Context is king. If there’s vital/time-dependent correspondence you’re waiting on, notifications can matter. But email in 2024 is pretty darn transactional, in which case a daily check is enough for most. Notifications for something suggest that I need to drop what I’m doing and attend to whatever arrived. That just doesn’t apply for service provider marketing, purchase receipts, etc.

And then the opsec angle comes into play: https://www.axios.com/2023/12/06/apple-google-requests-push-notification-data

Give me a mandatory field and I will give you a latrine.

Notifications are overrated. I turn them off for the bulk of apps.

Devote one or two small time windows each day for life admin. Outside those windows it shouldn’t be seen or heard.

When is the company axing search?

The purpose of the piece is to smear the notion of individual control and development of AI tools. It’s known as ‘running propaganda’.

I’m happy with outgroup x being able to develop their own AIs, because that means I’m able to develop AIs too.

Staggeringly naive, tbh. Your profession will be made obsolete as a self-sustaining for-profit enterprise either way. The difference is that the tooling can either be owned exclusively by megacorp, or it can be owned by people.

It’s better to be a bard relying on the charity and small custom of others than a literal sharecropper fueling Universal’s proprietary model for next to nothing. At least in the former case you’re free.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the average consumer does more for the environment by reducing consumption by 10% and not recycling anything, than maintaining normal consumption and regularly recycling.

Advertisers working in your native language cannot hijack your attention when foreign language videos are running. Subtitling facilitates that, and encourages site activity that differs from consumption, such as broadening one’s horizons and being inquisitive about the real world.

Started playing Rain World. I’m getting huge ICO vibes.

Whenever I see Harris, all I can think of is the Backpage . com miscarriage of justice.

HN reckons https://www.showsonsale.com is where the price collusion happens.

It makes you wonder why Google pursues initiatives like Web Environment “Integrity”, given that proprietary mobile apps for the most part have already completed the hatchet job on user agency and privacy.

An open app simply is another type of browser tab, in my books. From a ‘screen cruft’ perspective I consider them roughly equivalent. At any rate it’s an interesting aspect of software design psychology…

Is turning off WiFi sufficient in Android to stop my phone’s scanning attempts?

It’s quite accurate: Microsoft consulted its ethnographic map of the world for marketers, and it clearly shows black, white, brown and yellow faces predominating on every continent.

So long as it’s publicly accessible, Youtube has ‘plausible credibility’ when it talks to advertisers about impression numbers. Remember, we’re not the only party YT fucks.

The rise of corporate landlords provides the incentive for all these bad actors. Fail to solve that and the gaming will surface in a new form in ten years. RealPage and other cretins are in business because they have only to make a dozen phonecalls to rental agents in any given city/municipality and they’ve got the bulk of supply co-operating. Any state/federal government that takes cost of living seriously will do everything it can to keep residential real estate ownership highly fragmented; anything else amounts to a default on citizens.

You need to enable JavaScript to use Direct File.

On the plus side, UBO only had to block one script (on the login page at least).

How many Youtube employees would be assigned to frontend/adblock sabotage efforts? I’m wondering whether the law of diminishing returns will be observed, or will the company have sufficient resources to maintain the shenanigans indefinitely.

If it’s the latter, Youtube can rest assured my resolve will match theirs, until the damned thing gets paywalled…