Cloudflare took down our website after trying to force us to pay 120k$ within 24h

Yikes. That sounds bad.

I'm a SysOps engineer at a fairly large online casino.

Okay all my sympathy is gone. Online casinos deserve to die.

That said, my feelings towards economic vampires aside, the way the events unfolded is concerning to say the least. Cloudflare has been racking up evil-corp points quite rapidly in recent months.

I mean these kinds of "AI companions" are grifts anyway. They won't take off because they are a solution looking for a problem. They aren't as affordable as the entry level HomePod/Amazon Pod/Google Home units, so they can't be bought as a "why not, and it's a speaker anyway" type thing. They don't have any secondary functionality you don't already have in your phone.

And if that's not enough, you can bet your cute arse on that Apple and Google are both working on bringing LLM functions into their assistants, basically making these units obsolete.

The moment that these companies decide that they can't afford to pay for servers and API subscriptions anymore, the service will die and you'll end up with a colourful brick. Don't buy these things, they're unfinished and will die within a year or two.

I mean Trump and his allies goal is literally to dismantle democracy so that shouldn’t come as a surprise.

Lmao. I’ve no love for Apple, and even less for Epic. It’s like two grotesquely unlovable toddlers are throwing a hissy fit in their little sandbox and I’m here for it.

Using someone’s preferred pronouns isn’t woke, it’s basic human decency.

I feel like the overall engagement has increased. I see a lot more niche communities (like people butchering their VWs in various ways 😂) and it’s nice! There’s generally conversation to be had and such, it feels like a healthy platform.

Lemmy slotted in the gap that Reddit left really easily for me, and I’m getting what I wanted from the platform.

I can't wait for the "GenZ are killing the restaurant business!" headlines.

My boss mentioned that she thinks it’s from those reality TV shows like the Kardashian ones where all calls are on speaker since it’s part of the “entertainment.”

It’s why people are holding the phone up to their face like a sandwich and speaking into the bottom. It mimics the TV shows.

This is my favourite. 痔 means haemorrhoid. Presumably it was meant to say 侍, samurai.

You can still have trees and plant life in low density housing. You don’t need green deserts everywhere.

Shocking. They’ve been trying to make the car a second living room, and in doing so sacrifice the driving experience by foregoing buttons, levers, and switches for capacitive surfaces and touchscreens.

The turn signal on the Tesla Yoke is shocking to me. It screams of tech boys adding “cool things” before thinking about whether or not it’s useful.

Then there’s all the anti-consumer practises. Buy a car, but don’t own it. Yes we shipped it with heated seats, which you obviously paid for, but to use them you’ll have to pay a monthly fee. And no, you’ll still pay for all the energy used, that’s not on us. But hey we’re actually giving you a better deal on it!

It’s all BS.

Well obviously. It was never about children, because gender affirming care doesn't involve surgeries or hormones for children. Those were all lies feeding into an anti-trans narrative so they could push for more drastic changes.

Start with children, because no one in their right mind would want to see children suffer, and then move on to the rest. After all the trans people are dealt with, they'll come after the gays, and then the women and people of colour.