Got a message saying I was banned from a sub I wasn’t even subscribed to and hadn’t posted to. I replied to the message telling them to get stuffed. They reported me and got me banned from Reddit for 3 days.

So instead, I banned Reddit and haven’t looked back. F-'em.

I skip the app and use one of Safeway’s “Please Don’t Rape Me” cards that I found in the parking lot.

If you value your privacy and you have a choice between using a browser to access a service vs installing their app, use the browser.

Online services can get much more information about you through an app vs the browser. Browsers are generally locked down more. Apps in general have access to much more information from your device.

True. And the nepo-babies that lead these corporations are making millions off dollars each year simply by showing up to work.
Switching over to electric vehicles is inevitable. But who’s going to do that work and take that risk? What if they screw up? Ain’t no nepo-baby gonna screw up that cash cow. They’re going to continue showing up to work every day, sucking up the income and when the end of gasoline happens, they’ll throw up their hands and say, “No one could have seen that coming.”

(To be fair, it’s not just management. There are tons of people at every level who don’t want to risk losing their job with an uncertain outcome over just showing up to work every day and doing the same job they already know. But it’s the “leadership’s” job to do that anyway for the long-term health of the company.)

But not at the software companies that require monthly subscriptions, right? They get money every month, so they have lots of incentive to fix all the bugs. Right? … Right? /s

Talking about energy wastage, next time you’re walking around commercial buildings, pay attention to how many lights are on during the middle of the day.

Drove by a closed car lot the other day. The place has been abandoned for months. Weeds growing up everywhere. The entire lot is fenced off getting ready for demolition.
The only building on the lot is small and completely surrounded by glass walls, so you can see right through it. The red neon around the outside of the building is still on 24 hours.

Back in the day there were stores that could definitely answer such questions. The employees were trained to be able to tell you which aisle (side and end) you could find their products.

Not anymore. Guess the training got cut so the CEO could get his quarterly bonus for being a genius. /s

Yeah, for a short time there the word ‘java’ was very ‘in’. Marketing hipsters at the time wanted to use it in everything, just like the word ‘AI’ now.

Great job, men! We finally found it!

Yup, some dishes absorb microwaves better than the food, so they absorb the majority of the energy.

Too late. The AI scanning the comments isn’t smart enough to “see” corrections.

‘Excalibur’, huh?

Bunch of people around a big, Round Table… writing down ideas… 'Arthur’s if you will.

There’s just currently no way for AI to understand the difference between dry humor and serious responses.

There’s no way for humans to do this either. We invented an entirely new series of markers (emoticons, /s, etc.) at a vain attempt at doing just this and still fail.

My understanding is that these projects are a side-effect of how Google judges promotions. If you’ve “created a new product”, that puts you higher on the list to get promoted.

There are no incentives nor resources for maintaining those products. So you see a long list of “ideas” from Google that are abandoned immediately after someone got their promotion.

“It’s a big club and you ain’t in it.” — George Carlin

Big endiant is great for intellisense to quickly browse possibilities, since it groups it all in the same place.

If only someone would train a program… we could call it a Large Language Model… to knowingly group the names together so we wouldn’t have to choose between human-readable format or dB format.

Guess that will never happen because instead we’re stuck using “AI’s” to inflate stock prices instead. /s

I remember seeing a proposed language that would allow each programmer to choose what name to use for each item. Don’t like ‘open_file’? Choose to see it as ‘file_open’ every time you review the file in the future.

While we battle with each other endlessly, we keep forgetting that the computer doesn’t care.

I’m not going to lie to you and tell you I know how all of this works, but from experience, the people running these scams are rarely the people who suffer.

Here’s one I’ve seen myself:

There’s a new hot startup. Wall Street rolls up to the C-suite of this company and makes an offer: Go public and we’ll give you thousands of “special” shares. (Some companies might even get multiple of these offers from different Wall St. investors.)

Once the company agrees to go public, Wall St. gives that company’s C-suite Special Shares. Wall St. also gives these shares to friends, family and power people they would like to reward and/or influence.

On the big day, the company goes public. (To the Moon, Baby!) Everyone with Special shares can sell anytime they like. Company employees have a 6-month “blackout window”. The general public is encourages to “invest now before the shares go up so they can sell after they go higher!”

After the stock climbs in value, the Special Stock holders dump their shares and rake in the cash. Everyone else is left holding the bag.

So who in this scenario are the losers? The people who bought the stock and watched it lose value? The people who sold their Special Stock after it went up and before it crashed? Who gets punished? Who goes to jail? Where does the money go?

You saw this whole scam condensed to it’s essentials during the Crypto Currency scams a few years back.

So many different variations on this scam. Keeps working too, so long as you don’t get sloppy and steal from rich people like Bernie Madoff did.

The left blame the employer and the system, the right blame the people accepting those conditions.

The Left punches up. The Right punches down.

Because the investors are always using Other People’s Money. They “invest” OPM and if it succeeds they take a huge cut and proclaim themselves to be geniuses. If it fails, they shrug and make up some BS to console the loser.

One day, someone’s going to have to debug machine-generated Bash. <shivver>