Thankfully, I don’t use Tidal for music discovery. I luckily have a lot of people I’ve met over the years that love music, perform themselves, work for venues, or are crew for artists. That plus indie radio like KEXP and NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts has kept me exploring for new music via recommendations from those areas.

I use Tidal for high fidelity music with a more acceptable artist payout than Spotify.

That said, I’m slowly working towards going back to the old days where my massive CD collection rips (i still have those binders too), direct purchases of high fidelity content sitting on my network share, and records aremy primary source of listening pleasure. The only problem here is acquiring the hardware to scale thanks to the AI boom buying up all the production lines of consumer grade hardware, and business class storage drives having gone up in cost. Technically I can afford it, but I could also spend that same money and buy tickets to several local shows for both my wife and I, which will support the live music industry and artists more directly.

You also have to remember that Google has been switching their search tools over to AI search tools and the results have degraded as a result.

Even before then, there was manipulation of the search algorithm by content creators, even on the YouTube side.

It’s probably a combination of all factors tbh.

• Google is slowly pushing on the scale of authoritarianism.
• Search changes being a degradation in results.
• Search algo manipulation.
• Google intentionally showing divisive content due to the higher revenue opportunities
• And the sheer breadth of right wing grift content.

So fighting against this new understanding of the term is either pedantry for the sake of it, or you have some sort of stake in Google perhaps?

Great use of a bad reason fallacy with a touch of ad hominem in an attempt to discredit.

Your claim is that the term has been used to mean something negative. You present no evidence to back this up other than your feelings.

I don’t discredit that major corporations do evil shit.

However, I presented you with the experience I’ve had with the term dating back nearly 30 years where I, and the people I talked tech with, was sideloading files onto our PDA and Rio MP3 players.

The term started out as a technical distinction in the circles I ran in (Detroit area) back then.

Aside from your feelings on the term, I see no valid justification to stop using it when I’m trying to clearly communicate something. I work in tech (and no, it’s not Google or Apple. Fuck publicly traded companies) as a lead on the platform support group, and I need to be able to clearly communicate with my peers and reports. Sideload is a widely recognized term in the spaces I have worked in.

I’m not going to stop using a precise technical term because some internet strangers have unfounded negative feelings about the possible marketing connotations.

Present me with evidence that it actually means what you’re saying and maybe I’ll consider working on making the language change. Just like I’ve done with actually real problematic industry terms (master/slave, black/white lists. Etc).

I’ve been using the term side loading since the late 90s/early 2000s for installing software or files to a device via a transfer cable. And by the time Android came along, the early app development community was using the term to push the app to your device via ADB. And from there it’s expanded from transfer cable push to download and install from an unmanaged 3rd party source on a mobile computing device.

So the term has existed in some form throughout the tech/power user community before modern mobile computing. Now did Apple and Google usurp the term? Ehhh, possibly? I’ve yet to encounter somebody that uses sideloading to mean something negative, but I’m sure there is a group out there that does. I’m not convinced that group is large enough for me to stop using language I started using nearly 30 years ago to mean something specific. “Why use more, less precise, words when this single term says it already?”

There is.

It’s called Parental Controls.

It also does a fairly good job at preventing stuff from getting through.

One of the big issues right now is that there’s a lot of sexualized content on social media right now that’s bypassing parental controls because the social media services are doing a poor job of limiting that content when encountering a parental controlled device.

You don’t need a native mobile app to use the Progressive Web App (PWA) installation.

https://web.dev/learn/pwa/installation

Federation of self-hosted servers is on the Fluxer road map.

However, the team has had massive growth in the last two weeks and pulled enough visibility that assholes being assholes decided that it would be fun to DDoS them while also dealing with sudden growth.

Fluxer’s majn benefits are that it is so close to discord that it, in theory, supports existing Discord bots with minimal effort, and the kid behind it is obsessed with the tech stack and FOSS.

We don’t? Says who? You? Your bubble?

I live in the PNW and am surrounded by progressive people and hear “Zionist” used as a perjorative for fasciast frequently. Hell, I could easily go into a local coffee shop or bar and find a sticker that will have a “fuck zionists” message on it. Hell, one of my best friends is of Jewish heritage, and is the biggest critic of the Zionist movement I know, to the point where he even attends a moderately sized local synagogue that’s also critical

So obviously there are US citizens in the PNW that use that language. But I’ll be sure to tell them that according to some random internet gate keeper of the American English dialect says they don’t talk like an American.

There’s always a Franz Ferdinand.

You have to view this from outside your tech knowledge bubble.

I have friends that are “stuck on windows 10 because fuck windows 11”. I urge them to give Linux a try via Live USB and they’re hesitant to even do that.

The paid support path is there for people that want to try and escape and need the comfort of that safety net. They don’t feel comfortable trying to figure out even where to search for information. And if they’ve gotten that far, having various instructions for different distros can make things confusing because they probably did a generic “my issue, linux” search or just did a “my issue” search and are seeing cryptic answers, including Mac and windows. If somebody needs that paid safety net, ZorinOS for an existing machine is great, System76/PopOS for something new.

If there is something that provides value (customer support or even the OS equivalent of a hat cosmetic) to the user, I have no concerns at all with that being sold. If that optional value could easily be done yourself with effort, those of us that know how to put in that effort ,are willing to put in the effort, or not afraid of the effort when unknown, will continue to do so. Those of us who don’t match those criteria at least have an option.

Be forewarned, Bazzite has some install issues and can lock up or appear locked up during a painfully long install process. Also, VR support is meh on Bazzite and their immutable distro and managed packages make it more challenging to get non-managed solutions rolling.

As somebody running Bazzite and loving it on their HTPC, I am looking at switching to CachyOS using the Handheld (SteamOS) Display Environment or launching directly into Kodi.

Yes, hence the second part of the sentence.

Unless you need to use the precise word for communicating the “context difference”, just use the word impact(ed/ing/s). Makes it a lot easier for ESL speakers as well.

Even then, most people can understand the meaning of the misused word due to the context of what’s being discussed anyways.

Effect vs affect: Use ‘impact’ instead of having to worry about two words that essentially mean the same thing but are context based.

Did they do Tripple Band at your show at the very end as well with the opening act joining in with Double Band? Was a ton of fun.

Twinsies!

I saw Jeff & Pup last month. Was such a blast to party with punks of all ages at that show. Even bought myself a nice Death Rosenstock shirt (yes, death), that has a nice “Fuck ICE” message on it.

How does a massage parlour help with your brother’s eye issues?

She now uses an even more masculine pen name for her detective novels.

Hilarious that a TERF is using a masculine pen name for her book sales.

Murder. You’re allowed to say murder. This isn’t YouTube or some other corporate entity that will silence and demonitize you for using the correct words to describe the violence committed by others.

Screen space.

I work in tech doing performance, memory management, and developer workflow tooling and automation for a large 3D Rendering/Creation tool.

Being able to throw a long setup doc, or a large class file on a 4k portrait monitor allows me to read things through with a ton of context and far less scrolling.

It’s also useful for putting two window tiles that have related content, or one is a reference content.

I currently have a tie-fighter monitor setup (2x4k portrait on either side of a ultrawide) and will put comms and email/calendar on my left monitor, core work in the center, and overflow reference/research on the right.

It’s less hectic for personal use, but I still use all the space.