The No AI Wiki List has been updated. There is now a separate section for wiki farms with site-wide no AI policies.

Hi, we're your pharmacy! To confirm your identity, we need to ask you a super secret personal detail about yourself that only you would know. It has to be something you have never shared with anyone aside from us, something you can change if it ever leaks, and something you definitely wouldn't hold a big party to tell everyone about.

What's your birthday?

Which kind of table is easier for a blind person to navigate: CSV or HTML tables? Or something else?

#Blind #ScreenReader #a11y

I have come to the conclusion that the aspect of video games which bothers me most in video games is anything which compels or "rewards" you for opening the game at regular intervals at specific times.

Examples include "daily login bonuses," daily "streaks," and multiplayer activities that require a fixed set of people to agree in advance to long in at a specific time (e.g. "guild raids.")

I'm pretty negative about subscriptions. I have subscribed to a total of 1 video game in my life, and that was only for a few months in 2005. I've also never subscribed to a film or music subscription.

I'm pretty negative about lootboxes, and I have never purchased a lootbox ever.

But I have played free-to-play games that have subscriptions or lootboxes. I just don't buy them. I don't have any trouble playing free-to-play games and resisting the constant nagging to buy in-app-purchases.

There's something different about daily login bonuses for me. When I play a game with a daily login bonus, it messes with my thinking even when I am not playing. I think "Did I remember to play <game> to keep my streak up?" Even when a game stops being fun, I've kept playing for another month or so because I couldn't resist the urge to continue my "streak."

I've realized that games with daily login bonuses poison my thinking and the way I interact with games in general. So, while I may still play games with lootboxes, I have decided I will never again play a game with a daily login bonus.

Discord Web has now added an ad in the bottom-left corner. I cannot figure out how to block it (I can manually close it, but it comes back the next time I load Discord).

I already tried uBlock Origin's element picker and element zapper. No combination of sliders were able to remove the ad.

Is there a way to get rid of it?

I believe the next step in the war on ownership is domain allow-listing.

Google and Apple will point out that many websites contain malware. They will claim the only solution is to make themselves the sole arbiters of what websites you are allowed to visit.

iOS and Android will each come with a list of approved domains, and will refuse to connect to any domain not on the list.

To get a domain approved, the developer will have to provide Google and Apple with government documents, pay a fee, and go through the website approval process.

The website approval guidelines will assume that all websites have JavaScript, ads, and accounts, and the AI that reviews it will run into trouble with any site that doesn't have all three.

Of course, websites that actually have malicious JavaScript, such as Facebook, will get approved immediately.

The only way to bypass the domain allowlist will be to jailbreak your phone, but then you won't be able to access your bank or government sites, even in a web browser.

Fedi, I need help with RSS feeds.

More specifically, I want to be able to sync the following data between my desktop and laptop:
* Which feeds I am subscribed to
* Folders organizing my feeds.

I do not care about syncing
* Downloaded articles
* Which articles I have read

I currently use RSSGuard as a feed reader. To move feeds between computers, I export everything as an OPML file and then import it on the other computer.

This is very inconvenient, since I have to manually import and export every time I add or remove a feed. I want some way to automatically sync in near real-time.

There are several online RSS services, many of which can integrate with RSS Guard. However, all of them that I've seen have very stringent limits: many put a cap of 100 feeds you can follow without paying a subscription.

This seems strikingly low for what I want to use it for: I am subscriped to over 1000 RSS feeds, but the total size of my opml file is 346 kilobites uncompressed, or 55 kilobytes gzipped. I don't think I should need to pay a subscription to sync such a tiny amount of data.

I use Nextcloud for file syncing, and there is a Nextcloud RSS extension. However, the Nextcloud instance I use (@Disroot ) has it disabled. The reason the gave for disabling it is essentially that it costs a lot of storage to save every article from every feed. That might sound reasonable, except that I don't actually care about the server saving every article: I just want to sync roughly 55 kb of data containing what feeds I subscribe to and the folders I sorted them into.


I considered trying to ask Nextcloud (or another sync program) to sync the RSSGuard config files, but I don't think that will work. It looks like RSS Guard natively stores everything in an SQLite database in /.var/app : I doubt I can sync the database without breaking something.

So what can I do?

Not the point, but I find it utterly hilarious that a company arguing for the merits of "enterprise" features has to use ridiculous ad-hoc contractions and incomprehensible abbreviations in order to fit into an artificially low character limit.

Or maybe it is the point. Commercial social media (or "consumer" software) uses low character limits to make you waste more time and view more ads reading a thread than you would need to read an equal-length post. Mastodon uses an artificially low character limit because it's trying to imitate a particular commercial social network, despite not having the same incentives to make you waste more time.

Element is trying to use "consumer" software with an artificially low character limit to make an announcement that shouldn't have such a low character limit, with the result that they have to use non-Googleable abbreviations like "s/w".

#AbolishCharacterLimits #StopDoingCharacterLimits #StopDoingAbbreviations