Phone proximity is used, so if your phone is in proximity to his, the algorythm can note a relationship between his interests and yours- or even the interests of people who also interact with him.

It’s possible his behaviour is learned from a narcissistic parent, or that enough of his customers are involved in learning about narcissism. OR you also mightve been at a Cafe near a clinic for long enough your phone tried to ping the office wifi, and you just noticed it because of your interactions with him.

Google also uses your relationships, so maybe a person you know is interested, or you watched a video about (blank) and a lot of those viewers also watched narcissism videos. Your brain is asking the connection to the contractor because it’s an intuitive logical leap.

Phones spy on us in a dozen different ways, mostly pattern recognition. They track location without GPS (by recording wifi pings), and track interests without the microphone. So they can claim they’re not tracking those specific things while still gathering scary amounts of data.

My cpuntry doesn’t have Craigslist, the ‘eBay’ alternative that used to be mainstream has become a dropseller’s market. Marketplace is the only secondhand market platform here, basically. Warts and all. Though some people will create Facebook groups to buy and trade in, for some reason.

Moat of the teams I see hiring designers are still using Adobe, and printshops take .ai files. But most of the solo designers I know use Affinity, and I’ve heard of one (albeit small) team that has swapped to Affinity for their whole team.

Affinity was just bought by Canva so idk how it might evolve over time, or if v3 will make compromises I don’t agree with. But I got v1 during Covid, loved it, converted to v2 as soon as it was available, still love it. Using all of them on the same file in the same window feels amazing.

Another downside is that designers rarely make asset packs for Affinity. But I’m pretty sure Affinity is able to import brush pack formats from one of the other big names, just not sure which (likely Adboe’s .abr)

I don’t like painting in Photo though, but that might be because I’m so used to Krita, which is designed for illustration in the first place. (They’re great, I might donate to them again actually)

I use Affinity Suite for work. Paid for it once, have it forever. Free updates until new editions, which are discounted if you own an older edition. Buy it for one platform (Windows), that’s a license for that edition of any other platform too. AND they regularly go on special, often to 50% off.

It doesn’t have AI content generation, but it does a few things Adobe doesn’t - like being able to use Photo and Designer from INSIDE Publisher, seamless like its a single program!

Affinity Photo (Photoshop), Designer (Illustrator), and Publisher (InDesign). Then Krita for raster illustration. That’s all I need as a professional

Yeah I remember thr same thing. Everything else was suppose to be a package update.

But back-end technology and usage expectations change, and there’s a limit to what front-end changes an existing user tolerates. That was never a promise they could keep.

It has lasted a really long time, though. I don’t decry 11 existing. I’m upset they’re sunsetting 10 without giving us a chance to wait for 11 to get better, let alone for ‘oops we fixed the fuckups’ W12.

Nope, will probably avoid 11 as long as I can though. I have an Mvidia card (drivers are notoriously troublesome on Linux). And I need professional design software for work (as in, industry standard: Adobe or Affinity).

But I put 11 on my laptop to try it and I hate it. So many terrible UI changes, UX noticeably worse. Like they changed stuff just to say they changed stuff.

I considered going Linux for personal use and development, and then using another machine or dual boot for Mac for design software. But i learned about the Nvidia issues after I upgraded my card :/ and swapping to Mac’s walled garden after avoiding it for decades is… a sign of how bad W11 feels to use.

This is what I do, except I would add 700 and 236 at the end.

Well except I would probably add 700 and 116 or something, because my working memory fucking sucks and my brain drops digits very easily when there’s more than 1

I might. Then I can subtract 74 to get 74*14, and subtract 28 to get 72*13.

I don’t generally do that to ‘weird’ numbers, I usually get closer to multiples of 5, 9, 10, or 11.

But a computer stores information differently. Perhaps it moves closer to numbers with simpler binary addresses.

Yes, starting getting this with ublock Lite.

I’ve noticed if you click the button to "make an exception’, and refresh the page, you can watch the video anyway. But it’s possible that their server can record you doing that several times and might eventually suspend you.

Thanks.

Holy shit, it’s so many. Days apart, so I’d guess like half my comments in the last few months? I stopped scrolling.

Som of them I can assume why. The discussion might be about gendered experiences and I’d use a word like ‘sexism’, ‘rape’ or ‘bitch’ in intellectual discussion. Bots can’t know the difference and might think it’s harassment (or not ad-friendly).

But so many of them are informative responses to questions in subs like TooAfraidToAsk. Sex, relationships, escaping abuse. Most of them are long comments discussing controversial topics in a nuanced, analytical way. Almost all of them are correcting misinformation, providing empathetic context, or teaching somebody who asked for help.

Shadowbanning comments removes the user’s ability to appeal. Jesus, I hope some of these people still managed to get the help they needed.

Literally the only things I still posted there were supposed to answer people’s questions and instruct. If I can’t warn an 18yr boy that his relationship sounds unhealthy and recommend resources to him, there’s no fucking point me being there.

Thanks for the link. I’ve got stuff to think about.

How do you know? I’m curious to see how my old accounts might be shadpwbanned. Is there a tool that makes it easy to tell or something?

They said capitalism bred innovation too but all it actually bred was profit. Innovation is work. Why improve a bad product when you can cripple or buy out the competing ones?

I’m reminded of how the English tried to lower the cobra population during their occupation of India, offering a bounty for each snake head that was turned in. The locals started breeding cobras into a profitable enterprise. When the colonials realised what was happening, they cancelled the bounty; all the breeding stock was then simply released. Yet more cobras.

The metric by which a system is measured will determine how that system is optimised, not the system’s original intention.

Schools measure grades, not learning. The English measured snake heads, not population. Capitalism measures capital, not innovation.