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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • To be fair, in that specific case it is almost certainly not YouTube directly censoring the phrase. They aren’t known to do any kind of editing like that on uploaded videos.

    What is happening is the person that uploaded that video censored themselves…because YouTube’s policy around monetization. They’ll demonetize videos with certain no-no words. Part of that is YouTube and part of that is advertisers demanding their ads not be placed on content that they find objectionable.

    Indirectly, YouTube and advertisers are censoring our content. A lot of it is also TikTok, which will ban you for no-no words. This seeps over into YouTube where something that might be fine on YouTube but is banned on TikTok gets censored anyway in case it gets clipped for TikTok.

    Genuinely the power TikTok and it’s advertisers have over how we communicate is pretty scary. Imagine how often you hear “unalive” instead of “suicide” these days. “Pdf” (or others) instead of “pedophile.” The list goes on.


  • Why would Amazon want to hinder the accuracy of the price tracking in that way?

    Accurate price tracking leads to people saying “Oh well it was 50% less a year ago. I’ll wait on a sale, not paying full price on that” and waiting on a sale, leading to less conversions. Amazon has pressured Camelcamelcamel into agreeing to not track specific low prices (i.e., Prime Day, if that actually had any good sales). I’m unsure if they track coupons or not, they were not clear about what the criteria for not tracking a price are.

    Camelcamelcamel is unfortunately compromised by Amazon, it’s probably mostly accurate but there are price points they do not accurately log at Amazon’s request.


  • I’m not arguing one way or another but I want to clear up some very common misconceptions about US gun laws.

    in some states, you can get semi-automatic weapons (which are completely banned in Austria) in a shop in just minutes. And that without any background checks, psychological reports, justifications, approval required, without anything like that

    This is just blatantly untrue and I wish people would stop parroting it. If you go to any shop you need to pass a federal background check to buy any non-vintage firearm (pre-1899…not exactly a ton of those floating around). The exception here is private firearm sales, i.e. I go to Craigslist and sell a rifle or handgun. The law states the seller has to have no reasonable cause to believe they would be an unlawful possessor (weak, yes). With that said, almost half of the states (22 per Wikipedia) have implemented state-level laws requiring a background check for private sales.

    In many states even convicted criminals can get guns like that.

    Again, objectively untrue. You are not buying a firearm from any legal, licensed dealer in the US without going through a background check. And a violent criminal offense will get you barred from purchasing. For the 28 states without laws around private sales, the seller can be federally legally liable if they sell to someone that is not legally allowed to have a gun and they use it to commit crimes.

    In the US, guns are sometimes a presents for kids which they can just…own and use (while in Austria everything is obviously 18+).

    No, a child cannot legally own a firearm. The parent can purchase and own a firearm that they are allowed to use, but they do not own it. In many states if the child hurts themselves or others with such a firearm the parents will be held liable, many states have laws around safely storing firearms when children are around.

    While in the US (in many states), you can just carry any gun around in public whatsoever. So even if the police sees you having weapons in public, they can’t / don’t do anything about that

    In most states if you don’t have a license to conceal carry and you do you are breaking the law and can be charged. I’ll say this one isn’t entirely false but heavily depends on your state.

    A large part of why this issue gets nowhere is that neither side can even agree on what is true today, rather than what should be true to bring down the issue of violent crime. If one side says “They’re totally unregulated you can just buy one off Amazon and start blasting. We have to do something!” The other side is gonna think “Well they obviously have no idea what they’re talking about, no point in listening to what they have to say”


  • pokemaster787@ani.socialtomemes@lemmy.worldBurgernomics Δ
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    4 months ago

    Even if it started out that way, where “surge” pricing is current pricing and “off-surge” pricing is cheaper, leading to consumers paying less overall, it won’t stay that way. It would only be that way to prime consumers mentally to accept that dynamic pricing. After which they’ll slowly increase prices, 10 cents or whatever every month. Soon enough it’ll cost more and the corporation can brag about how it increased profits again this quarter. Remember publicly traded companies are legally obligated to maximize profit - the only time they aren’t doing so is when they’re burning money to prime consumers to accept bullshit or building a captive base, in order to eventually maximize profits.







  • This is a pretty big overstatement.

    DO NOT USE AN SSD to store your data long-term! Solid-state storage has a very short, finite life-span.

    This has not been true for years. SSDs are generally more reliable than HDDs except in write-intensive applications (and even then… It really depends on what exact models you are comparing). SSDs have a life-span mostly talked about in terms of TBW (terabytes written) rather than years for a reason, if they’re powered on and not written too they’ll last as long as or longer than a hard drive. (Note: Powered on regularly, SSDs can lose data if stored unpowered for a long time (months)). If you just have an archival drive you’re not constantly erasing and rewriting data to, an SSD is a great choice. Reads also barely affect the lifespan of at all, so you can still access the data you want to protect (hell, write-lock the drive even and it’ll last decades if powered on).

    What you want to do is buy an even number of hard drives, plug them in long enough to copy your data to, and then unplug them and store them in a climate-controlled area. bout once a year, copy the data to a different hard drive

    This is just plain silly. Yes, the mechanical wear of the drives spinning up and down means they’ll die faster. But we’re still talking MTBF measured in years. And replacing a hard drive that’s barely used every single year? That’s not just bad advice it’s creating e-waste for no reason. Also note drives fail on a bathtub curve… If you have two good drives that lasted a year, you are increasing your chances of a failure by swapping them for two brand new drives… The best thing you can do for your hard drives is to not power cycle them constantly, any typical usage is fine. Also mechanical parts can actually wear out from disuse as well. Even archival services don’t go to these extremes you’re recommending.

    If you really care about saving your data follow 3-2-1. 3 copies of your data (live, archival (external HDD or similar), off-site), two-different forms of media (HDD, SSD, cloud (yes cloud is an HDD or SSD but they have their own redundancy)), one off-site (in the event of a fire etc.)

    Honestly 99.9% of consumers would be fine with a 2-2-1 scheme, 2 copies (live and off-site/cloud), 2 forms of media, 1 off-site. If you don’t trust Google or don’t want to pay for cloud storage, set up a server with redundant disks at a friend’s house. Just keeping a second copy on a server with redundancy is plenty of fail over for most use cases. 3-2-1 is for data centers and businesses (and any cloud service you rent from will follow 3-2-1…) Let’s not overcomplicate how difficult it is to keep data intact, if I tell someone to buy a new 12tb HDD each year they’re just gonna give up on keeping it safe.



  • Conveniently I work in this space, but note the following is primarily my own personal opinion.

    Primarily there’s a few reasons I prefer Android Auto over native Android on the car:

    1. Ever had a phone that’s a few years old slow down in you? Now imagine you buy a car for $60k, and three years down the line the (already sluggish to begin with) Android interface is bogged down by updates and is barely usable. Imagine Spotify drops support for that version of Android Automotive. Android Auto puts all the infotainment into something the customer controls, and something external to the car so you are not dependent upon the OEM to do their own due diligence to ensure functionality and compatibility. If my phone slows down from age/wear/increased software demands, I go buy a new $400 phone. If my car’s infotainment slows down I…buy a new car? (Looking at you GM)

    2. Like I said it moves the infotainment to something in the customer’s (and Google/Apple’s) hand. OEMs do not want this. Auto makers want you locked into their proprietary Android skins for two reasons. First, making it more difficult to leave their specific company’s ecosystem. They (will) build in their own apps that you’ll start putting all your settings and private info on. Things like remembering a driver’s preferred seating and mirror arrangement and auto-adjusting, so when your spouse buys a car you go “Oh well if we both have brand X, it’ll be easier to drive each other’s cars.” Etc. Second, they want all of your data. Legitimately the industry is on fire right now figuring out how much consumer data we can scrape and use/sell with these systems. The Android Automotive stack in a car is 300% sending data back to the OEM of literally anything they are legally allowed to collect. Probably more, too. Plug in Android Auto from my phone and yeah they’re still spying on me, but they don’t have my Spotify login info or my specific apps used, they just have what the vehicle can directly measure (still a terrifying amount).

    In your specific case with a third party head unit…go ham and use the stock interface if you want. Personally I’d still use Android Auto, to top off my phone and to access my local music library (I don’t stream music), but a third party has a lot less interest in spying on you or locking you in the same way an OEM does.

    Also out of curiosity, what head unit did you get? I’ve got a 2012 Cruze I’ve considered installing one of those on but I can almost never find anything that seems actually trustworthy.



  • They can be or they can be paid through “escrow” and your mortgage servicer will pay them.

    Usually sites like these want to show total monthly cost though, so they tend to include estimates for property taxes and insurance in the monthly payments. Whether it gets paid through your mortgage servicer or directly by you doesn’t change much.



  • I’ve heard that, but once I tried to refund a game at 3 hours and got nothing but an automated response (denial) everytime I requested a refund.

    In this specific case it was actually a game I played 2 hours of during a free weekend approximately 4 years before buying it, played one hour after buying it to see if it had gotten better, decided it hadn’t and refunded it. But Steam counts free weekend playtime towards the refund window…

    If there’s any actual way to ensure a human reviews it, that’d be neat. 100% it was automatically denied by some code just checking my playtime and seeing it was past two hours.