To quote someone from HN:

There is nothing special about the Troubled Engineer’s setup. It’s mostly a matter of using open platforms. With Firefox on the desktop and Fennec on Android (Graphene), you get full uBlock Origin support and therefore never see any ads anywhere, even on Youtube. On Android, there is also NewPipe that offers “free Youtube Premium” (play in the background and download).

It’s really just uBlock Origin, a DNS blocker, and a few other small tweaks for YT. I use NewPipe on Android and Invidious instances. At this point I only see ads when setting up a VM and open the browser for the first time and forget I need to install uBO.

Ages ago - they tried to make it all these flairs and sparkles and whatever. Maybe it’s back lately?

The day they got rid of reddit gold and started cash grabbing hard was the day the writing was on the wall.

Among the greatest heists in US history so far

I expect this was in the terms of service, though

While I expect the same, there’s also just a reasonablility standard. If Meta and Google updated their TOS to say that users agreed to become human chattle slaves to mine cobalt and forfeit their rights, no court (…right, SCOTUS?..right?) would uphold that. A TOS is a contract, but it’s mostly for the protection of companies from liability. Takign active steps to brick someone’s device over the device not connecting to it’s C2 server (the company had zero evidence this was done intentionally and a router firewall misconfiguration could just have easily done the same thing), is IMO something that should result in a lawsuit.

How should I feel when reddit starts deleting and shadowbanning my alt accounts?

Well, I’ve only seen KDE on TW, so maybe it was just the default theme color scheme that gave me NT flashbacks. Though I did actually mean that as a compliment. Maybe I also don’t remember NT well enough.

IMO “Smart” refers to the lawyers that got paid to write a 900-page TOS that lets a company do whatever they want.

To be fair, telling people to scan QR codes with their phones is a huge phishing vector. I’ve seen a few places with new stickers over the first one, which is very easy to do. Is it an updated menu? Or a scam page for a session stealer?

The fact that this isn’t considered outright fraud is disturbing. This person OWNS the device, yes? They’re not leasing it.

FFS, this should be illegal.

This 100%. Also cross-reference IP addresses associated with the fridge’s IP to get Google/Meta advertising IDs on the whole family.

There’s a non-zero chance that when Grandma comes over, she gets ads just for her as long as she’s there.

Fedora gnome is so good it makes Linux boring

Is this a workflow thing? I was looking at Fedora last week and I’m interested to hear what you like about it.

I’m on Cinnamon and made everything look like OSX, but it seemed like gnome would have a learning curve. And as much as KDE looks like Windows NT, something a touch more modern does seem nice.

Literally describes my last couple weeks distro hopping

I’ve literally never had a problem with this…that I know about.

What are you all turning off?

Dick Dale era surf guitar (someone else mentioned this as well, adding the best artist name). Dick Dale also did a cover of Claude Debussy’s “The Aquarium” which is the sound track for Space Mountain at Disneyland/World. So either or both, and there might be other covers of “The Aquarium” out there if the original isn’t too slow.

Going more ocean-themed…

Aquabats or Tsunami Bomb for some early 2000s punk/ska that isn’t ocean-themed but the bands are kinda.

Tide is High - Blondie

Scuba Diver - King Kong (it’s a weird song, but hypnotic)

Where is My Mind - Pixies (about fish, but close enough)

Beyond the Sea by Bobby Darin

Maybe more sailing themed, but that’s close, right?

Brandy by Looking Glass

My Heart Will Go On - there’s a Dragonforce metal cover of this if you’ve been traumatized by the pennywhistle.

Come Sail Away - Styx

Rock Lobster!

I feel like reddit is accidentally trying to speedrun dead internet theory.

I stopped using it when their quality contributor score shadowbanned me because I don’t post enough in the right subs.

My partner stopped using it for the same reason - account used every couple days for comments also shadowbanned out of no where.

Starting a new account means grinding for a month or two in subs that force you to spam each other with up votes before you can ever do anything other than post and ask the mods to approve your post manually.

…are you serious? I know this is Linux Memes, but have you ever used Windows 11? MS has been ruining their own products for years. 1/3 of their janky code is LLMs constantly causing problems.

They’re not really competitors across both enterprises. If they were then you’d need some conspiracy theory-level mental gymnastics for things like:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/defender-for-cloud/quickstart-onboard-aws?tabs=Defender-for-Containers

https://aws.amazon.com/windows/products/

https://about.ads.microsoft.com/en/blog/post/october-2025/unlocking-more-opportunities-for-partners-and-customers-through-collaboration-with-amazon

And finally

https://advertising.amazon.com/library/news/microsoft-amazon-dsp-partnership

This isn’t Coke vs. Pepsi for computer boops. This is about ad revenue! They can partner up to cut Google out of the mix!

Oh no.

…Anyway