JoshuaEN

I really liked having unless in Ruby; a ! can be easy to miss, while unless made it clear without needing to write out != true.

We retain a policy of goodwill for legitimate takedown requests, whether it be from copyright holders or scanlators acting in good faith.

Yes, what a legitimate good faith takedown request for code in a repository that this company didn't own the copyright to.

The copyright system is an absolute joke.

The matter of what it's worth isn't the issue, but the fact of it being worth anything to anyone at all, and it being taken from you with little to no choice in the matter.

I view the value as being important because I see it as an exchange: use of a service for data about how one uses the service. I do think the fact this exchange is happening should be made clear, vs. the current allusion that a service is free, but I doubt many people would care.

Exchanges should be fair though (or at least both parties should be well informed when they are unfair), which may not be the case now.

I don’t think I’ve ever bought something because of an advertisement.

Side note, this is incredibly difficult to believe, tbh.

You're probably correct. When I think of advertising, I think of the in your face completely out of place advertising, which turns me off of products and is often not even targeted correctly (as in, something I would never buy).

But things like "please turn off AdBlock or support us on X", premium upsells, product descriptions and packaging, and hidden advertising (fake user reviews, """sponsored""" reviews, posts on social media by "normal" users) are all also forms of advertising which I have been influenced by in the past, even if I didn't realize at the time.

This misses the point; trying to get people to move to a different platform is a big challenge if they don't share the same mindset as you around the app, and even when they do agree, they might have other contacts who don't (and so forth). And having everyone in one place is just more convenient, so people generally don't want to split between two apps.

Thus why I'm stuck using Snapchat.

With the $10 plan, it's 1 cent per a search for the first thousand, and maybe a thousand searches a month doesn't sound like a whole lot but supposedly the average user on Google does 3 to 4 searches a day (who knows what the actual source for that is). Thought in that case the $5 plan would be better.

Google doesn't seem to provide a dashboard which summarizes how many searches one has done personally over a period of time, though it does list them all on https://myactivity.google.com/product/search if you haven't opted out.

Most browsers also provide an easy way to switch between search engines, though personally I would suggest always using Kagi if you're going to spend the money, because some of the of value comes from generally having better results, in addition to being able to filter out SEO garbage for specific search topics (like programming queries).

Also, to be fair, Kagi is not perfect. Google's calculator and unit converter are better in my experience, for example. And I still use Google at work (software dev) because I refuse to use personal accounts on work devices, but even then I find myself using my phone sometimes to search Kagi when Google is not turning anything up.

However, I've watched Google's search quality drop for a long while now, and I like what Kagi is doing, so I support them.

P.S. If you're worried about unlimited spend, Kagi provides settings to cap pay-as-you-go costs.

FYI you're probably being downvoted because the r word is a slur in modern English.

Also, a VPN is just an extra wrapper around your network traffic.

Your credit cards are no less safe over a VPN, except for the fact the VPN software is installed on your device and could be doing something malicious, but at that point it doesn't need to be turned on or visibily running to steal your data.

Is user watch data really that valuable?

Then again, the massive amounts of money spent on marketing have always been baffling to me. I don't think I've ever bought something because of an advertisement.

I think of tipping waitstaff as just being part of the actual cost of the meal (which is why it is based on the bill, everything on the menu is actually priced lower than it would be without tipping). Optimally, that and the tax would both be part of the listed price, but alas that's not the case.

Why is this done? I figure it's because it lowers the perceived cost at the time of ordering, which makes people spend more.

A vocal portion of the reddit user base seems to really hate moderators for some reason. In the subreddits I frequented I never saw anything which seemed like an abuse of power, but maybe reddit doesn't automatically broadcast mod actions very well?

This is a good thing, the faster and harder reddit crashes, the more people will move to better platforms which are run not by corporations leaching money from entirely user created content while making the experience actively worse (long before this latest incident).

Reddit backtracking for half a year and turning up the heat slower was the worst case outcome.