I went to look at the parent comment, and I'll admit that I was disappointed that your reference was to the Vandals, and not Finnegan's Wake (as "Oystrygods and fishy-gods" was about as far as I made it before I acknowledged to myself that I wasn't *that* committed to being well-read).

Would be fun, no more cellphones, laptops, or TVs in USA

Some SCADA stuff that monitor powerlines and water utilities and all are super old, those working with 3G modem are being replaced at least, it is sometimes 20 years old technology without security. For instance it reports by SMS and you send SMS to it to execute commands and all.

What a world we live in, it's incredible LOL

The only thing the internet is is an ad platform.

My KIA has a startup screen where you can press "confirm", but there is a 7s timeout or something so it's not too bad, I just ignore it.

I don't have any objection to people getting educated on how to be literate with the technology available for doing their jobs and interacting with their world. I also agree - just because I think it's stupid doesn't mean it doesn't have value.

What I have a problem with is not with the information itself, it's with the increasing trend towards abuse. With traditional marketing, it's more obvious that it's sponsored, and there are more obvious standards as far as how far you can go with stretching the truth for your marketing. With "influencer" culture, we blur all the regular communication lines, and end up with far more advertisements dressed up as if they're documentary news.

My problem isn't with "Product X is healthier than Product Y", it's with "Did you know that people who buy Product Y are putting literal poisons in their bodies!!?!". I'm in favor of the advertising from The Invention of Lying (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stbwqSOJwL4).

There were a number of things I could say on the topic, but they all unfortunately end up reinforcing the unstated premise - I'm older and I think new things are stupid.

Be it Bluetooth, meshtastic or meshcore

When discussing a robot made by the same company that makes RealDolls, you might want to be careful with your phrasing.

I'm using Qwant for a couple of months, on both PC and phone, both in Firefox, it works well.

Wow great UID, I am here on /. since before we could have username and all too, 1998 or something? Glad to see old coots like us are still here!

I got involved in a contentious topic on Reddit recently (amazing, right?) and I went to AI... can't remember if I used Gemini or ChatGPT that day, but I asked it to provide evidence supporting or refuting the redditor's claim.

It cited as evidence in support of the claim the very post I was disputing.

Full disclosure, I use AI daily (almost always for work, because our corporate overlords require it, but also for one-off jokes when accuracy doesn't matter.) But I loathe ubiquitous, unsolicted use of AI in my daily activities and I never trust what AI tells me; at best I use it as a suggestion list of topics I can research in depth on my own.

They broke support, for the username, maybe 20 years ago, my username was "Frédéric54" but after a slashcode update I was unable to log, I had to contact CmdrTaco to debug this and it was because they broke accented characters badly. Taco had to rename my username in the database...

I had a brief (6-8 years) as the guy who could find anything online because I was able to leverage my dBase and R:Base query skills into complex searches with Altavista - (this OR that) AND (x OR y OR z) AND (not foo). Then Google came along, and eventually Altavista died.

What's really frustrating is, Google theoretically has operators for complex searches but whenever I try them, their anti-bot gatekeeper tells me I'm obviously not a human because I'm using sophisticated queries.

What would you say... you do here?

> Or turn it off, but is that 100% safe?

It seems not, because IIRC my Pixel 10 says that even if for instance a thief steal my phone and shutdown it, it will still be traceable for a few hours.