If you need a service and every competing service has the same practice, then yes they are.

The t&c are not a separate contract, though. Its a “take it or leave it” signing here gets you the car and the agreement to be spied upon.

It can be very lonely being one of the only “good ones” in the world. It may be wise to consider the possibility that fewer creatures will suffer overall if you can get some legal wins toward that end, and legal wins cannot be gained by a tiny group with no allies.

Calling out good faith points made by people that essentially agree with your premise as intellectually dishonest is false, combative, and discourages any meaningful coalition that can do something about your cause. Acting out in a bitter fashion makes you more alone and politically powerless.

I am not saying they are sentient. I am more saying that it is impossible to establish an objective valuation scale for the lives of creatures. You can choose whatever subjective one you want, but we can’t lose sight of the fact that it is just our own, and even getting an army of like minded people doesn’t make you any more objectively right or wrong.

The one I choose for myself is to do what I can to minimize the suffering of any living thing I can, and avoid excess consumption. Some others are more absolute, choosing to abstain entirely from any part of the meat industry until every part of it has its act together. Others refuse to eat anything but beans and leaves, leaving the most minimal environmental impact possible. All of those and any that avoid waste and needless suffering seem valid to me and not worth the division.

Lacking photosynthesis, we have to kill to eat. The fact that plants don’t have faces and lack any common means of communication with us does not make them any less evolved than any other creature.

It is easy to think of them as inert objects that lack any sense of the world around them, but we already know that not to be the case. I think that understanding that makes it impossible to distinguish killing a plant or an animal. The best we can do is hold the lives we have to take in high regard by being humane, including to plants, and to avoid waste and frivolous killing.

There is no Mastodon service. Its an application anyone can download and run. I understand your frustration, but it seems like you’re mad at the universe they exist in for its role in housing them.

There is no Mastodon for them to be blocked on in the sense you’re talking about.

Mastodon is similar in setup to Lemmy in that nobody owns it and anyone can run it. I am absolutely positive they are banned on tons of Mastodon servers and not banned on tons of others. If the server you are on is federated with even one server with one that isn’t banned, you could potentially see their posts, at which point you can either report those posts to your and their admins, or block them yourself.

Maybe not, but at least in part because they don’t understand what the previous poster said. If their scrapers were more efficient at data harvesting by employing API calls instead of scraping your whole domain, it would be much less burdensome on the target’s server resources and one would think they would be less annoyed by that than if the same thing had happened without that burden.

Their grievances with LLMs and their owners may not be limited to that, but they are certainly likely to include it.

They ware widely regarded as among the most villainous companies in history along with DeBeers and the East India Trading Company. Among their more infamous crimes against humanity include bribing the leaders of developing nations to sign over water rights to aquifers their people are using, which they take completely for bottling, destroying the local ecosystem and population. When the malnourished mothers can’t produce milk to feed their babies, they say things like “use our baby formula instead then, which is much healthier than natural milk”. If there’s not already a Behind he Bastards on them, someone could make a whole podcast just on their villainy.

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In this case, “doing your part” is probably accelerating the downfall of platforms you disapprove of by not participating in them. They have influence because of their critical mass, so leaving hurts them. They just don’t care or notice until they no longer have critical mass. No social media has ever regained it once lost.

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“What do you get for the guy that has everything?” 😂

Mr. “Platinum Yendorian Express” over here!

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I’m pulling for you over here! I never made it past the fortress right after Medusa.

Imagine my great sorrow when I discovered that turning Perseus back to a man didn’t make him tame! 🥺

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Are there actual phone games that would benefit from this? I haven’t had much luck finding games that are actually even much of a game at all, let alone ones that would benefit from gaming hardware.

Does anyone know of actual cool Android games to look at?

For the most part, the answer seems to be yes. Some products did also ship with missing or reduced feature sets for a time, too.

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