The degree to which MS Teams can get fucked by the horse it rode in on is proportional to the number of registry entries their bloatware has on first install.

And learn how to use it.

And get your FF fork loaded up with the right extensions to prevent fingerprinting.

Ugh, this world is so cooked, but we keep reaching out of the oven and turning up the heat on ourselves.

Agree with less cookies and trackers if possible. Google doesn’t need to see my emoticons.

Also would prefer a JS free-version if possible, but I can see how that might not work.

Or maybe you’re also collecting the IPs of everyone here by cross referencing usernames with the emoticons used in comments and copied from your site. Statistically, this would actually be pretty easy to use to doxx people’s IPs/locations that way.

Well, considering that I speak 4 languages myself, maybe that’s not the take I was going for.

Done the same. Didn’t think it could happen to me. I was wrong and paid the price.

I speak 4 languages, and when I need surface level basics for a trip, I’ve found the Duolingo helps get the wrote memory part of see a shape, hear a sound.

For actual terminology or grammar, it’s OK, but it doesn’t deserve the hype it gives itself. I can make up my own lessons with Google Translate better than Duolingo.

I believe that a clickbait title about 400 idiot people starting the first lesson in Duolingo and then quickly quitting without deleting their accounts is the through line here.

Narrator: “But he didn’t mean the critically acclaimed 2013 movie ‘Her,’ but instead the 1991 classic ‘Mannequin 2:On the Move.’”

Cut to GOB driving the stair car with a mannequin in a wig tied to the top.

This is all about pressuring Bytedance to sell to any of the large US companies dying to get that user base. Remember that one party is currently loaded with tech bros with no ethics.

Bytedance seems willing to play chicken and hit the wall as a gamble about coming out of this less hurt than anyone else.

In theory, but in practice the BBB is usually a pay-to-play sort of racket where as long as a member doesn’t have active litigation happening, you can likely swing an A+ rating and still be a terrible company. It’s business oriented, not consumer.

While this might have been true for a while, but payola is alive and well. My spouse has Spotify and still has to listen to music podcasts for real discovery. Otherwise she’s one more person swatting down Espresso playing over and over.

I’m certainly not going to argue with you on this.

However, I will say that, fromy perspective, if you remember the world prior to 9/11, government incompetence was the standard. Sometimes shitbag people can bumble into a golden opportunity and have no hesitation milking it for all they can.

But I can’t prove my idealized version any more than you can. Maybe we’re both right. Maybe we’re both wrong. We’ll never know.

Regardless of the reality of what happened, the increased scrutiny and surveillance pushed a lot of people to distrust of institutions, just like you.

That sentiment was actually ramping up quite a bit in the 90s, and the way the factors that led to the mistrust never went away, but we were given a Faustian deal to ignore them or be labeled a traitor made it all worse.

I feel like stuff like this is always aimed at average people and the data collection is what offsets the price to make it the cheapest option. Only new money would use it to chase trendy things like this. They end up being slight convenience with added work and expectations on the consumer.

High end appliances aimed at real wealth are usually more about how they can be built in to the house design. Rich people will pay more for a thing that makes the house look like a magazine, and will last years.

Why would a rich person want a fridge that tells them they need to buy milk when their actual human assistant does that?

shit ton

I see what you did there.

Same.

There’s a song by the Armenian band Ladaniva that’s just a few lines about a mountain home with a table that sits under a fig tree for the season. It’s relatively vague imagery with beautiful haunting vocals. Makes me ugly weep every time. No idea why. It’s the only song that has ever affected me like that. But there’s something about the idea of just a homey, simple life and how gar away that is that makes it seem all the more important.

Yeah, same with my dad. Best thing that ever happened to him was a Nigerian scammer tried to hijack his account and FB suspended the account for 6 months.

But then a week later he had some new account with no friends just for the reels. ಥ_ಥ

Zuck just realized that his main FB user base is older conservative people that he can either lose even more to X and Gab, or he can let FB turn into the wild west the users want.

His IG user base is stable, young, and left-leaning. So he still has those users in another segment of the business until some mass exodus to pixelfed that won’t every really happen.

I’m also not getting them.

Are…are we robots?

Or are we too human for the robots?

Just a civilian guess, but 2 or 3 Delta V or Falcon Heavy to put 1 payload into LEO with a command module and lander, then 1 booster with fuel. Short of using prototype lander, fabrication would take months at best. Then a Starship or SLS to get a crew, food, and water into orbit.