Even this doesn't ring completely true. What happens if they can't notify customers of a repair option? The customer either takes it to a repair shop or buys a new one. The former loses the company a little bit of service money, the latter gains them substantially more.

I guess there might be a bunch of scammy 'upsold maintenance' they're missing out on - "Your washing machine motor is reporting 60% brush wear and may not operate at peak efficiency. Click now to schedule a service appointment." This is much like the bulb hour warning I turned off on my projector and have happily continued to use it for about 3x the replacement life now.

Okay, it's definitely a lack or organisation, doing too many things at once (and switching between rather than finishing one at a time), a hoarding mentality, not being able to make decisions until I have all the info and having a job that doesn't mind blurring work/personal on the laptop.

Looking at my work Firefox, I have multiple different work areas I look at. There's customer issues, customer licensing, a project to transfer our licence system into various other systems, build setup/Azure dev ops, Azure portal VMs and coding. I.e. when searching for a coding issue you can open up 20 tabs to find the answer then start experimenting and not close them. I seem to have about 50 from looking into NoSQL db design and Azure web apps recently.

On the personal side there are several hundred for various music-related things - albums, forum discussions, guitar tutorials. Also seem to have random recipes I thought would be good to cook and never got around to. Some stuff for shirts, fly screens, an issue where my wife couldn't send SMS, a bunch of GPU comparisons for my nephew. A set of DnD character stuff. Slashdot, news, social media.

I'll admit it's a bit insane. Every so often I do a clear out, the time is now.

From running Firefox on both my work Windows laptop (~4 years old) and my home Ubuntu desktop ( 1,000 tabs (don't ask), the Windows performance and memory resilience is far greater.

The Linux version is greedier about sharing memory and drags down other programs eventually, especially large ones like games. Eventually some browser windows lose input to their top area (tabs, URL and men) and I have to restart Firefox.

On Windows I'm happily running various database servers and bloated dev tools like Visual Studio. Very occasionally Windows will kill Firefox if memory and swap become exhausted.

None of this is necessarily the fault of Firefox. The Linux desktop environment is not as stable as Windows, but for all the usual reasons I have no inclination to switch to Windows or Chrome.

You don't need AI.

ChatGPT, write me a procedural function to generate Stack Overflow replies;

switch( rand( 4 ) )
{
    case 0:
        return "Where's your code? Provide the sample and context.";
    case 1:
        return "Why would you even want to do it this way?";
    case 2:
        return "This looks like homework.";
    case 3:
        return "Read section 5.2.43b of the standard.";
    default:
        return "This has already been answered before. Do you know how to use Google?";
}

My memory is hazy but I had a similar realisation when I did something like shifting to a different Firefox container to log into a second Microsoft account and found it was already logged in. I don't think this is a sham, it indicates that some authentication tokens are stored on the OS and accessed by the browser.

I use containers on Firefox all the time (mostly to keep Facebook and Gmail separate from everything else), but sadly they can't defeat Facebook's fingerprinting. My understanding is they can identify you across containers and even across different browsers on the same machine.

Using uBlock Origin to ban Facebook scripts when not on their page is a good step, but again they have "Off-Facebook Activity" where other sites report back to them from their servers. This can be turned off in your Facebook settings however.

I'm probably of much the same opinion as you, and similarly don't classify myself as a climate change denier. It seems to me there is a large gap between hard science, with it's logical deductions and reproducible experiments, and broad multi-disciplinary science trying to predict chaotic systems. There's a larger gap between hard science and human behaviour, and we can't seamlessly flow from one into the other, we're in the realm of politics.

What tempers my scepticism is that I'm not a scientist and the vast majority of those who are appear to hold to these conclusions. And human behaviour is always a risk - ss we slowly adjust and migrate our industries, it's not impossible that economic pressures will cause wars.

There's a lot of ground away from the stereotype of the yokel who believes it's a government hoax. What in particular are you denying?

1. * That the climate is changing?
2. * That the change is primarily caused by humans?
3. * That the consequences for humans are severe and we cannot smoothly adapt as it changes?
4. * Something else?

That's interesting, who is paying for the network usage and portal, the manufactures of IoT devices? If so, if a manufacturer goes out of business do you lose the connectivity features? This is exciting in a sense, but feels a system equally designed for the needs of companies as consumers. It's like a hidden mobile phone is being embedded in everything you buy.

I know this is a trite thing to say, but Amnesty has gone more and more down the path of left-wing/woke micro-politics. Some of this coincides naturally with their mission of calling out political abuse, but some of it appears indistinguisable from various political factions and this has lead to a loss of credibility. It may be too far to suggest the recent report is an example of this, but many are going to write them off as tankie activists because of it. New waves of leadership generally come from the younger generations, and if this group is what have driven them to a more narrow viewpoint they'll have a hard time reforming. I hope they do though.

Yes, title should read Microsoft Including Facebook Rip-off in Their Slack Rip-off.

This subscribe-to-use seems absurd to me too, but you can imagine the reasoning.

At some point it becomes cheaper to manufacture all cars with the same hardware rather than, say, 40% with heated seats and 60% without*, not to mention dealers having to balance stock of different options.

That's done, next you have the problem of activating the purchased features for any particular car. You're not going to have hackable switches or necessarily trust the dealer to only give their customers what they paid for, so a request has to go back to BMW for an activation key for features X, Y and Z, and the customer pays it.

But these features are expensive and customers skimp on them. Let's lower the cost by making them subscription, then customers will sign up for more and hopefully forget about it and keep paying.

Frankly the main annoyance I have with this is the mental load of managing yet another financial relationship and ongoing choice. I just want to buy a car and use it, not micromanage it. Nor do I want to subscribe to a fridge, washing machine or any other life necessity that should be set-and-forget. Just stop.

* I'm reminded of the scientific calculators we had in school. The cheap model had the same board as the expensive one but no holes or buttons for certain advanced functions. Interpid students could cut holes in the case to upgrade.

I went in expecting the usual politicised diversity stuff, but this is hilarious and refreshingly unpretentious. Or rather a middle finger to corporate bureaucracy.

A new one for me too. Doing a :help :cq shows it is its own command (cquit) rather than c and q together. It doesn't say explicitly but is probably "(error) code quit".

If I had them, I'd have gifted you a funny mod point.