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.

Oh man, that's a name I haven't heard in many decades!

I built my career around dBase, starting in 1986; evolved to Clipper around 1992. My Clipper work kept me busy until nearly 2000, and I was still patching my old Clipper apps well into the first decade of the new millennium as I made the transition from developer to DevOps working primarily in SQL and Powershell.

I think my argument there is that we shouldn't be saying that what they did wrong was to "use infinite scrolling maliciously" as much as the broader concept of "creating addictive content".

Please forgive the poor comparison, but it's against the law for me to cause bodily harm to you. There might be additional laws that indicate that my reasons modify the nature of the crime, or the implements I use change sentencing, but the underlying law is about my actions and how they cause harm.

Similarly, I don't believe the issue should be about what UI elements the companies choose to use, but about the underlying actions / harm.

There's no need for a refresh button. If the page wasn't correct the first time around, that's on you.

Historical data lookup is the first one that comes to mind.

I want to pull back data, and keep pulling back more data as I go down further. This is a context where the data has value - it's not trying to keep me on the site. I'd *love* it if my bank would do this for me.

From a purely social media perspective, you're right, there aren't really any good places for it. But I'm just saying that the concept of a UI element that grabs more data when you get to the end isn't fundamentally bad.

My initial argument, before I just started attacking social media, was that if we start legislating certain UI elements as problematic, then we end up in a situation where legitimate use cases get outlawed, and companies actually trying to create good products end up hamstrung.

Can we quit trying to attack UIs?

I understand that an infinite scroll can be addictive. It's also an incredibly simple UI feature that has plenty of viable use-cases.

As long as we look at these companies in terms of what they *do*, rather than what they *are*, we're never going to actually solve any problems.

If you ban this or that feature, they'll use their teams of psychologists to find something else that isn't specifically regulated and use that feature. Or they'll have a litigation of lawyers come in and argue that the thing they're doing doesn't fit the particular legislation. But we need to come to the point where we all agree that artificially trying to force someone to engage beyond the point they normally would is not "making a better product", it's just sleazy.

I get the argument that people can make choices to do what they want. I support that. But we also shouldn't collectively turn a blind eye to companies going out of their way to milk psychology and exploit people. Just because I accept responsibility for the fact that I spend more time on YouTube than I should doesn't mean that YouTube gets a pass in the matter.

I 100% agree that parents need to be way more engaged, and that teens shouldn't get unfettered access to social media. But just because some parents are less engaged than they should be doesn't excuse bad behavior by Instagram / Tiktok.

Personal freedoms doesn't have to be diametrically opposed to companies being responsible. I'm all for a smaller government with less stupid crap, but if a multinational conglomerate isn't going to make right choices on its own, then oversight ends up as the only viable option.

I completely went off course with my argument, but as a curmudgeon, I stand by it.