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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • One application I’ve seen for this is recording your brushing patterns for your review and to recommend ways to improve your process. This is pretty useful right now considering dental hygiene literacy is criminally undertaught and uncommon even among adults.

    IoT is great, it’s just that companies right now are abusing it and our lack of data protection laws to extract as much personal information as physically possible. The question shouldn’t be “why is my toothbrush connected to a network”, it should be “why does my toothbrush need to be connected to the Internet”.




  • It’s bad faith to argue that companies should be allowed to do things because they’re already allowed to do those things. I see a little bit of that creeping in even here with the concept of “rights”, as if corporations were humans. Laws can change.

    It’s good faith to ask if companies have too much power over what has become our default mode of communication. It’s also good faith to challenge this question with non-circular logic.

    Your assumption that I’m defending racism and bigotry is exactly why I think this stuff is important. You’ve implied I’m an insidious alt-rightist trying to dog whistle, and now I’m terrified of getting banned or otherwise censored. I’m interested in expressing myself. I do not want to express bigotry. But if one person decides what I said is even linked to bigotry, suddenly I’m a target, and I can lose a decades-old social account and all of its connections. And if that happens I just have to accept it because it’s currently legal. It’s so fucking stressful to say anything online anymore.


  • I think this is an underrated point. A lot of people are quick to say “private companies aren’t covered by free speech”, but I’m sure everyone agrees legal ≠ moral. We rely on these platforms so much that they’ve effectively become our public squares. Our government even uses them in official capacities, e.g. the president announcing things on Twitter.

    When being censored on a private platform is effectively social and informational murder, I think it’s time for us to revisit our centuries-old definitions. Whether you agree or disagree that these instances should be covered by free speech laws, this is becoming an important discussion that I never see brought up, but instead I keep seeing the same bad faith argument that companies are allowed to do this because they’re allowed to do it.


  • This was the main thing that made me switch to another engine, too. It’s very obvious that Google hides certain results in addition to sponsoring others, and I don’t want a profit-driven corporation deciding what I can and can’t see (or anyone, if I can help it). On a larger scale, it’s terrifying how much power over our culture via access to information this gives Google. I’m just glad there are still better options for me to choose from.





  • I understand hating subscriptions but in this case a one time payment would require Kagi to continually gain an increasing number of members for eternity or run out of operating money and shut down. You could hope for something donation-based like most Lemmy instances, but just expecting other users to cover your costs is selfish. There’s a difference between asking your users to at least pay what they’re costing you and rent-seeking with things that don’t or shouldn’t cost you a dime to provide. Subscription services have existed for a very, very long time (see: any government that collects taxes), it’s only recently and due to greedy trends that they’ve been becoming a nuisance.

    If you want to empower your own sense of privacy and security, you’ll need to accept that you’ve been paying for services with your data or supposed ad views for decades, and some of those services cost money to run.