the same reasons web browsers store them in plain text

Why one web browser stores them in plain text. Fucking Edge.

Who knows about the others, but I can pretty much guarantee you that Librewolf, for example, isn’t doing that shit.

Still too much effort.

Automate a script to send AI agents on goose chases for you.

Name a single big tech company that died in the last 20 years.

None of them entirely die … they just become hollow shells of their former selves, sold off to another company to use the IP rights. See: Yahoo.

They’ve already had a spate of serious, unprecedented outages affecting half the internet.

So I guess that means the only place to go from there is to double down, eh?

Aw, only for the 15 and up.

On the plus side, sticking with my iphone 7 has saved me way more than $95 over the years.

You really think democracy can’t possibly work without opinion polling?

It would mean a population of voters informed solely by propaganda or not at all.

99% of opinion polling is propaganda. It’s relatively easy to make the outcome of a poll whatever you want it to be, especially when most of your viewers/readers don’t (or can’t) dig into it to find the raw polling data. And even when a poll doesn’t go the way you’d like, you can just bury it or refuse to publish it and run another poll until you get the result you wanted.

Their accuracy died when people like me became difficult to poll.

I don’t answer phone calls from unknown callers. I delete unsolicited text messages. I throw away irrelevant junk mail without opening it. I automatically delete emails that don’t come from my whitelist of approved senders. I don’t answer the door for door-to-door solicitors.

How are pollsters supposed to find out about the opinions of me and people like me? It’s just impossible. And I don’t think I’m alone – there’s a large and growing portion of the population who are just absolutely impossible to get poll data about.

but giving up on stats because bad stats exist, is like refusing to ever eat food again because someone got you to try a sardine and spinach chocolate cupcake one time.

I won’t die if I give up on stats.

Let me fix your analogy:

but giving up on stats because bad stats exist, is like refusing to ever read newspapers again because you once read a tabloid rag that was full of falsehoods and lies.

And that’s a more reasonable approximation.

The second m is silent.

Web services and websites should block all Utah IP addresses and redirect to page explaining that because they cannot tell who’s using a VPN, their only option is to block all of Utah.

But VPN users using a VPN outside of Utah will still get through.

What Utah (and likely other dumb states soon) are trying to do is to force age verification worldwide through a state law, forcing websites to verify the age of every user from anywhere, because any user who accesses the site from anywhere in the world might possibly be someone in Utah using a VPN.

negative time hints at negative energy

Energy = mass, and negative mass would have some really bonkers paradoxical behavior…

However paradoxical it may seem, it has a directly measurable effect on the atomic cloud that the photon traverses

So … a proton exits this ‘atomic cloud’ before it enters?

They want to harvest your data and sell it.

Well, yes. But they’re doing this anyway. If you’re paying with a card (and most people do), they’re using your credit card number as an identifier to track you across all the purchases you made across all their stores. These days, they may also be using facial recognition for the same purpose, to even catch the people paying with cash. Making rewards program memberships and the like illegal would barely slow down their data collection at all.

Well, you (and everyone else) are paying for it through retail markups and profit margins … but you’re going to be paying that anyway under capitalism.

What the store gets out of it is:

A) They hope their rewards program will motivate you to shop at their store, rather than going to any competitor’s, since you have a rewards card for their store and hopefully not the others. So the rewards program could increase their market share a bit, at the cost of a few discounts.

B) They’re using it to track you, of course. It provides more analytics for them to further optimize selling you shit, and they might also be selling the data to 3rd parties.

Why only for groceries?

In the interest of keeping markets fair, it should be illegal across the board to change prices depending on who the customer is*. The price is the price, as it should be in a free and fair market.

*Though I think I’d still allow for rewards/loyalty card programs and coupons given to frequent customers and that sort of thing – with the distinction being it’s something that the customer explicitly opts in to. And a restriction that these programs can only ever lower prices, never raise them.

You could also just not use these services.

I do need RAM, though.

Fortunately, I got pretty well stocked up before this shit, but the hardware I’ve got now will fail eventually.

Allegedly.

I didn’t examine the body.

Doesn’t matter. 100 more just like him are coming tomorrow.

I moved my library over to codeberg recently. So much better of an experience. Its really too bad, I have 15+ years in Github but the AI bots are going to push me out.

If AI can finally kill Github and get repos to move to open-source alternatives, maybe AI isn’t that bad after all.

Citing Xitter posts as sources. Indefensible.