EU is going down the same path. The “EU alternative” stuff is just bogus. It’s just a matter of time before EU starts doing the same.

It’s not bogus if you are yourself European or if the alternative is Big Tech. But I feel you. There are lots of shitty European companies that are not that much better. I avoided the switch to Spotify because even though they are “European” they gave a lot of money to Joe Rogan and to Trump on his inauguration.

Also, the EU did recently reject the chat control proposal so at least that’s something…

Valve is a shitty company.

Does valve make some good things? Yes. Do they make shitty things? Yes. Not hard.

You just stated the exact nuanced position I was defending from the very beginning, while simultaneously insulting me for holding it 😂

It’s not.

Look, you are not necessarily wrong in holding the opinion that Valve’s monetization practices are so horrible, that they ruin the company’s entire reputation. It’s a valid moral boundary. But at the end of the day, it’s just an opinion, not some objective law of the universe and other people can weigh the scales differently without being an evil person. Yet you portray it as the TRUTH. And it’s a bit ironic, that when people disagreed you started talking about echo chambers and attacking the community. This is why you got downvoted.

I feel like you’re straw-manning here.

I never said it’s okay. All I’m saying is that a mega-corporation can simultaneously exploit psychological loopholes for profit (loot boxes) while actively pushing open-source ecosystems (Linux), providing great value to consumers and fighting other pc gaming monopolies (Microsoft). Look at the whole picture.

Maybe just maybe it’s because it’s not as black or white as you make it seem? Especially talking about a company that did so much for Linux and looking at what their competition is doing…

Last week, we published our team’s findings about an exposed Elasticsearch cluster that contained over 160 indices and held 8.7 billion primarily Chinese records, ranging from national citizen ID numbers to various business records.

Last December, the team uncovered an unprotected database containing 4.3 billion records, some of which included LinkedIn-derived personal information. The 16TB-strong instance contained emails, photos, employment histories, and other personal data. A single collection alone contained 732 million records, including photographs.

In July, Cybernews covered one of the largest data leaks in history, after researchers discovered several collections of login credentials, containing 16 billion records. The team found 30 exposed datasets, each containing tens of millions to more than 3.5 billion records.

The leaked data included login info for just about every online service, including Apple, Facebook, Google, GitHub, Telegram, and even government platforms.

Damn…

It was…oh my god. Do you have ANY idea how awful the vanilla youtube experience is?

Whether or not that matters depends on how much and how you watch it.

Ads while I listen to music = annoying

I want to navigate fast to different videos on PC to find something and almost every time an ad appears on a new video = annoying

I’m watching some chill drive or walk while reading a book and a loud ad appears = annoying.

But when I just go and watch 1-3 videos before bed on my ipad? I don’t care if I get those 2-4 ads, I just mute and wait those couple of seconds. I have no youtube adblockers or different clients on ipad / phone for that reason.

“Based on these reports, users see a message stating “Comments are turned off,” which appears across a wide range of videos”

Seems like a win to me.

I haven’t been following much of the new developments of these self-hostable AI. Can you actually self-host anything decent?

I have played around these smaller models in the past and honestly anything smaller than LLama 4 Scout was just not very useful. Now Llama 4 Scout was “17B Active parameters, 16 experts and 109B Total parameters” so not sure what that even means.

Terry Davis was right…

Edit: For anyone that don’t know : https://youtu.be/3HD43lvNvCA?t=2084 He was mentally unwell but he called it !

And what do you think Kagi uses? They rely heavily on the same Bing and Google. If you played around with them you will see most of their searches are identical to what you would get if you did a bing search and then follow up with a google search, you’re not getting much more. The fact of the matter is that there are only 2 real choices of search engines. Google and Bing. There’s a massive gap between them and every other independent search index.

Everyone should be aware of the fact that Kagi supports Russia by buying Yandex index API. They excuse themselves with neutrality. Well, DuckDuckGo for some reason took the L and dropped them after the Ukraine invasion, so make your own conclusions here. I think it’s easy to come up with all sorts of justifications for your actions and I cancelled my sub a couple of months back. They do have a decent product, though but it’s also pretty expensive.