Psst you're literally on the fediverse right now.

I have a handful of yearly reminders in Google Keep along these lines:

Are you sick today? No? Then rejoice! On this day in 2016, you were quite sick and miserable with an infinite runny nose. The past version of you would gladly trade their place with you.

Another one for it being too hot in the apartment I lived in:

Was it swelteringly hot to the point that it was very hard for you to do sleep or even go upstairs to your room today? If not, rejoice! Because on this day in 2017 (these past 3 days, really) it was unbearably hot and dry in your room, and you had to soak a towel in cold water, and tried and failed to sleep. Also the cat got stuck in your closet and you had to let him out

And a few others, including reminding myself not to lose an entire day to watching youtube videos. A few like that.

The Van Gogh scene is amazing, and it made me think that I understand the purpose of the show

It's safe with us

Wow, I feel like the most upvoted solutions here don't work, and meanwhile some obvious and widely known alternatives are being completely overlooked.

❌ Inspect Element - many modern sites don't even include the full article in the paywalled html, so this wouldn't work. Also sitting there and mousing over elements and deleting them one by one, is tedious, it's easy to accidentally delete an element that encloses the content you intended to keep, or to drive yourself crazy trying to figure out how elements are nested.

❌ Ublock Zapper - a similar to the above, won't work on stub articles, and just janky because you're manually zapping things

❌ Disabled JavaScript - Similar to the above, same problem because many articles are stubs anyway. And the HTML layers that block your view don't have to be done with JavaScript.

❌ Rapid copy and paste of the article to notepad or rapidly printing the screen - similar problem to the above, lots of places just post the stub of an article, and besides nobody should live their life this way rapidly trying to print screen or copy everything. If you're trying to do a quick copy you're going to grab all kinds of gobbledygunk from the page and probably have to manually filter it out.

❌ Reader Mode - Your browsers reader mode will be hit and miss because, again, many sites post stub articles, and it's possible the pay wall stuff will just get formatted into the reader mode along with an incomplete article.

✅ Archive.is - works!

✅ Pocket and Instapaper - amazingly, nobody has mentioned these even though they're probably the longest running (dating back to 2007-2008), possibly most widely known, and most consistent solutions that still work to this day. They keep their own local caches of articles, so it's not depending on the full content being visible on the page.

✅ Other dedicated extensions - Dedicated browser extensions seem to work, but be careful what you're signing yourself up for.

🤷‍♀️ Brave - It works, but, it's a Chromium supported browser, so ultimately Google controls the destiny and can drive Chromium to incorporate fundamental frameworks supporting DRM and pushing their preferred web standards.

So unless they are willing to change their model I’ll just refuse to live.

Wait what

Sounds pretty fricken near death to me.

Strongly agree. Deus Ex is still even now my favorite game ever. NPCs sound like real people and actually have meaningful things to say.

I keep getting stuck at the beginning in Nier Automata. Is there really no option to save until after like 30+ mins of gameplay?

I know this is not the point, but "begs this question" is the oddest construction of that phrase I've heard yet.

You're completely right and I'm terribly disappointed that nuances like these get reflex downvoted.

A fundamental flaw in this, is it still involves user data, even if “anonymized”. You can advertise without any user data.

Right. The reassurance is supposed to be: "don't worry, no personalized data is retained." So, ideally, no individual record of you, with your likes, your behaviors, your browser fingerprint, aggregated together with whatever third party provider data might be purchased, and machine learning inferences can be derived from that. Instead, there's a layer of abstraction, or several layers. Like "people who watch Breaking Bad also like Parks and Rec and are 12% more likely to be first generation home buyers". Several abstracted identity types can be developed and refined.

Okay, but who ordered that? Why is that something that we think satisfies us that privacy is retained? You're still going to try and associate me with an abstract machine learned identity that, to your best efforts, closely approximates what you think I like and what is most persuasive to me. I don't think people who are interested in privacy feel reassured at anonymized repurposing of data.

It's the model itself, it's the incentives inherent in advertising as an economic model, at the end of the day. I don't know that there's a piecemeal negotiation that is supposed to stand in for our interests to reassure us, or whose idea was that this third way was going to be fine.

I'm talking about the fact that it ever happened, at all, anywhere. In this sense and in this spirit that I say "the historical existence of snow." It's not about a particular place or amount.

I'm absolutely okay with vilifying people asking for sources on the historical existence of snow.

For a second I thought you meant you don't use Signal, so they all went there on purpose to avoid you.

I almost forgot today was April Fools day. I feel like since Covid, the national mood (TM) was such that Google and co stopped doing April Fools pranks, and/or if they did them, they were so safe they were groan inducing.

Looking around at the roundup links for 2024, there aren't many that happened this year, from the looks of it. So I wanted to post this one, because it's the rarest of rare - one that I thought was really incredibly well done.

Excuse me! I would never buy a thinkpad.

This was a longstanding fediverse complaint, which was quite remarkable to me. It was described as a "missing" feature even though you never had this ability anywhere else let alone the fediverse.

If you get a new email address, it doesn't bring your contacts or your history of emails with you. If you make a new twitter account, same thing. And of course, don't even think about trying to port, say, your facebook stuff into a youtube account. But if the fediverse can't, then it's a dealbreaker.

If you truly want to channel the limitless depths of human creativity, give a Comment Section Skeptic (TM) every fediverse feature they say they want. Then wait and watch as that creativity goes into action, as [insert new feature] is now the new dealbreaker. It is and always will be an endless game of whack a mole.

Not quite. That was the second of my two sentences. What was the first?

I learn from the best!