A) use ad blocker and noscript - the latter only allowing domains I whitelist
B) ignore all sites that insist I turn the ad blocker off

Yes, it can be inconvenient at times, but ads have proven to be unsafe again and again.

Yep, good luck scrolling a website, downloading a PDF instruction manual, and zooming in on a section to see the wiring diagram - something I had to do yesterday on my phone. Even that was so painful compared to the PC screen that I went and used my desktop instead.

Plus people buy these phones with gigantic screens so they can play casual games on them. I'd love to see someone directing their army in Boom Beach or building a fort in some other game.

I've been programming for decades, and have run my own software business for 25 of those. A couple of years ago I started spending more time making money from one of my other passions ... carpentry and woodwork. At least those won't get screwed over any time soon.

Douglas Adams was one of the writers in the Tom Baker era, to mention one example.

I know several devs who removed their apps so their home address wasn't published for everyone to see. Of all the stupid moves by big tech, this was one of the dumbest.

Funny, I just mentioned the exact same game. Elite Dangerous still takes up way too much of my time.

Before Elite most games had 3 lives, you lost them one by one and started again. Then Elite came long and you could play indefinitely, in 8 galaxies of 256 planets each ... all crammed into 32k. Space trading, combat, ship upgrades, even an alien race.
Did I forget to mention it was all rendered in 3d wireframe?
There were two sequels, and then Elite Dangerous was released in 2015, and is still actively developed.

My experience with AI so far has not been promising. For example, I asked one of them for a list of childrens' encyclopedia published in England between 1970 and 1974. It came back with an autobiography of a slave from the deep south.

I asked it to look for a title I read as a kid, which was a graphic novel about Einstein's life and discoveries, probably published around 1972-1978. It came back with a book on Einstein published in the 2000's which was written by two women who weren't even born in the 70's.

There are several similar examples where it completely ignored the parameters and just threw out any old stuff. When I pointed the errors out, it said oh yes, you're right.

If it knew I was right and it was wrong, why didn't it just say 'I DON'T KNOW' or 'I CAN'T FIND WHAT YOU'RE LOOKING FOR'.

The issue for me is going to a future bookseller website and getting a list of 100 new release novels, where 99% of them are AI-generated spam. If I want a novel written by AI, for some strange masochistic reason, I'm not going to buy it - I'm going to generate it myself using my own prompt. Therefore, yes, it would be handy to filter out all the desperate cash grabs.

I've been saying (in print) for about 30 years now that the way they'll eventually get humans out of the driving seat is by charging them about 100k per year for insurance if they insist on taking the wheel.

I have 2 older Windows 10 gaming PCs which always seem to be updating something or other. One is stuck in a 'windows could not apply this update' loop, can't find anything to resolve it other than 'reformat and reinstall' which is not happening.

So now both of them dual boot Ubuntu. The game I use most (Elite Dangerous) works flawlessly. Both HOTAS work fine. My home brew button-box works fine. The systems boot faster and updates are painless.

I'm sure there are some games with anti-cheat runtimes which might not work, but if Valve leans on those publishers maybe it can happen.

One major plus with Steam gaming on linux: even the old windows XP-era titles work, which is more than I can say for Windows 10/11.

"Social media companies also won't be able to force users to provide government identification, including the Digital ID, to assess their age." reported in Australia's ABC news.

Except that "Social media companies also won't be able to force users to provide government identification, including the Digital ID, to assess their age." (as reported by Australia's ABC news)

I have 3 older PCs that can't officially run Win 11, but I do have Steam accounts on them. Recently I set them up to dual-boot Ubuntu, it runs the games I want to run just fine, but also runs some older XP-era games from my Steam account(s) which no longer work on Windows 10/11.

I've been writing and publishing sofware and apps written in BASIC since the late 80's (and tinkered with it before that on Sinclair and Atari ST machines). Multi-user accounting software with task switching on PC-XTs, share market software for Windows 98/XP, novel-writing software for anything up to and including Windows 11, Android and IOS apps, MacOS software, you name it.

In my (long) experience users don't give a damn what their software is written in as long as it's fast, effective and free of bugs. It's not about the programming language, it's all about the programmer(s) you hire in the first place.