possible.

Well maybe if they stopped taking all those screenshots with their fancy rice avocado phones they could afford a house!

Agreed! Thanks for this discussion.

You’re spot on, I’m sorry for my loose usage of the term.

But I dont necessarily fully agree with your definitions either. Don’t get me wrong they are soundly constructed, I just don’t personally see it the same way. The slur one is fine and I largely agree.

As for the ideological definition I’m not sure that you can decidedly say that self-improvement is at odds with it.

I think a full definition for me would be mostly related to the culture of specific online spaces, what I would call “4chan social dynamics” and it’s memes and people who buy into them past a certain point, and very little to do with any sexual status or lack thereof, which there’s nothing actually wrong with, it’s fairly obvious that lack of sexual access for men is a significant detriment to their quality of life and it’s complex societal problem to be solved like any other. It’s not for me to really talk about at length because I’m not a man.

I would argue though that “femcels” in communities like FDS and (I’m not sure if it’s a thing still) Vindicta are very much thinking along the exact same lines despite very few of them being involuntarily celibate or identifying with the label in any significant way.

Likewise men who have sex but still buy into these memes are also still ideologically incels under this definition.

I think this grouping is more useful because it allows us to identify ideological and philosophical commonalities between more stereotypical incels and those who wouldn’t on the surface be such.

What I’ve found across my observations is if grouped this way, plenty of these people actually do practice self-improvement and are explicitly motivated to do so via their ideology. A particular telltale sign is active hostility and contempt towards those who do not buy into the same memes.

So I don’t necessarily see a toxic variety of “self-improvement” as being contrary at all to this ideology, in fact if anything I see the “blackpilled” (or in less internet terms - hopeless) variety as being far less harmful than the “redpilled” variety which is often used to exploit people economically via endless lifestyle coaching guides and courses and even transparent pyramid schemes alongside usually a serving of mysogyny and reducing women’s behaviour to some sort of conspiratorial pseudo-scientific evolutionary psychology “harsh truth” that only serves to further disconnect people from the real world and entrap them in cycles of financial exploitation.

In plain English, in the best case the very framing of “work out to get a girlfriend” is inherently distorting reality into 4chan social dynamics and implying a causality that isn’t there (e.g. “guys who work out get girls”) when in reality women aren’t something to “get”, and many men don’t work out and have women all the same.

Through this lens “looksmaxxing” is problematic the same way those fake “diet” aids are, even when the implication is unspoken.

When you introduce the profit motive into this, there’s never any incentive for people to get out of the cycle, only deeper in.

In contrast the ones who think self-improvement is a cope maybe have some unproductive ideas but honestly I just don’t think people holding communions of shared self-loathing is a particularly huge problem unless they threaten and go through on real world harm ala Elliot Rodgers or whatever his name was.

Also sorry for the long-winded response, I just want to add that I may sound overly harsh on self-improvement but this is coming from someone who is a staunch self-improver myself.

I’m not at all against self-improvement in the slightest, but I think it’s important to work towards whatever goals one may set for the right reasons as well, and recognize when a drive for self-improvement stems from a “toxic” (less productive) place and when it stems from a “legitimate” place (actually solves problems).

Okay, I’d be interested to hear what you think is wrong with this, because I’m pretty sure it’s more or less correct.

Some sources for you to help you understand these concepts a bit better:

What DLSS is and how it works as a starter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Learning_Super_Sampling

Issues with modern “optimization”, including DLSS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJu_DgCHfx4

TAA comparisons (yes, biased, but accurate): https://old.reddit.com/r/FuckTAA/comments/1e7ozv0/rfucktaa_resource/

No that’s not really true from what I heard. Tons of vindicta and FDS type femcels and Tate fan manosphere loons are into looksmaxxing and moneymaxxing and whatnot. Ironically enough, blackpilled proper withdrawn hikki incels at least don’t get taken for a ride by grifters so much.