For several years now, any reasonable simple question has had Search-Engine-Optimized useless shit at the top of google- these days it generally can be counted on to fill the entire first page. Google helpfully highlights the relevant text by default so they spend money making sure google can't displau that text but instead displays an ad.

I just googled:
odds of rolling three sixes on three dice

The AI has the 1/216 answer and the reasoning and the math and the links to the people on forums explaining all that. That is actually the search engine right there; it actually links me to people who have explained this to each other over the years.

The top link is to reddit and claims the odds are "180 to where", and eventually has a bunch of links (reddit and google signed an agreement to stop other search engines from reading reddit well). If I click in there I will find the answer. But what if it wasn't?

Under that is stackexchange, and all the wording is chosen so I can't see the answer. Clicking through the answer is present at least. Below that is a dice probability calculator that can make the answer, and something called thoughtco which has the answer in the summary. This is the first non-AI spot on the page with the answer.

Overall the AI summary has been godsent, but if more time has been spent fighting SEO it would not be so needed.

I'm on my third set of LUENX sunglasses. When I inevitably lose this pair (the fate of all my sunglasses), I'll probably buy another. I want purple shiny polarized glasses, they sell those. The say LUENX on the sides. The microfiber cloth that comes with them says LUENX. The little test card for polarization says LUENX (you can only read it through polarized lenses, of course).

So how are these a sketchy brand, or a knockoff, or whatever? These things work fine, arrive at my door the next day, and are like 15 bucks. Am I to believe that these are somehow a bad buy for 15 bucks? Am I to be enraged that I could probably get them for 9 dollars if I went directly to their website, or to alibaba or something?

Anyone have a suggestion for a nice pair of shiny purple polarized sunglasses- ones that aren't Luxotica (aka EssilorLuxottica these days)?

If you charge a small fee for account creation, you can get almost all the benefits of having someone's social security number and picture ID, for almost none of the cost of having to deal with such a toxic "asset". You can even offer degrees of anonymity when taking payment.
Now obviously, someone will decide to spend 5000 dollars on bots to advertise or delegitimize voting, but that would happen even if you had the picture ID thing going on. None of this gets around having to police your platform to remove comment bots, vote bots, etc. You still have to do that. But charging 5 bucks to 25 bucks to make an account creates a massive barrier to the unlimited influx of captcha solving AI chatbots, because bad actors simply can't afford to pay the amount required to flood your database will advertisements and propaganda.

They really are not. I mean, there's some post here or there that is probably botted or like AI assisted or something, but it's absolutely nothing like bluesky, reddit, and worst of all, twitter. Those places are robot playgrounds.

This isn't news. Remember how it was reported the last time it happened?
https://www.thedailybeast.com/...

Proton mail has never, despite what is being claimed, promised to not store your IP address. A subpeona can compel them to do so, and it has in the past, and this will continue to happen. If your security depends on your IP address not being unmasked, you need to use at least one VPN.

If you self hosted then the subpeona would be delivered to your ISP, which will happily comply- likely quicker than protonmail.

NO EMAIL SERVICE WILL COMMIT A CRIME FOR YOU

If you only connect through VPNs, then the email service will provide the VPN's IP. If the VPN is then contacted and they have no logs, then they will not be able to correlate the IP to a user. This is your only chance at anonymity under these circumstances: some VPN plus some private mail service that never knows your real IP address. Note that proton is a strong choice here because if you previously connected via your real IP they won't have a log of that; they'll only start saving your IP when they get a warrant. There are other equally strong private email choices, but ALL OF THEM WILL DELIVER YOUR IP IF THEY KNOW IT.

It wants your email, and lets you set a username.
But it doesn't give you a password.
Now when you want to login- or really, as these things go, every fucking time- you get to go to your email and dig out their confirmation. It behaves like a site to which you have forgotten your password each and every time. Total ass.

Incorrect. If a million people signed on with my actions above, only effective solutions would be considered. While that won't happen, there are plenty of cases where the threat of people acting out of spite keeps those in power in line to at least some extent. Spite is great.

Don't forget spite. If they get rid of first class for carbon reasons I will personally find a way to add 10x more carbon than whatever their estimated percapita carbon savings is, even if it takes burning a barrel of oil in some fireproof place. These people can cram all this performative bullshit up their asses. You want to reduce carbon, make it so that if I buy furniture it wasn't grown in Canada shipped to China processed into furniture pieces shipped to somewhere to be clicked together and qualify for a "made in" tag then shipped everywhere. A million effective centralized solutions and they keep doing the "it only counts if you personally suffer" narrative. Pants-on-head retarded.

"The purpose of a screensaver was"....
A live feed so that you could be sure all the migrating toasters had safe flights.

In many cases Home is preinstalled. Obviously you can do a full install with a better version that you buy, but I am pretty sure that takes a lot longer.

This is how you install Windows, the only safe way. Obviously Windows is an ever-growing problem, but don't talk shit on the utilities that preserve some of its Linux-like features ("not having to log in to microsoft.com to use your computer" being a top Linux-like feature).

Wait are you saying it DOESN'T start in the working directory either? I thought you were saying that everyone should run from commandline and never need a second thing. Not that it fails to support that either. It didn't even occur to me at all that they wouldn't support that. Outrageous.

Who fucking cares about your trivial use case? A competent program solves yours effortlessly, starting a filepick in the working directory is a sensible default and not what is being discussed.

The problem is for anyone who starts it from an icon, or who works from multiple subdirectories (for instance, when I edit with LibreOffice I'm in three subdirectories often, or if I'm building an iso in a CD burning program. Obviously filepickers should not be written assuming that you have one working directory and you started it from a commandline.

A filepicker should allow you to type /home/(yourname)/whateverA/whateverB and then display that list. Outside of shit that the GNOME devs have touched, all of them have done so for decades without issue. And no, memorizing Ctrl+L and then having to type /home/(yourname)/whateverA/whateverB/Long File Name Of Thing.xml doesn't cut it- I want to browse that fucking directory.

I don't even know what GNOME wants, except that they view it as a victory whenever they make something shitty for real users. Like that's their actual goal as near as I can tell. And once they get rid of this standard, they'll bury the option to turn it back on it some weird place that can't be accessed except by a special Power-user type extension, which you have to grab separately and gives you shit about how you're gonna break stuff if you use it.

GNOME is a fucking disgrace. Every time I have to use it I try to configure it (if allowed) and then just push through it the best I can. Obviously any machine I have root on doesn't have any of that shit.

To make it stupider, other desktop environments use their GTK3 file selection thing, which is less functional than a windows dialogue box from 1993, generally unable to change to a given manually entered directory completely. Everything they touch gets so bad. I wish they would go the fuck away and never write any more code.

100%, recipe "writers" delenda est

I wish their servers melt to stone. A miserable pile of ads.