Jamie

Well yeah, they asked the IDF to airstrike their offices in case they have Hamas breeding more terrorists in there.

The relative lack of content on Lemmy, for me, has been a boon. I go through New, then Top 6 Hours, then Top 12 Hours, then I need to find something else to do. When I was on Reddit, I found myself bouncing between Reddit and YouTube for entertainment. With Lemmy not having boundless amounts of crap to scroll through and no algorithm, my tech usage is far more varied.

unbearable due to the sheer amount of advertisement.

I spent 3 days in a hotel room this week, and while I did bring my Steam Deck and dock with me for entertainment, I got there to find that the TV had no HDMI ports. I was stuck with basic cable and the only saving grace being Showtime, which wasn't at extra cost and doesn't have ads.

But when both Showtime channels had stuff I was less than indifferent to watching, the advertisements on any of the other channels were horrible. The shows felt like they were 1:1 in terms of content to ads.

Don't get me started on the radio, either. I used to love listening to the radio, but now all they play is the same set of a couple dozen songs, with 5 minutes of ads that play every 3 or so songs. Also, no rock station in my area plays anything newer than ~15 years old, tops. They're all still playing the same music that I listened to on those stations when I was a teen, and I'm a little over 30.

I remember hearing about the potential of Web 2.0 in the 00s and thought it sounded like it was going to be really cool.

Now I just want the old web back. Isolated forums had a sense of community that, even on Lemmy, isn't present in the same way.

If they're going by user agent, then a VPN won't help. But user agents can be spoofed trivially, especially on a PC. If it's geographical, you could try parking in a place with low average income and look up prices with the browser set to incognito/private.

If I had to guess, they're probably not doing it just because they want to. It's entirely possible they got a threat letter from one or more publications about the topic and are doing it to avoid litigation. Or they're afraid that they could face litigation if they don't take action.

We shouldn't assume ill intent unless there's something to substantiate it.

Car dealerships shaking and crying

Ah yes, the old parent company with a sole employee and it's address is a basement in a country where the laws they want to avoid don't apply.

I host my own searx instance and use that to search, it supports all of DDG's bangs by default if you begin a query with a double bang !!

The RIAA's lawyers will be there to take that bird for everything it has.

There have been examples that are effectively primitive shitposts found carved into walls in Pompeii. People never really change.

And adding 0.081% to the population every year are stealing all the good jobs uh... checks notes, working in construction and on ranches where actual citizens usually don't want to work anyway.