@timbray @ben This is where I am. We thought making the internet friendly to business and investment wld make for a better world. So we enforced intellectual property, limited liability, tax-advantaged VC + employee stock options, etc. Look where we are. The less commercial internet we thought we were improving on was much better thn this brave new world created by the commerce we prized. So it’s time to undo the work of making the internet so friendly to commerce, at least to commerce at scale.
We are told by large firms that if only we choose to be virtuous consumers we can save the world. They claim if we recycle, what we painstakingly wash and sort won’t be burned or dumped.
That’s a lie, of course, but when they are caught out, they claim it was mere “puffery”, despite the hours and guilt we burn on it.
We cannot buy our way to a better world, or even build one by refraining from buying. We must use govt to build and insist upon one.
see @pluralistic https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/26/career-criminals/
Day 6 of resyncing to try to recover about 300GB of data from #Dropbox. I am so looking forward to never again having anything to do with that firm. But they sure are drawing out the goodbye.
some #css tips and tricks worth revisiting here. https://www.builder.io/blog/css-tips-for-better-web-development via @thepracticaldev
“the overuse of consultants is a problem, and should be restrained in most cases in favor of a professional civil service, unencumbered by politicization or an overclass of political appointees.” @Alon https://pedestrianobservations.com/2023/02/25/the-issue-of-consultants/
the measure of a state is the prosperity of its hinterlands.
@shawnhooper @BenRossTransit I hadn't seen StartPage. Will give it a look.
@BenRossTransit @shawnhooper yeah. i've been pleasantly surprised. i use neeva a lot lately, but brave seems to do a bit of a better job of finding what i'm interested in.
I made myself a mail alias (on fastmail) that autoarchives into a folder and sends to an address that https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ created for me, which converts to an RSS feed.
(n.b. "Newsletter name" on "Kill the Newsletter!" just becomes the feed name, doesn't have to match anything.)
I changed my e-mail-for-substack to that address, and have all my substack subscriptions (free or paid) in my RSS reader, in a single feed and, thank goodness, out of my inbox.
Recommended.
@shawnhooper (thanks!)
@paninid my experience is that they are finding (or more likely surfacing) more and more current content than Google. Google seems to index (looking at the access logs) but does not surface items from the "drafts" blog i started last week. Brave search (along with neeva, bing, duck duck) does.
@paninid (if you restrict to "past year" or "past month" are the newer results missing, or there but not prioritized by the default index?)
anyone know what search.brave.com uses as a back-end? is it (i doubt it, but hey) and independent index, or do they buy from bing or what?
“Indeed, what is most extraordinary about New College is that it achieves outcomes comparable to those of some of the nation’s most elite colleges—ones that play the U.S. News selectivity game—with students who are far more representative of American society as a whole. ” #AaliaThomas https://washingtonmonthly.com/2023/02/15/why-does-ron-desantis-want-to-fix-a-high-ranking-college/ #NewCollege
@akkartik excellent! this reminds me a bit of macroresilience on the at-first-blush sensible practice of having humans as emergency backstops to automated systems. a similar kind of creep from a simple but systemically illiterate narrative to pathological outcomes. https://www.macroresilience.com/2011/12/29/people-make-poor-monitors-for-computers/ https://www.macroresilience.com/2013/05/09/deskilling-and-the-cul-de-sac-of-near-perfect-automation/
"Contrarianism is monetizable in our current media landscape. I know because I’ve monetized it." #FreddieDeBoer https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-democrats-are-bad-but-we-cant
// i love how self-aware he is about this stuff, from a very well-calibrated piece
@Smando Of course it is! But by whom, on net? remember, Google doesn't "mint money". Every dollar it earns as profit is a dollar we pay. Those costs are embedded in the price of every good and service advertised on the internet. 1/
@Smando If we withdraw our attention and data from Google and Facebook and Twitter and they earn less, but we directly pay local intermediaries for things we rely on Google for, we might on net pay less, it might be a transfer from Google's profit margins shared between ourselves and the new class. 2/
@Smando Even if we don't gain financially on net, if the same money for the same services are distributed to providers within our own communities rather than centralized to Google stakeholders, that would be socially valuable on net. /fin