That's just basic marketing psychology: By referring to it with gendered pronouns, its architects are trying to establish the most basic of interpersonal human connections so that readers/customers are softer on it. When a machine fucks up, it's directly identified as such while questions are put to the manufacturer/maintainer. When a human (or even animal) fucks up there could be an abundance of grace given to them, especially if its the first time for that mistake, and only in extreme cases would anyone bother to dig deeper. (In fact, I would put money on Andon specifically deciding on feminine over masculine as there are all sorts of studies/stories about the difference in customer/public perception to women vs men in the same role.)

It's the same playbook that techbros have been trying to run for this whole LLM racket which, FSM willing, will collapse almost as quickly as this experiment inevitably does when "she" is manipulated to donating the entire stock to a charity in exchange for PR credit.

RSS is how I saw this article, too. After Google killed their own RSS reader I poked around at a few options and settled on NewsBlur back in 2016. It has a free version, but after giving that a spin I elected to go for the paid version. $36/yr has been a pretty good investment IMO, save myself a lot of time checking between multiple sites manually. I could probably survive with the free account as I don't have that many RSS feeds but, eh, at this point I'm happy to keep paying until I need to really pinch my pennies.

The layout has had minimal nips/tucks in ~10 years, I have feeds arranged in a way I rather like, I use the web version so I can easily look at from different desktops. The small dev team (I think it's more than one person now, but not by much if so) and lack of sell-out means it's avoided enshittification, tho that has meant a few periods of long outages. (Many years ago their servers went ass-over-teakettle while the dev was on vacation and couldn't respond for like two days, ope; but that's a severe outlier, these days I'll see a "Newsblur is down" notice at the bottom on rare occasion without ever really causing me trouble.)

I also use the FeedBro extension in FireFox for, ahem, personal interests. Very nice for image-based feeds, which I don't know if NewsBlur does as well, but I'm not looking to mix my peas and porridge anyway... Vivaldi, my main browser, has a built in RSS thing but I haven't tried it cause I got NewsBlur. I'm overall happy with the browser, tho, so I assume it's at least decent.

Before I started using Google's RSS Reader, I had a custom HTML page with iframes and some javascript so it was easy for me to just press "down" in a drop-down box to visit a site to check for updates/news. The thought of going back to something like that is not a pleasant one, and I sure as hell am not going to try to follow all these sites through some social media funnel, oof. In fact, this story reminded me that there are still things I regularly, manually check which I could probably handle via RSS/NewsBlur as well...

Can't say I sympathize much, since companies have been posting fake job listings:

Four in 10 companies posted fake job listings in 2024, and three in 10 are currently advertising for a role that is not real, according to a May survey from Resume Builder.

I wonder if the phrase "real knows real" has a counterpart "fake knows fake"...

bought 37% more air source heat pumps than the next most popular heating appliance — gas furnaces

Hastily written Executive Order to block the sale of heat pumps in 3... 2...

users to purchase new computers ahead of Windows 10's end-of-support date

Tell ya what, Microsoft: You buy me a brand new, at-least-mid-tier gaming rig and I'll let it run Windows 11 for at least a year.

My PC is from 2016, I only last year moved from Win7 to Win10, so that's the only way I would possibly deal with Win11 myself anytime in the near future. Honestly, at this point a given Windows OS only becomes usable once it's nearly deprecated...

Besides, everyone already has credit monitoring from the last 6 breaches.

Just one day after I got the letter for this breach, I got a notice from a credit monitoring service I have only due to different breach that my SSN was found in this breach.

lmaosob

Exactly. If they are banking on "software updates", then they need to make a mouse that can be used for at least two years with minimal function loss (nevermind "forever"). I have three G602s that still "work", but the left click mechanisms are basically shot (50% chance to either register a double-click or no click at all.) Frustrating-but-simple surgery can be done to extend their life slightly, but it's a losing battle. Can't even be used for basic, day-to-day stuff.

Meanwhile I have a Logitech MX Laser from like 2008 or w/e that still works fine day-to-day, the only major issue being the scroll wheel is unresponsive half the time. I might have to trash it sooner than later, though, because the charging contacts have worn down so much that I have to wedge it in the dock to charge.

After the third one I gave up and bought some "gamer" mouse from a company I had never heard of before finding it. It's closing in on four years and still works just as well for basic gaming in addition to day-to-day stuff, the only issue being that the internal battery doesn't hold nearly as much charge. Which still isn't a real issue, because I can use it in wired mode. A $50 purchase has lasted nearly as long as three $60-ish purchases. (Brand is Redragon, in case someone is curious.)

True, but in this case the review included photos which gives far more credibility. And, very unique to this case, Bloomberg also contacted the reviewer and confirmed she left it. (When they called, she said she was contacted by the mom-and-pop quickly who sent out a free, new replacement; she meant to update her review to mention this, but didn't get around to it. I assume it's too late to do so now, four years later...)

Thanks! Yeah, reading it now, the problem is how Amazon does returns and restocks. The article does say that Amazon recently implemented an option for third-parties to disallow reselling returns (why is this recent??) but the review is apparently from four years ago so that means nothing in this context.

Unsurprisingly, this article boils down to "Amazon is shit" (pun unintended), thus my OP was based on misunderstanding and not knowing the details. Too bad I can't delete it or attach a note to correct it, so hopefully some folks with modpoints will (rightfully) give it some negative scores.

is because the return that was the problem, was handled by Amazon, not by the seller

Ahhh, that makes more sense and, in that case, I think the mom-and-pop is right to ask for a take-down. When I read "While the company claims to inspect returns before resale" from the blurb, I thought "the company" referred to Beau & Belle, not Amazon.

The full article is account-walled (fuck that) so I can't dig in further, but if there's no indication that the review is fraudulent then why should Amazon remove it? Yeah, sucks for them, but 1) tying yourself to Amazon has horror-story after horror-story (either they knew the risk and went ahead, or failed to do research); and, 2) if there's a risk of receiving a pre-used diaper (even a reusable one) I would absolutely go elsewhere.

If they want to fix this without abandoning Amazon, they should take down the original listing and then put up two new ones: One that is for selling only new-in-box diapers (what a phrase), and another for discounted, returned diapers. Those who want to "gamble" can then buy the latter, which includes all sorts of language/caveats (and the offer to replace any "soiled" ones that slip through with a NiB version), those who don't want to risk it can buy the former. The change also gives them a perfect opportunity to raise the price of the new ones...

The premise behind the reward system has always been completely implausible and never actually had an organic user base. Think about the basic idea of it. Someone would make a comment and if you thought that comment was important or meaningful you could...pay reddit and then they'll put a gif next to it...huh? How does that make sense?

The new system sounds like ass, but I did find value in the old system: I had an esoteric OS problem that I could find many questions about but no answers. Finally, after playing around with my search terms enough, I found a reddit thread where someone had posted a solution which took care of my issue. This was after a week+ of searching, and was a very irritating issue, so I gave reddit money to gift the redditor Gold.

AFAIK, it just gave them an ad-free experience for a month and a few points to spend themselves, but I still wanted to thank them for taking the time to post the solution and, hopefully, encourage them to continue the same.

I don't know if it was a worthwhile reward for them (they DM'd me to say thanks but also they rarely used reddit themselves lol) and I am unhappy that I lost the remaining points I had, but at least I had a direct way to show my appreciation. Does it qualify as "organic"? I honestly don't know, but I think the system did make some sense.

If you are on YouTube and can't think of a video you want to watch... maybe you... DON'T want to watch any videos right now!

lol yes I do

I want something in the background while I do other stuff, but I don't want to just turn on some random OTA station. It does need to be something tangentially related to my loose interests or it's pointless, but I don't have any focused subject to search for. And I never rewatch videos (or TV, or movies), so going through my subbed channels when I've already exhausted them isn't an option, either.

Thus I turn to recommendations. (That Youtube's recommendations can really suck is a different subject.)

new forms of governance could be rethought

Oh, so this is just Walt Disney's original vision for EPCOT: A "city" that was painted as utopian, except it was privately owned and if you weren't employed by anyone (it was meant for Disney employees, but wouldn't have just been them) you'd get thrown out of it. I bet a lot of what Moritz has in mind lines up pretty well with what Disney envisioned, even to the point of using one or more shell companies to buy up the land over time.

Defunctland did a great video about Disney's original idea (and how it morphed into the Epcot we got) a few years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Another big one is (I assume) to share it outside of Twitter. If another site even does a link preview, it usually sucks, so taking a screenshot and posting that to Facebook, Tumblr, uh.... Friendster? is going to be noticed a lot more. Plus, at least Facebook promotes posts with images over text- or link-only posts so the screenshot is more likely to be shown to others in their feed than linking would.