One thing is that the scam call centers usually pay very well there. From what I’ve heard, even teens can get in on it, and they can make as much as someone with a full college degree just working for a scam company. The owners are making six figure sums each year.

And the amounts aren’t always small. Sometimes they’ll find a particularly vulnerable elderly person and net thousands, or even tens of thousands.

Is there a particular reason you can’t use apt here?

It’s always preferable to stick with repo packages unless absolutely necessary, because performing a manual install could place your system into an unsupported state or prevent apt from updating it later, which can lead to issues especially if that package is something core like bash.

The thing is, MS made a command line package manager that allows users to submit configs for new packages via GitHub. But they haven’t made a UI for it and don’t tell anyone that it exists. You have to go out of your way to find out about it, which 99% of users are not going to do.

I use it when I set up new Windows VMs and it’s a lot easier than manually navigating to websites for software installers.

Shout-out to the GM of the Aaron’s calling me an idiot that doesn’t know how to operate a dryer when they sold me one out the door so clogged I’m amazed my house didn’t light on fire. Swore up and down they quality checked everything, the 2 hours I spent with that machine open scraping the lint out suggests otherwise.

Yes, I’m still salty about it over a year later.

I didn’t go full keto, but I did tighten up my sugar consumption once and tried to keep it as close to zero as possible for a couple of weeks.

I can’t say I had hallucinations, but the cravings are seriously real. I didn’t even stop because of the cravings though, I stopped because sugar is so ubiquitous in everything that trying to find a drink to buy while working that didn’t contain sugar and I actually liked was difficult. I tried drinking tea with stevia as a main drink, but the taste of it never really acquired for me.

Sir, do you have a license for that power drill?

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 !!

If he could get in league with Bobby Kotick and they just collectively go screw up a different market somewhere else, that’d be nice.

Nah, they had some BS going on in DOS I’m pretty sure, too.

And harasses you ceaselessly to use it, advertises itself if you look up Chrome in it, gets reset back to default on updates for a bunch of file types.

Sincerely, a Firefox user.

DDG is Bing by proxy, has been for ages. A while back they had a controversy for having microsoft trackers or something like that, and mentioned it was some stipulation for using Bing results. But they still backed off on that anyway.

There was mention that he had one more appeal on the SEC ruling a while back. My thoughts were he was banking on getting the SEC ruling reversed and giving them back a broken company.

Lemmy doesn’t natively track karma unless they’re doing their own tracking, but even then, nobody else is seeing it unless their client does it.

So basically, karma farming isn’t nearly as important on Lemmy.