When I saw this news yesterday, it made me realize I hadn’t used Reddit almost at all since the purge last summer. I ran the PowerDelete tool last night to nuke my profile and then deleted my account this morning. 10 years of posts and comments gone but ill be damned if im going to let those posts stay and train AI to make this douche canoe any more money.
Some things that my company does:
Has someone watching you browse our site live. We can see everything you do in real time. All your searches, missclicks, mouse movements, etc. Only thing it cant see is credit card info.
Uses these live views to create a profile on you. Are you in the deep south and searched for something that could be “conservative”? Your now on our Conservative mailing list. Vise-versa as well, We have email marketing campaigns that are written to cater to demographics. For each email sales campaign we put out, there are about 8 varieties of those emails that are tailored to what we think you want.
Keep databases of all our customers and people who visit the site, with as much info as possible. IP, location, estimated salary, spending potential, whether or not you are more likely to click on our links. All kinds of info that isnt really protected in any meaningful way. Most of it is just on a Google Drive.
For our big spenders and repeat customers, we have a separate database that has even more personal info. The marketing manager has even gone so far as to look up Facebook and Linkden and whatnot on you and take whatever they can find. Family, friends, hobbies, jobs, anything that they think can be useful to sell more stuff. Again, none of this is really secured to well.
Im not in the marketing department of my job so theres probably a lot more that im not aware of. These are just a few things we do and im sure this is mild in comparison to bigger companies. My job is a small family business with like 10 people working there.
I’m a big fan of Firefox’s email mask feature. Not sure which update it was but recently it showed up when clicking on an email field. FF creates an email address for you and forwards any mail you get to your main email. It’s been great for signing up for random crap cus you can just delete the email mask “account” afterwards.
I’m just going to leave this here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge’s_law_of_headlines
The Harry Potter films. I just finished HalfBlood Prince this evening.
I haven’t tried it personally, but https://deoldify.ai/ might be an option. Though, it seems more geared towards colorizing than restoring.
I work for an online business. Its very small but the owner tries to run it like a Fortune500 company. They’re all about SEO and attend all kinds of seminars with words like Synergistic and ‘metrics that mater’ etc. They’ve spent the past month upping all our prices by 30% so we can offer a 20% discount and still make more than normal. Its shitty and I’m not a fan, but this seems to be the norm lately. That, or just offering worse quality in general. Ive avoided black Friday deals for a while now.
Sharks and other bony fish have something called Ampulle of Lorenzini that let them detect electrical signals in the water. it can also detect electromagnetic signals and possibly temperature differences as well. I always thought it would be cool to be able to sense electromagnetic fields. It would probably be overwhelming though TBH
"…and their principal, Asfendis, has vowed to raise awareness on campus of how to use new technologies responsibly."
Surely all the teenage boys will understand, and only use the technology for wholesome purposes.
This game is super nostalgic for me. I loved going to Blockbuster and renting a game for the weekend when i was a kid. My Dad worked a lot and I didn’t get to see him all that much. One weekend we rented Earthworm Jim, and my dad happened to be off that weekend. He watched me play for hours, just cracking up at all the crude humor in the game. Its one of the few good bonding memories I have of him. Ive thought about going back and playing it again as an adult but I don’t want to ruin that memory.
Yeah i picked up quite a few tips for generating good AI porn in this article. Im still not sure if this was satire or not. it basically gives you step by step how to do this.
What if your still being controlled by that centipede…?
How would you describe counter.social? I read through their home page and like a lot of what they’re saying but im not sure if its like Discord or Twitter or something more akin to Lemmy? I’d rather follow communities over individuals and it kind of looks like you follow people but I can’t be sure.
That was exactly what it was. I had to look it up but as soon as i opened that wiki page, this surge of anxiety and ptsd washed over me. That was it for sure.
My addiction to World of Warcraft and obsession over getting a certain mount may have lead to the death of an elderly man.
Way back in the ancient times, I was super addicted to WoW and really wanted this super rare mount. I would stay up super late trying to farm for it with no luck and eventually started setting an alarm for when it was supposed to spawn and waking up every hour or something all night to log in and try and get it. After a few days of this, I was fried and couldn’t function at all.
At the time I worked at a soft serve ice cream place and had to be there early to open the store which was inside a mall food court. My main opening job was to clean out the soft serve machines and get them ready for the day. Well, these machines are under a fair bit of pressure and your supposed to drain off all the left over soft serve and depressurize the machine before you open it up to clean it.
I didn’t depressurize it.
In my sleep deprived, deep-fried state, I walked through the mall food court filled with the early morning elderly mall walkers making their rounds. Got to work and immediately started unscrewing the face plate of the soft serve machine to start cleaning it. It sounded like a bomb went off. I was covered head to toe, literally every square inch of the front of my body was covered in ice cream mix and when I scraped the ice cream out of my eyes and looked around to survey the damage, I was horrified. There was chocolate ice cream splattered from one corner of the food court to the other, floor to ceiling. Everyone in the food court had at least a little ice cream on them, most more than a little. But then, A man who had to be in his upper 80s collapsed, grasping at his chest. The sound of the explosion and the shock of freezing ice cream sprayed all over him gave him a heart attack.
The paramedics were loading him up on a stretcher when my boss told me to go home and change. To my surprise, I wasn’t fired but when I came back later that morning, no one could give me an update on the man. I never found out if he made it or not, but my gut tells me he probably didn’t. He was a regular mall walker and I would see him quite often before that day, but never did after that.
I never did end up getting that mount. I can’t even remember what it was anymore which makes the whole story even worse imo. I quit WoW shortly after that incident and never really played another MMO after. I think about that man anytime I get the urge to stay up late and grind another game or finish another episode or whatever it is.
I’m sorry mall walker man.
If everyone has the plans for a super efficient easy(ish) to build free energy device, then its existence couldn’t be covered up and the big energy companies and governments around the world would be forced to implement those plans or face civil unrest or revolt.
Tell it to figure out zero point energy or whatever else scifi type free energy is possible. Then tell it to figure out the cheapest easiest way to implement the technology. Then have it disseminate those plans world wide to everyone.
A bommy is a small metal plate attached to the side of old wooden ships. It would be attached outside the ship a few feet above the water line. A metal knocker was fixed to the bommy with a small float. If the ship started to take on water or loaded to much cargo, the ship would sit lower in the water and the knocker would hit the bommy, alerting the crew of potential problems.
Sounds good at least…
Im glad to know that arm goes missing here too. Makes me feel right at home.
Your probably right, but short of going through and editing everything with nonsense (which could just be rolled back anyways) this at least provides me with some copium.