geosoco

Ahh, Google’s tried and true method of throwing a million half-baked features to people before promptly cancelling them all. This will definitely work for them.

That’s a decent start, but you need a browser that’s resistant to fingerprinting through some plugins and something like ublock origin that will block all embedded content. At some point, it may require you to use a phone number, and at that point you may have a problem. If you avoid that, one of the biggest threats are the facebook and related meta content placed on other pages around the internet. The pixel is one aspect, but almost any facebook content can still track you across sites. These are easily blocked with a decent adblocker and probably privacybadger too.

I know lots of folks will disagree, but I’d care less about Facebook tracking you as they mostly only care about serving you ads and making content suggestions to keep you on the platform to view more ads. Facebook has never served me a relevant ad, and even with a lot of use still can’t recommend things I’m interested in. Data leaks and sharing is a concern, but that’s a concern with every site. I think when it comes to privacy, there’s far bigger concerns.

Chrome lost its way years ago. I value not seeing ads or getting personalized content more than I value 99% of the chrome features.

Since Firefox finally fixed that weird memory fragmentation issue, it’s been pretty smooth sailing for me. Inspector & Debugger could use a few performance patches though.

What standard means of seeking information did you lose? You can still visit a library or ask a friend?

I don’t think people remember what using search was like before google. All of the problems you mentioned weren’t even possible 25 years ago.

On other search engines you had to know specialized query languages.

This is all possible because google collects this data from users. They’ve been doing it forever, and it does have some value.

pi-hole or some variant can definitely help in some situations. For example, if you care about your computer OS or your TV phoning home, it may block some of those (with the right list).

It may also block some ads on other devices too, but many places are working around this by tunneling the ad data through their servers.

It depends on what you’re trying to do. What exactly are you concerned about?

Most ‘adblocking’ is only in a desktop browser unless you use solutions like pi-hole or some alternative. Pi hole can help block some apps, services, and other devices on your home network from doing certain types of communicating in addition to blocking certain ad-related connections.

I mean yes, but this has been true for nearly 20 years at this point. Some of this comes back as useful features for everyone. Spam filtering, grammar checking, predictive text, maps route planning, face detection for all sorts of things. The same is true for many modern cars too, security cameras, etc. It all has to be trained on something and to collect more edge cases to improve.

If you care, you avoid their services.

When I see the monero.town domain, I know it’s gonna be garbage.

Exactly. The only other choices here are to buy used with a risk or wait longer to upgrade.

In this particular case, it’s a bit more complicated.

I suspect the majority of 30x0 & 40x0 card sales continue to be for non-gaming or hybrid uses. I suspect that if pure gamers stopped buying them today for months, it wouldn’t make much of a difference to their bottom line.

Until there’s reasonable competition for training AI models at reasonable prices, people are going to continue buying their cards because it’s the most cost-effective thing – even at the outrageous prices.

German and English are the two I can fumble my way around. Having lived and traveled some, I could fumble some basics in a few others like Dutch. I know a bit of a few others. I can read enough to figure out what’s going on in some contexts, and maybe speak enough to get around, but definitely can’t carry on a conversation in them.

It’s tough. There’s only so many hours in the day, and while I do get to watch some videos on occasion, I sometimes have too many things going on. I used to watch movies I knew well in other languages, so I already knew the context and could piece together words and phrases. I don’t have time for that anymore though.

Eh, only 2 sorta well. I’ve tried learning a bit more, but without being immersed regularly I lose them relatively fast. I can still read a bit of some of them, and hear things in movies or tv shows that I understand.

How about you? You have to have a couple you can at least get around with?

Sure, but if it’s infinite money, it won’t matter, right? :)

I like the idea of visiting other places and exploring, but I think I’d want to spend longer in each place. For the times I’ve travelled, I enjoyed the extended stays most where I really got to get past the surface and travel to the non-touristy places.

I honestly don’t know what I’d do with the infinite money. Definitely not having problems would be nice. First thing I’d do is probably make sure all my friends were set and comfortable for life and retirement. Then go from there.

It’s a bit of a journey, but she does.

So if money weren’t an issue, where would you most want to travel?

That really sucks that it’s so expensive.

It’s a scifi story about a girl who gets hired to track down who has been posting video clips online. The book’s like 20 years old now, but was his first one set in the present instead of being in the not-so-distant future. It’s a fun read.

Oh wow, that’s expensive. Is it always that expensive or just because of the time of year?

The most recent fiction book I read was pattern recognition which was fun.

Nice! I’ve never been there either but had a friend who lived there for a few years. Well, maybe you’ll get to visit soon and use your Portuguese.

That’s awesome! Are you learning for some travel or just to learn?

Same mate. read. You?