That's why I am 100% invested in buggy whips.

Just make selling people's data illegal and be done with it.

That will get rid of about 90% of the BS "Tech Companies".

Thanks for confirming.
Always nice to be validated.

It is peak irony that - honestly - the whinge about how miserable the "internet" (as a broad synonym for social media, I guess) is, is followed by one of the most authentic, non-political*, most Old-Slashdot-Flavored engaging discussion I've seen here in at least the last 5, maybe 10 years?
Thanks, this was a nice post & engaging discussion. Even the people I disagree with on balance were making persuasive points.

*so far. It's 2026, I don't hold much hope it'll remain pristine.
Even my simple posting here, I may have tainted it. I have a lovely anon-stalker (I am pretty sure I know who) that follows any post I make with political bile, regardless of the subject.

From a 1960s comedy:

Interviewer: "Have you ever had any experience running a high-speed digital electronic computer?"

Virgil: "Yes, I have."

Interviewer: "Where?"

Virgil: "My aunt has one."

It was an absolutely absurd thing to say in 1967, but in 2026 the joke is about as dated as anything can be. I wonder if young people today even get it.

I don't know when you went larval, but your low uid suggests it was probably a very long time ago. I speculate that a few decades back, a type of tool once thought to be for business (which IBM had earlier predicted had a worldwide market size of about a half dozen) somehow fell into your hands, and you fell in love at a personal level. No? Did I guess right?

In a lot of industries, people learn about tech at work first, and then maybe adopt it personally. But with computers, at least for GenX-and-later, it mostly worked in the reverse: you get a personal computer and master it, and then when you're 18 you show up at a business totally loaded with years of experience and skills.

Why? Because unlike Bessemer converters or bucket wheel excavators or magnetic resonance imaging machines, computers are cheap. All the "capital" (if you can even honestly call it that) you need is just a few thousand dollars at most, maybe even just a few hundred.

The way things have worked in the last few decades (I'd think especially for old Slashdotters) is that the "professional" tool was already very familiar long before you got the job where you work with it. And anything involving cheap electronics is going to remain like that. Unless it's just totally illegal, there's no way millions of people aren't going to have it and use it personally.

Just ban them all in public, except perhaps for people with special needs (who could wear e.g. bright red ones with polkadots -- that nobody else wants to).

All the crap I wrote above was just to say: special needs is everybody. Don't hop in your time machine and tell 1979-me that I can't use a computer, or I'll become a very angry kid, and by 1984 I would consider it an inexcusable Act of War.

Now if you wanna mandate wearable displays be bright red with polka dots, you might get away with that. But don't be surprised if you end up changing fashion itself. Wearable displays don't really appeal to me yet (they haven't been commoditized where I can choose from many manufacturers, all of whose product can run the same defacto-standardized Free Software, just like how an x86 motherboard can) but maybe some day the market will produce a wearable display that I would be willing to use.

If it's bright red with polka dots, then I just might end up losing the black-band-shirt-and-jeans look, and start dressing like the love-spawn of Liberace and Quetzalcoatl, just so my glasses match the rest of me.

searches made through its AI Mode generate less revenue than traditional search

Have you thought about disabling AI Mode and returning customers to traditional search? It'll not only make you more money, but result in happier users too. Everyone-except-Nvidia wins.

I'm surprised that Reddit, of all places, is emulating twitter?
As far as I can tell "for you" is just a firehose of shitty people that disagree with me politically.
On the other hand "following" is (I guess?) derived from the posts I've actually followed, and that's a firehose of shitty people that I ostensibly agree with, politically, but clearly don't in nearly every other respect.

I think the intent is that one feed will engage me angrily, while the other will engage me affirmatively.

In fact, together they've made it astonishingly easy to never check twitter, ever. Kinda like facebook and reddit.

1) the IAU manipulated what they knew would be an unpopular discussion and the vote they wanted was pushed quietly to the "cleaning up junk" phase of the conference when the majority of attendees had LEFT. Does that sound like a kosher way to handle an IAU issue that the general public might actually, for once, care about? Sounds like a deliberate coverup to me, maybe you have a different view.

2) Nobody yet has explained why the list of planets had to arbitrarily be constrained. Why not expanded? "Eris is more massive, if we included Pluto, we'd have to include Eris" yeah, and? What would be wrong with ADDING Eris? Or if we found larger objects, why not add them? The "must clear their orbit" is vague handwavy bullshit. Depending on your definition, EARTH hasn't 'cleared' its orbit, either. And what happens if planet 9 turns out to be a Neptune-sized gas giant in the Kuiper belt? Would the IAU say that's NOT a planet?
In fact, EVERY SINGLE PLANET has other bodies in its orbit - Jupiter has tens of thousands.
The fact that later in the ruling the IAU simply decreed "(these) are the 8 planets" shows that even they recognize their definition is functionally worthless.

Yes, I continue to object to arbitrary, unjustified rules passed en camera by a small body of elitists. No matter how long ago, ESPECIALLY when they're so stupid that they set themselves up to be almost inevitably self-contradicted and need revision...again.

(I could bring up some other issues that are "done" that we continue to debate, if you'd like examples? But I think as a disingenuous AC you're already aware of them.)

TSIA

If you're upset about "everything":
a) take your ritalin or prozac or whatever cocktail of anxiety meds you're on; you missed a dose.
b) you control you. Nobody MAKES you addicted to the social media feeds; yes, absolutely they are CRAFTED to be the visual-cortex version of heroin. I get that, they are meant to be addictive as fuck. NEVERTHELESS you are (supposedly) a human with agency. Just. Put. The. Fucking. Thing. Down. Go for a walk. Read a book. Turn off your router for a while, if that helps.

Otherwise you're just a herd mammal bleating that you don't like the pasture YOU put yourself in.

You're the one who politicized this, not me.
Or did you forget that you asserted ex nihilo that Trump was going to get it from Putin and then throw Zelensky in the conversation?
You just used those names what, coincidentally? Having a seizure?

Precisely what "stupid shit" re Helium is happening today, that's not just in your hate-Trump fevered imagination? Looks like the US designated helium as a critical resource - that's not "stupid shit", that's sensible.

I don't see any point in your post BUT the political, thus my point that if we're picking sides, it was democrat that put us here.

There's growing evidence for a ninth planet.* https://www.skyatnightmagazine... (real stuff at https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.172...)

I've seen some vastly speculative bullshit (including still today "what if it's a micro black hole!?!!??!!?" which is fantastically unlikely, but the evidence does seem to be accumulating about a substantial TNO 500-700 au out.

*assuming the IAU doesn't again set up a bullshit scam-vote after nearly everyone left the conference to deprecate this one too.

Remember when we were all techno-optimists who thought we would end up with 401Ms and even 401Gs? We're as dumb as the flying-car believers.