This is a great rundown. I’ve never been in the ecosystem and thus have zero exposure.

But part of me thinks, having done development in noncoding roles and getting zero further compensation for, say, something that could save a corporate giant $7 million a year if fully rolled out, this is just grooming kids for what they’ll be subjected to after going into massive debt for a degree.

I never had kids of my own, but seeing what my stepkids got up to from 2009-2016 (they were 6 and 7 to start), I became very worried about how things had shifted to online interaction. They wouldn’t have their own computers for another couple of years, but I gave them my netbook (remember those?) once I’d gotten a tower built (UPS drop-shipped my old one, and that’s not a euphemism … thank god I had the presence of mind to remove the hard drives).

It’s one thing to play SimCity for hours on end locally, which my parents allowed. It’s something entirely different to foist the whole of the internet on them without having concepts of online hygiene.

“A horse walks into a car wash” is a Vaudeville joke, not an impossibility.

I mean, if you’re still using Chrome, you likely don’t know about Manifest v3. Those who do have been on FF for quite some time.

Horses can absolutely go into space. No use in beating them at that point.

OK, I’ll bite. Where can cars go that horses cannot?

How many people use them instead of defaulting to FB Marketplace or Craigslist?

Class is dead. Has been awhile; that was actually what started the decline in local newspapers.

Odd … stepcattle doesn’t sound at all like the sort of thing involving jackboots and train cars.

At this point, using NoScript is muscle memory. No reason to add friction to a process, even if it may not be the most efficient method in terms of memory usage.

I first gave NoScript a spin sometime in the mid-2010s. It was an adjustment, to say the least. But once you get used to temporarily allowing a new target domain as a matter of course, holy hell does the whole game come into specific relief.

The Washington Post, for example – which I was a paid subscriber to until it shit the bed – wanted JS from some 25 domains (many of which were Amazon ad related). I also have NoScript on Firefox on my Pixel.

Firefox, uBO and NoScript are the floor for passable internet hygiene to me.

That’s not a handout photo from Midjourney, so it’s entirely possible that with so many problems, it was used intentionally to convey the state of the art in a way words can’t on this topic.

I’ve definitely engaged in some editorial shenanigans when I knew a source was full of shit but didn’t have the option of spiking. I’ve also intentionally run such pieces with a recast angle subtly calling out the bullshit.

Gives the government “we didn’t know:” cover.

TikTok is no more in a death spiral than Facebook. This is about complete domestic control of major social media platforms. It’s unclear that ByteDance would sell rather than shut down completely in the U.S.

My initial response was “JFC!!!” but given the gap between thinking that and starting to type, I realized “of course they’d do this” was the correct reaction.

Maybe they can get a couple of chatbots and a rural PTA member into a Signal group chat this time.

OK. I’ll revise. No one with any sense is doing this. “Hi, RIAA and MPAA, come after me” is an asinine approach. I realize we have at least one generation unfamiliar with Napster, KaZaa and LimeWire, which replaced ratio FTP servers (which in turn replaced F-Servs in IRC). This is terrible online hygiene. You don’t leave your media out there for all to see. At least password protect access before linking to your friends.

Not exactly. Much of it radiates out into space. If all the sun’s energy remained in the atmosphere, climate change wouldn’t be a concern, as the Earth wouldn’t have been habitable for humans to even evolve.

Another feedback loop is that, thanks to thermodynamics, the heat being removed from homes and businesses is transferred into the environment, further raising temperatures.

Who has the technical wherewithal to run Jellyfin but leaves access on the open web? I get that sharing is part of the point, but no one’s putting their media collection on an open FTP server.

The level of convenience people expect without consequences is astounding. Going to be away for home for a few days? Load stuff onto an external SSD or SD card. Phoning home remotely makes no sense.

I grew up in the '80s. It was absolutely unnecessary then, and a pressing need has not since developed. “Be home by dinner” was perfectly serviceable when I’d head off on my bike to see which friends were available to hang out with. Often, I’d be invited to dinner, and the parents would talk so mine knew where I was, usually followed by an invite for a sleepover since it was by then dark.

Abductions of and assaults on kids are statistically far more likely to happen with a known party. This tracking obsession stunts normal childhood experiences, and I’ve not seen any study conclude that kids are overall safer from this level of surveillance.

If uncle Bob is molesting you but your parents trust him, this is all theatre. “At least they’re safe … they’re at Bob’s” my ass. But god forbid you meet up with your friends to build a tree fort outside of an arbitrary radius.