The United States has done far more harm than good for humanity at large. The individualistic values it champions have led to a society that is fragmented and leaves many citizens in misery. Its global hegemony has resulted in the destruction of numerous countries, with countless lives lost due to its military interventions, coups, and regime change operations around the world. Moreover, the US’s extractive policies have prevented other nations from developing their own economies, perpetuating a cycle of underdevelopment and dependency. Additionally, as one of the largest consumers of energy per capita and major producers of fossil fuels, the United States is among the worst offenders when it comes to climate change, exacerbating global environmental crises with its unsustainable practices.

yup

Another aspect of the problem is that people making the decision of what programs to use don’t actually have to use them.

Software just has to be good enough that people put up with it. Once you get users on the system, you make it difficult to move your data out which acts as a lock in mechanism. The company that can make a minimally usable product that people are willing to put up with will typically beat one making a really good product that takes longer to get to market.

indeed

Yeah also true, you’re generally not gonna start doing anything if you know you’re getting interrupted anyways.

I really like fish because it has excellent contextual autocomplete based on the folder you’re in. I haven’t used any other shell that was as good at it.

Our tendency to perceive agency in ambiguous situations sheds light on the origins of cognitive biases like religion. Our minds, shaped by eons of natural selection, are finely tuned to err on the side of caution. Think of a group of ancient hunters traversing the savanna. A rustle in the tall grass could be merely the wind, or it could be a lurking predator. Those who instinctively assume the worst and flee are more likely to survive than those who dismiss the sound and remain vulnerable.

Over time, this survival advantage has led to the evolution of cognitive models that favor the perception of agency, even when there is none. We are prone to seeing patterns, faces, and intentions in random events because the cost of mistakenly attributing agency is far less than the cost of failing to detect a real threat. This explains why we might see a face in the clouds or feel a presence in a dark room. Religion is a direct byproduct of this phenomenon.

Furthermore, it’s important to keep in mind that every contemporary belief system stems from an uninterrupted chain of development, tracing back to the earliest human societies. This implies that every ideology has enjoyed a measure of success, having endured the test of time. This makes it difficult to definitively assert that one set of beliefs is fundamentally “more correct” than another, as truth is often subjective and dependent on context. After all, the effectiveness of a belief system in enabling a culture to thrive and grow is perhaps the most relevant measure of its “truthfulness.”

If somebody grows up in a religious environment, then religion becomes central to their world model. It’s not an isolated concept, it’s an integral part of the tapestry of their mind. Our brains, like all physical systems, operate within the constraints of energy efficiency. Assimilating a new idea requires mental effort, as it necessitates restructuring our existing cognitive framework to accommodate the newcomer. This, in turn, translates to expending energy to rebalance the connections within the neural networks of our brain. If a novel concept clashes significantly with our established beliefs, the energetic cost of integration can be substantial. Radical ideas that demand a significant restructuring of our mental models, such as challenging deeply held religious beliefs or political ideologies, may be discarded, deemed “too expensive” from an energetic standpoint.

This principle helps explain why it’s often so difficult to change the views of others, regardless of the soundness of your argument. The strength of the argument alone may not be enough to overcome the inherent inertia of our entrenched belief systems.

Sure, VPNs are marketed as a security measure, but for most people, the security benefits of VPNs are negligible. VPNs can be useful for hiding your browsing activity from your ISP or for appearing to be in a different country in order to access streaming services, but VPN companies make a lot of misleading claims about the security benefits of their products. For example, some VPN companies claim that their products use “military-grade encryption,” but this is just a marketing term and most websites already use encryption.

Tom Scott did a pretty good video discussing this in more detail https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVDQEoe6ZWY

Yet, that’s not what’s happening in practice.

It’s somewhat amusing how western liberals once touted freedom of speech as a defining characteristic separating them from states like China, which impose stricter limitations on freedom of expression. The argument was made that the pursuit of personal liberties is what sets western liberal culture apart and makes it superior to others.

However, this narrative succeeded primarily due to broad public agreement within mainstream Western society. When economic conditions were favorable and people generally content with their system, there was little reason to suppress dissenting views. In fact, allowing such opinions on the fringe even served to reinforce the narrative. But now that growing discontent is causing this illusion of freedom they once believed in to unravel.

VPN services

I do that now, but it’s a bit clunky I find. Basically, I don’t really want a calendar, so much as just getting a reminder sometime in the future, and if I have time and I’m in a mood I’ll look at it, and if not then I snooze and it’ll pop up later sometime.

I’d like to see a reminder app that figures out how to space out your reminders, and if you nooze a reminder then it gets slotted at some random future date.

I find I end up making reminders for shows I want to watch, books I want to read, etc. These don’t have any specific day associated with them, but I do want o get to them at some point. So getting a reminder once a week or so to check out one of the items on a list would be really nice.

lol I’m definitely in the news checking to pass the time boat :)

The itself app isn’t typically the issue. It’s the remote server that the appliance and the app connect to that’s the problem. What happens is that the appliance uses your wifi to talk to the company server, and that server pushes updates to it, does tracking, and so on. As long as the appliance can’t connect to the internet there’s no danger from it. Typically, the best approach is to avoid configuring the connection in the first place.

4 in particular I think is more open to interpretation based on ones existing biases than people seem to think

I mean yeah, people with fascist views obviously wouldn’t see fascist propaganda as being ironic.

kebab case for the win xml-http-request

As the other reply mentions, aside from these devices representing a security vulnerability, there have been numerous cases where the devices themselves got hijacked. In some cases they can even get bricked via updates. There’s also a privacy concern with these companies collecting data on how you use the device.

Software development here. Never, ever, connect your appliances to the internet, and check whether appliances you buy have an offline mode as some are now aggressively forcing users to connect in order to use them.