My local issue of interest is how my county and state administer elections. I volunteer as a poll worker for nearly every election, with a preference for the "boring" low-turnout contests like state legislative and local board primaries. This experience has given me insight you would never get on national news but lots of people blindly argue about: voter ID requirements, how provisional ballots work, why higher-population counties take longer to report results on election night, what election night "calls" actually mean, entirely mundane failure modes that can slow down the line, etc.
You'd think that for such an important issue like elections you'd get more interest at the local level where regular citizens can actually get involved. But nope. We're always desperate to fill poll worker assigments on non-presidential years, even though those are the best and least stressful opportunities to experience first-hand what it's all about.
In the long run shareholders care about customers though, not the UI. Of course in the short term the stock market has always been about something other than fundamentals, but in the long run shareholders who care about customers tend to do better and most shareholders are in it for the long run - but they never are enough to be powerful today.
A lot of digital tech produces more waste than actual value. Just look at your email inbox: odds are, the overwhelming majority of emails you get aren't useful correspondence from real people.
The level of entitlement and irresponsibility tech companies (especially the largest and most well-resourced ones) is just astounding. You'd think that proper engineering requires some degree of care and stewardship, but these aren't engineering organizations, they're toddlers.
>One evil thing they were doing that they've suddenly given up on: they spent a ton of money buying up gaming studios (highly anti-competitively) to win on the console front and to stymie Steam's ability to move off Windows. They wanted to make Windows/Xbox gaming the place everyone would be. They threw all of that away because AI became a bigger target.
No kidding, the totally threw it all away. It used to be that Windows was already the place for gaming. And the Xbox 360 arguably won its generation. But that was a long time ago. Has any Microsoft gaming release exceeded expectations lately? Call of Duty will always sell like hotcakes, but the latest Black Ops is a hot expensive mess that underperformed last year's title.
Maybe it won some battles in your part of the world, presumably North America. But the PS3 outsold it globally as its contemporary, and even the PS5 passed the 360 in global lifetime sales as of November 2025: https://www.vgchartz.com/article/466599/ps5-outsells-xbox-36...
Microsoft seems to have decided that they can't make all that much money with gaming. But they are underestimating the mindshare they are losing with that.
I just love it - what's the chance that some internet stranger cites some site (pub intended) of another strange on some random forum, and that site/blog's owner immediately chimes in (as a member of that forum, no less) to take up the discussion, and to answer questions and share some (insider/off-the-beaten-track) insights. It is wonderful to see such positive interactions and knowledge sharing of humanity.
In your interview with MegaLag posted in the video, you say something along the lines that civil courts are probably the most likely place any lawsuits would be held (I forget the exact wording used).
If you had used Honey, would you join a civil or class action suit against them?
I believe in class actions as the most efficient way for large groups (of consumers or small businesses) to resolve disputes. Have to think about the specific claim. Yesterday's write-up covers a scheme harming other affiliates (creators, influencers, reviewers, etc.) and also harming merchants and networks. I don't know if users are direct victims of the stand-down violations and concealment.
Capitalism is great at washing its hands of evil. I don't know how much slavery went into making the smart phone that I'm posting this from, but I'm sure it's not zero. I'm ethically complicit in the whole scheme. The C in ACAB stands for Capitalists. Which unfortunately, is all of us.
Culpability is not a binary thing, it’s a scale. A small number of people are far and away the most culpable for much of the evil in the world, and they know it (and don’t care).
We're not fully complicit all of the time. You don't know how many slaves made your phone, but somebody does. If you had a choice between a phone you knew was made by slaves and a phone that wasn't I assume you'd pick the slave free version every time. While it's fine to feel guilty for your involvement in the scheme don't let that get in the way of placing the blame for it squarely on the people who set things up this way and put you in this position.
When you can't escape an evil system you just have to do your best within it, while either working to get out of it or working to improve it however you can. What more can anyone ask of you? Capitalism is pretty much inescapable, but thankfully I'm not convinced that capitalism is an evil system inherently, it just needs strong constraints and regulations to keep it from being used to do evil things.
>If you had a choice between a phone you knew was made by slaves and a phone that wasn't I assume you'd pick the slave free version every time.
At the same cost? Sure.
At different costs? We see that is not the case.
People don't. A few do, but most don't. There are many who would still prefer the more popular phone and an ethical cost is something they only mention when asked but is given only minor weight when it comes to decision making. Some might try to justify it by saying you can't be sure a phone claiming to be ethically made actually is, but how many even considered that much when making the decision?
>While it's fine to feel guilty for your involvement in the scheme don't let that get in the way of placing the blame for it squarely on the people who set things up this way and put you in this position.
Who is really at fault on a systematic level if the population decides lower costs is what they really wants regardless of what sacrifices have to be made. If we look at a less morally challenging area, say air travel, and see how many people claim to want a nicer experience, yet airlines are always focused on cutting costs. Is that the fault of the airlines? Or is it the fault of the consumers who, despite what they say, show extreme preference for lower costing tickets? We can blame any seller at the moment, but we can't ignore the market pressures that picked the sellers who stayed and the ones who went out of business.
> Who is really at fault on a systematic level if the population decides lower costs is what they really wants regardless of what sacrifices have to be made.
It's always the people who are actually forcing slaves to work for them. Always. Consumers will always want lower prices but that doesn't justify slavery. It's not as if a company like Apple is being forced to abuse workers because they'd be bankrupt otherwise. These companies are pulling in massive amounts of profits year after year. It's not "market pressures" that force them to abuse their workers it's just greed.
> see how many people claim to want a nicer experience, yet airlines are always focused on cutting costs. Is that the fault of the airlines? Or is it the fault of the consumers who, despite what they say, show extreme preference for lower costing tickets?
Every customer wants low cost tickets. Of course they do. There's a lot that goes into that though. Almost nobody wants to fly in the first place. It's annoying, expensive, stressful and uncomfortable. What people actually want is to get to their destination. Consumers are basically forced to deal with airlines since it's the fastest, and often the only, way they can get to where they want to go when they need to. It's just a necessary evil that must endured.
That's not the airlines fault, but it does put airlines in a position where they know they can take advantage of travelers at every opportunity and so they do. They overbook their flights, they charge endless bullshit fees, they cram as many people into the plane as they can, their ticket prices change by the minute and airlines aggressively charge people as much as they think they can get away with.
Mergers and the high cost of entry into the airline industry have greatly hurt competition and often most people have only one choice in airline when flying to certain destinations. Airlines have consumers bent over a barrel and they pound away at them relentlessly. That's all on the airlines, not the consumers.
The only real thing consumers have any control over is the price of their ticket, and because airlines play so many games with ticket pricing they enable a certain amount of gaming the system to "get a better deal" so many flyers do work hard to limit what they pay for what will inevitably be a shitty service.
There's also a question of how much consumers can even afford. Many consumers would love to pay more to get a less shitty air travel experience but they can't if it means they'd no longer be able to afford their trip. ULCCs are often the only viable options travelers have and even then many people go into debt to travel. Others may figure that going with a cheap airline or putting in the effort to get a cheap ticket will be worth it because while the flights will be a miserable 6-8 hours it means they'll be able to afford a nice dinner or have a little bit more spending money when they reach their destination. Those kinds of choices can be put squarely on the consumer.
The original site is down for me, so going based on the app I was thinking it was about the actual edible Honey product, not Honey the discount coupon thing.
Yeah, I feel like our form of representative democracy is the least bad option. At the very least, office-holders aren't entitled to their office beyond their term unless they're re-elected.
The fundamental problem is that governing is boring, complicated, and unfulfilling to most people. The most impactful elections to citizens' day-to-day lives (i.e., local offices, state legislatures, and primaries for those) have absolutely abysmal participation rates, even in states that bend over backwards with voter accessibility.
Maybe I'm missing something here: the great thing about self-hosting is that you choose if and when you update your back-end software. What's stopping self-hosting admins from simply staying on a known good version and forking that if they so desire?
You don't have to expose your self-hosted services on the Internet to begin with. 0day bugs do exist even if you diligently apply all security updates.
making sure that your system is not exposed to the internet takes effort too. and then you realize you want to share something with friends or family, or access your home server from remote. you also want updates for new features too eventually.
There are different degrees of "exposed to the internet." You don't need to make your self-hosted services fully accessible by anyone from everywhere. VPN, IP whitelists, mTLS, HTTP basic auth, etc. change the calculus of security and feature updates. You can afford to lag a bit behind on updates because you're not running critical enterprise infrastructure at scale.
Pretty much every home router, network firewall, and host-based firewall is set to deny all by default, so the effort is mostly needed to allow exposure to the Internet.
Have the advantage of hosting content on Plex and other media servers that you can play them remotely. I can be on the other side of the Earth and still access my media. This is an extremely common use case.
Where are you seeing that? From what I can tell, the 10k message limit applies to "Mattermost Entry":
> Mattermost Entry gives small, forward-leaning teams a free self-hosted Intelligent Mission Environment to get started on improving their mission-critical secure collaborative workflows. Entry has all features of Enterprise Advanced with the following server-wide limitations and omissions:
What the fuck is this lmao? "a free self-hosted Intelligent Mission Environment to get started on improving their mission-critical secure collaborative workflows".
Sounds like some kind of parody of enterprise software.
Yea, here “we’re happy to pay for it” really means “we’re not happy to pay the price you’re charging, but maybe we’d pay if you fundamentally changed your prices or pricing model.”
The Plex rug-pull from excellent software to commercial gimmick happened years ago when they removed your ability to search your personal media library.
I assumed that they were being forced by the copyright mafia, but they’re perfectly capable of making these decisions on their own.
You'd think that for such an important issue like elections you'd get more interest at the local level where regular citizens can actually get involved. But nope. We're always desperate to fill poll worker assigments on non-presidential years, even though those are the best and least stressful opportunities to experience first-hand what it's all about.
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