That isn’t asking me if I’m available for a call. So rude.

They also didn’t charge you $20 just so the franchise can pocket it.

There’s a local restaurant that still does their own delivery, and we order lunch from them each week on the same day pretty regularly. We recently moved (still in area) and he was like “Hey wait you moved!” and we had a nice lil convo, it was pleasant. I miss that.

Impossible! Everyone has a smartphone with which to download The App:tm: to handle that. The only people who don’t have smartphones are actual criminals. There are senators completely ready to endorse this line of thought! Too poor? Nonsense, you’re a criminal. Straight to jail.

It might get there eventually but for now we can probably continue to coast on various combinations of general ineptitude, cheapness, laziness, and ignorance on part of people implementing these systems.

There’s a delightful LEMMiNO documentary about it for anyone interested.

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I have itsfoss in my RSS feed mostly to keep an eye on the FOSS community news in general, but will agree most of their articles seem to lean quite heavily into soft endorsing certain brands.

Sometimes it feels like people forget this used to be the only option. Was it a little annoying? Yeah. But oh well.

Ironically I remember reading somewhere that part of the reason people are so consistently shitty to each other is they forgot how to deal with the millions of little face to face interactions we had pre-internet in order to get things done in life. How ironic would it be if big tech forced us back into that mold and we all became a bit nicer because of it?

You know what, that’s fair.

Agreed, it’s an odd move when so much else about the phone is being marketed as having the user’s interests at heart. If you scratch a bit and squint at the wording they’re using, though, it feels more and more like the CEO has his own idea of how people should be using their phones and is pushing that. The fact that it is more privacy respecting is incidental to the fact. I could be wrong, but that’s the vibe I’ve certainly gotten.

It’s too bad. I wouldn’t mind having a phone with no social media but no browser is probably going to be a dealbreaker for me. Their FAQ says it’s basically a way of ‘cheating’ to get to social media sites and that’s incredibly condescending. I probably just want to look up if a nearby store is still open or something.

You’re one step closer to Unauthorized Bread

I’m starting to look into the ‘other’ as you say here, but there’s a lot to learn, and it can be hard to figure out at times. I tried to get Yggdrasil set up on my computer and just kept running into wall after wall, it was very disheartening. Going to take a break from it and learn about onion addresses instead, I guess.

Agree, but highly recommend checking out Privacy for temp cards.

Crazy the weird, fucked up things some places will do to their employees. One of my very first jobs, we got a little cubbyhole where they’d give us our paychecks or in-office notices and the thing I saw most of: What You Fucked Up Last Shift, You Big Fuckup

Glad you are working in a nicer place, and me too, and it sucks we’ll always carry that around.

Actually it’s not just the nostalgia talking! Things actually are worse

Read about this in today’s Corey Doctorow blog post: https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/11/lapsarianism/#nostalgia-is-a-toxic-impulse

I remember the last time this post made the rounds and I think it was uncertain whether she consented or not.

“When does it get to be MY boot on someone’s neck?”

There is an extremely good reason why the government is preemptively getting a rubber stamp with “technology extremist terrorists” written on it ready. They know how fraught things are getting

When I was job seeking I had two versions of my resume. Things where I was pretty sure it’d be ingested by an AI, I used that resume. Sometimes a rare listing asked for a direct email and I used the more personal resume for that one.

Then it didn’t matter because a recruiting agency scooped me up for something I didn’t even apply for.

However I will say definitely be the most ‘you’ that you can be while still being, yanno, work appropriate about it, that you can be. Good soft skills make such a huge impression.