Dirt_Possum [she/her, undecided]

I’m not sure why other commenters are able to do this without an account, but I also was surprised just now to click on user reviews to see:

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It’s getting worse and worse with this shit all over the internet. They have fairly successfully already enclosed most of the commons, now they’re building up the walls higher and higher. It’s all about control and of course tracking. I used to use a frontend libremdb.iket.me to access IMDB, similar to nitter/xcancel to read twitter or invidious to watch youtube. But it looks like IMDB made sure that is completely broken now.

Edit: It’s also a way to make people use the app instead of the website. This too is happening all over, reddit is well known for doing everything it can to force people onto the app, and their specific proprietary app. And it’s for the same reasons I mentioned above. It’s a lot harder to block ads from the app, but viewing the website with uBlock Origin on (and I refuse to browse any of the web without it, personally) you don’t have to view a single ad. And again, control. You have a lot more choice and options using a web browser, not to mention somewhat obscure your identity, even though that’s also becoming more impossible with browser fingerprinting. But using an app let’s them curate exactly what they want you to see, including ads, and also gives them your exact unique identity. I don’t know, I won’t use the app, but I’m assuming you have to have an account to use the app, so of course people on the app aren’t going to get a login wall because they’re already logged in.

Fuck corporate enshittification. Fuck IMDB. Fuck Amazon.

With you

The site could also be set to display whatever font it wants but also set to list standard fonts that also work which the browser can then choose from on the user’s end if the user doesn’t have the first choice font. That way you the user don’t have to worry about it and there is no way to fingerprint by the browser just handing out an entire list of fonts installed on the user’s system. There are plenty of ways to make things like this work, but the incentive is to keep them as they are or to increase uniqueness so people can be more easily fingerprinted.

Yeah I guess it was human expression that confidently insisted superglue was a safe ingredient to put on my pizza to hold the cheese on it. I don’t even give much of a shit about LLM slop on the occasions it’s accurate, it was your bad faith and absurd response to the other commenter that I was calling out which you ignored in order to shift the discussion to philosophical arguments about AI that make you sound like the entrepreneur genius Sam Altman or the other tech bro capitalists trying to keep that bubble from popping.

I was taking the statement about what you found “fascinating” in isolation because it was phrased as such. You were surprised that the other commenter could find enjoyment in “something” not knowing how it was produced then feel less enjoyment after learning more. That is a silly thing to be “fascinated” by because it is something that the vast majority of us are keenly familiar with. But because that commenter has qualms about AI which you don’t, you suddenly can’t understand how later information about something can alter one’s enjoyment of it? It’s an absurd thing to say. As is your sunset question. I don’t get upset looking at most AI slop either, but I absolutely do place it in a different category than either a natural phenomenon or something I know was made by human expression and if you can’t understand or recognize that difference, I don’t know that anything I could say could help you with that.

it’s also fascinating how you could enjoy something if you didn’t know how it was produced, and then the act of knowing would remove the enjoyment you were deriving from it.

Would you feel differently about, say a book you read and somewhat enjoyed if you later learned it was written by a fascist? It sure would make a difference to me. Have you never consumed any sort of media that you later felt was tainted by who created it, or used a product that you later decided not to use again after learning how it was produced? There’s even a colloquialism referring to this very thing, about “knowing how the sausage is made.”

It should be, yes. But browsers like Chrome are literally made by the company that stands to profit from fingerprinting you, so they’re always going to be made to make it easy to do just that. Firefox at least has “resist fingerprinting” option which apparently can limit font visibility to only base system fonts rather than fonts you installed and language-pack fonts. LibreWolf has this on out of the box.