Ages ago, when Chrome was still a new kid on the block, I read an article about it. Turns out, this browser is spying on you so hard that it made me, nope out immediately. Somehow, people missed that article, and others like it, and pretty much everyone started using Chrome on their computer (see also: pro-mobile era).

Especially among 4 year old girls, but the kitty merch is a different story.

A friend advised me to put lots of Hello Kitty stickers on my bike so that nobody would want to steal it. I wonder if the same logic applies here.

This looks like a dream target for hackers. Imagine all the data you could find here. If there ever was a single point of failure, this is it.

Mobile phones and earbuds solve that problem for the most part.

American supermarkets are a special category, since everything is wrapped in plastic.

In poor countries, plastic bags are a significant contributor to overall amount of plastic waste produced. Banning plastic bags in a place like that actually has an impact, because most things aren’t necessarily wrapped in layers of plastic.

If you wanted to have a similar impact in America, you would need to introduce a plastic packing and wrapping tax. So yes, banning a single product in a place like that is only a very small step in the right direction.

You know, there are third world countries with a more progressive approach to plastic…

Because we’re already in the “yeah, that may as well happen, why not“ -stage. Remember how crazy it got in 2020? We’re doing a rerun of all the.

Now we’re officially at the “Yeah, that may as well happen” -stage.

Just like in 2020 when Trump was tweeting bizarre things every day. At some point, you became desensitized to all the madness and just went “Yeah, that might as well happen. Why not.”

To be fair, most black Americans voted for Harris. Trump voters are a tiny minority by comparison, so you can expect all sorts of unusual things from a small group like that.

Source: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/interactive-how-key-groups-of-americans-voted-in-2024-according-to-ap-votecast

Futurism writing about the onion, so… yes, no, maybe, sorta, almost, but not quite? It’s clearly an edge case.

I had very similar experiences around 2015. Before that, it was reasonably easy to use a fully FOSS system, but things have gotten worse over the years. Sure, there’s more FOSS for mobile hardware than ever before, but the world surrounding the phone has moved in the exact opposite direction. Being compatible with the world around you is the problem here.

Back then, I couldn’t find a satisfactory solution. One extreme is to go full on FOSS, and cut at least 50% of the entire world from your life, while the other is to sacrifice your privacy at altar of corporate greed. Between the two there are numerous dissatisfying compromises, and you need to do some soul searching to figure out where you want to draw the line.

Maybe it’s automated propaganda and opinion steering.

LOL, he really missed his calling as a comedian.

Could still be technically correct if the bag wasn’t literally ✨full✨, but maybe filled like 2/3 or something.

Perplexity seems to do a pretty good job, whereas Copilot makes stuff up all the time.

All LLMs I’ve tested had a tendency to agree with my delusions and misconceptions, so you have to be very cautious not to ask loaded questions. If you start misleading the LLM, it will go with the flow and give you a wrong answer.

Copilot and chatGPT prefer to avoid PR disasters, but Mistral has no issues with sensitive topics. Mistral doesn’t really seem to have much opinions about anything so you can dive into any topic you like. The other LLMs do have clear opinions and lines they won’t cross.

Facebook has started using AI bots to boost engagement (and revenue). Is Reddit trying to do the same thing?

Tragedy or comedy? Why not both.

In the Soviet Union, the shopper experience wasn’t vastly different. You would stand in different lines to select, pay and collect items, so it was a good idea to bring a chair and a book with you.

Let them try. Maybe some of that money will go to researching something useful like cancer treatments.