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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • A person’s perception is highly informed by how well or poorly they understand the subject or situation in question.

    Let’s say you got stood up by a first date because they got hit by a car on their way to you. Your perception of them is going to vary wildly depending on whether or not you know the facts behind why they didn’t show up.

    Similarly, knowing how you actually fit into things at your job - i.e. your importance to your working group, the company, it’s customers, society itself, allows you to have a more accurate set of facts to base your perception on.

    So yes, the truth matters.





  • A light breeze is enough for Google to lock accounts, and they make it nearly impossible to re-access. And they have no reliable customer service you can call or email.

    But the final straw for me was when they started this bullshit of saying “tell me your phone number so we can make sure it’s you”. They never had my number in the first place, so it was clear that this was pure bullshit of them trying to associate real world identities with their accounts.

    After that, I said “fuck em”, changed to other providers, and haven’t look back since.

    Go ahead and delete my accounts - your service is pure garbage anyway.







  • The size of a person’s household or whether they live in the city are not the sole factors that go into a decision on what car to purchase.

    A person can live alone but regularly car pool with coworkers, get together with multiple friends, go on day trips with family, or make extra income by driving for Uber (larger vehicles can charge more). Heck, sometimes just needing extra leg or head room rules out most regular sedans and makes an SUV more comfortable.

    In addition, if a person’s activities require a lot of cargo capacity, that essentially leaves you with either an SUV or a pickup as the primary options. So whether it’s for luggage, buying stock for a family store, etc… that could be another reason for purchasing an SUV.

    Sometimes, people feel that having a higher view of the road is safer because they can see more of what’s ahead of them.

    So don’t fall prey to judging people as only needing an SUV if they have a large household or live in rural areas. It’s a lot more involved than that.








  • I gave up completely on Google accounts after they kept flagging make-believe security issues and made it near impossible to verify that it’s yours.

    Even if you have a secondary email configured (and this would be what it’s for) - but oh, no, that’s still not good enough for them.

    Then they pulled the utter bullshit of requiring your phone number “so they can make sure it’s you” - but since there was never a phone number associated with the account, this is clearly nothing more than a data grab so they can associate real identities with their accounts.

    That was the last straw for me, and I decided that their service was utter garbage, completely unreliable, and not worth using anymore.


  • I think the protest crippled reddit considerably. It robbed reddit of a significant number of quality users and moderators, caused an extreme amount of media attention, and created enough of a problem for Google that they had to change course in order to compensate for all the broken links and noticeably poorer search results.

    The main reason it looks like it had a much smaller effect is because a lot of missing users have been replaced by bots. And given how hostile those bots are with respect to moderators and the protest, it seems clear that they were put in place by reddit themselves. So don’t be fooled by “traffic is normal” announcements and metrics. They mean nothing by themselves.

    The protest caused a lot of users to start looking for alternatives and it shed a lot of light on the fediverse, giving it an incredible amount of exposure. People now know that it exists and know that there are alternatives to reddit.

    Remember, the worst is yet to come after June 30th when those API changes take effect.