True enough, but toxic toys aren’t super common in the US. It certainly happens, but they eventually get detected and recalled. That being said, with Trump’s plans for gutting regulatory bodies even further, I’ll be much less inclined to order cheap toys from online.

Yeah, wtf? I thought they were sanctioned to the extent that it made it so most US/EU companies literally couldn’t continue doing business with Russia?

Tons of people. My wife bought a $7 digital camera off of there for one of our kids and 2 years later, both of our kids still love playing with it and it works perfectly fine. We’ve bought a couple of other toys off of there without issue. But yeah, the majority of the products on there are typically garbage.

Police may be leaving phones online in case it continues receiving relevant evidence (texts, emails, etc).

They like it because they either work for it or hope to work for it and be in a position of power.

I was referring to Google banning ad blockers more than Opera’s move to bypass the block in chromium. I should have clarified that in my original comment, but I was quite sleep deprived when I wrote it.

They’ve been actively fighting libraries over the years, with renewed fervor in the last decade. As numerous others have pointed out before–including the article I linked–if libraries hadn’t already been such a long-standing concept for centuries, they would 100% not be allowed to come into existence nowadays. Hyper greed has poisoned every facet of modern society.

I truly hope this leads to the collapse of Chrome’s sheer market dominance. Fuck Google.

This is incorrect. Look into how SuperPACs get around the normal laws for donator transparency.

The SEC is the regulating body for the US stock exchange. Numerous companies on the stock exchange are heavily involved in Bitcoin. And if I recall correctly, Bitcoin is also exchanged through platforms regulated by the SEC. There are other things the SEC oversees that could be directly/indirectly related to crypto as well.

I wouldn’t think so, since Mastadon isn’t inherently “owned” by any one company and doesn’t rely on an advertising business strategy.

Hah, that’s interesting. I tried looking up to see if that’s true, but I’m not finding any reliable sources, only sites and articles talking about the first message sent on ARPANET.

It’s weirdly used as a normal social media platform by a ton of people I’ve worked with over the years. I have no idea why, tbh, but they’re out there.

It depends on the context for me. Repairing/replacing something on like my lawnmower or car? Video all the way. A simple CLI command/process? A quick write-up is often preferred for me.

You don’t need to ask, as there are tons of well made videos giving great breakdowns of the most popular distros and the pros/cons of each while also showing demonstrations of a user session within them. To me, that’s far more informative than a broad, generalized typed paragraph. However, I will concede that I’m more a visual, hands-on learner, so this is subjective.

And I agree, creating a boot disk is very simple and straightforward. The likelihood of GPT/Gemini getting it wrong is low. Especially Gemini/Copilot, as they basically just regurgitate the top tech site articles in this context and will cite the links it used (e.g. stack exchange, Tom’s hardware, etc). But like I said above, it can still happen, so why not just look up the source material for something so simple? I doubt any time is really saved by using AI in this instance. Not to mention, if you’re more of a visual person, it’s nice to see someone else give a demonstration.

To each their own, though. Neither method is necessarily the wrong/better one.

Eh, just look up a reputable YouTube channel and guide. Chatbots can randomly make dumb mistakes that a total newbie won’t recognize, potentially causing them a lot of headache.

And no, I’m not one of those diehard anti-AI people. My work has its own custom GPT model and I utilize it almost daily for menial tasks. But even having it generate script boilerplate and whatnot, I sometimes notice it writing stuff that won’t work and/or does it in a really verbose/weird way.

it is literally the whole damn point of shoving AI down everybodies throat…

To be fair, it didn’t start out that way. A lot of tech companies just didn’t want to be seen as being behind while OpenAI was making shockwaves around the globe. Iirc, after ChatGPT hit the mainstream a couple years ago, Google’s CEO was said to have sent a company-wide email demanding their own AI research become their number 1 priority.

Now that they finally have their own competitive model, they have to justify why they spent hundreds of millions of dollars over numerous years on this tech. Unfortunately for the rest of us, this just means enshittification will reach new levels… sigh…

Sadly, I believe you’re correct on that… sigh…

$500,000 is nothing to billionaires, or even people who make hundreds of millions a year. It’s a lot to average folks like us, but to them it’s the equivalent of going to the casino with money they can afford to blow.

But I do think you’re right about passing it on to the greater fool. They bet it’ll be the next hot product, regardless if they know it sucks or not. Then some bigger bag of money will come in and buy it up, thinking they’ll be able to somehow milk a sustainable profit out of it. You’d think by now that VCs would be smarter about the boom and bust of tech startups, but alas…

Iirc, didn’t the article say that was one of many hypothetical scenarios they try to plan accordingly for? Like you said, it’s been awhile since it came out, so I could easily be wrong. I imagine it won’t be a problem any time soon, though. There are always desperate people, and simply changing policy to allow rehiring people that had previously been fired/quit would open eligible candidate pools back up.

Or, y’know, they could just make working there not be miserable.