The secret is to phrase questions in a way the fanboys can't interpret as disloyalty to the mothership. If you ask "How do I disable this utterly insane default setting/feature", you're getting tarred and feathered. If you instead ask "boo hoo, $feature isn't working, how do I reenable it", you'll get a dozen responses telling you the exact settings you want, and 95% of the time you can just reverse the "enable" logic to disable it.

Oddly enough, the same trick works against pretty much any fandom, though there aren't many use cases for it in non-technical fandoms.

That's an argument for better moderation, not shutting down folks doing free tech support for one of the largest companies on the planet. A company literally can't buy that kind of grass-roots support; failing to even recognize its value is a sign that better days are not ahead.

As for Apple itself - Any time a real support call starts with "let's do a factory reset", I won't be replacing the reason I need support with a replacement from the same company. Their community forum is - was - the one palliating factor making iDevices viable in the real world.

I agree with you in spirit, but we need to live in this world - Why tear down a bunch of fossil fuel power plants still in their prime just to replace them with a technology that's still rapidly getting better?

Climate change won't be fixed by a revolution, more like a critical mass. If, when the current gen comes up for closure/retrofitting/replacement, the same capacity can be replaced (including baseload) with renewables for less money... It will be. What we can do in the meantime is make sure there's sufficient demand for continued improvement of renewable technology and reducing the cost of manufacturing. And if we "accidentally" move to a decentralized grid in the process because we've all paved our roofs with enough solar to meet our needs, aww, won't be crying for NextEra / Duke/ Xcel / ConEd / etc.

Large-scale emissions can be measured from orbit. Whether or not they're lying about the details, they can't lie about the overall total.

There's a bigger problem here, though - The US will never, regardless of whether the evil or useless side of the aisle is in charge, accept China's lead on any matter of real significance. If China becomes the world's (political) leader in renewables, you can bet the farm the US will double-down on fossil fuels.

We have ODD at a global scale.

There is, but we're the hos.

"Quick, go burn a quarter terabyte preloading this... Then do it again when we issue a critical day-1 patch because you prebuying idiots just keep falling for the same trick over and over and over."

The core idea is a strong point Reddit has been known for, even among people who don't directly use it - Real humans have real discussions about products.

Problem, is, advertisers do not want real humans having real discussions, they want 100% astroturf - Which is exactly what Reddit is not known for. I therefore see this going three possible ways - One, they intentionally bias the AI toward only positive reviews; two, this quietly dies a few months from now; or three, Reddit starts aggressively banning the few human users remaining for being advertiser-hostile. All of which make this service useless at best, or more likely this will be just one more minor degradation of everything that once made Reddit great.

tl;dr: I actually don't hate the idea, but I'm completely confident the implementation will be a disaster from every possible angle.

Dear Spez - Clearly Reddit is no longer "cool" enough for you to waste your efforts on. Please kindly fuck right off and let those of us who basically just want a 90's style forum have it back.

As for the bot problem - NGL, it's pretty bad, but Reddit allows it to continue. Any mod of more than one sub could trivially provide a long list of bots, yet is that ever acted on outside their own subs? No, because data collection is the entire purpose of Reddit-The-Company. Every single "improvement" they've made this year had nothing to do with user preference or reducing bots, they just want to make sure the right bots (the ones paying them) win.

So yeah, Spez can retire now, thanks. He's managed to destroy one of the top 10 sites on the internet just in the past six months.

"Dude... She... She totally used me. Awesome!!!"

He had an affair, nothing more and nothing less. I'm not defending his actions, but he didn't knowingly have an affair with a Chinese spy.

Powerful dude thinks with his dick, film at 11. This is only noteworthy because he happens to be the CEO of a particularly important company at the moment. If we really cared about his core offense, how many boardrooms around the globe do you suppose would be ghost towns?

Hey, I have no particular interest in interrupting the torch-and-pitchfork fest; but you're all hypocrites if turning the Earth to sand wasn't already committing a sufficient crime to get your attention.

He's 77 years old and it's a screensaver. A retiree pulling down an extra $80k/year "maintaining" a screensaver for a single customer was a ridiculously good deal for him for a good many years.

Whether or not he has any other substantial sources of income is likely a moot point - He's chosing not to renew the license to Fox, so presumably he's not going to starve.

"Oh, did we say USB-C? Well, yeah, technically it uses that connector but it's only compatible with Sony devices."

And jokes aside, that's exactly why Apple used Lightning connectors for so long - They're basically just a draft version of USB 2, minus the (non-Apple) licensing fees, plus a proprietary form factor.

I have exactly that, but they're not "normal" headphones, they're specifically for hearing protection.

Best thing ever for mowing the lawn (aside from paying a neighborhood kid to do it).

"It's a landline".

Or just make a Google Voice account.

You realize you can just lie about all of it, right?

Even if you desperately want that free dessert on your birthday, there's no situation in which Joe Customer would ever care about missing a call from Applebees or the like.

They also don't need to know your real name, real address (aside from the very few restaurants still doing their own deliveries), or real age (why have just one birthday when you can get free stuff throughout the year at different restaurants). Email could go either way - It's nice to have receipts and coupons emailed to you, if you value that; it's also easy enough to create disposable email addresses so you still don't need to give out you "real" email to benefit. Just make a throwaway you can abandon when (not if) they sell you out to the spammers (or their own marketing becomes indistinguishable from spam).

"Had". Google had the best search in town, 15 years ago.

Sometime between then and now, Google became utterly useless at the one thing they really did well. Their main page is bloated to hell and back, exact phrases aren't, Boolean search terms provably return results that don't satisfy the query... And the one that finally drove me to DDG, searching for "how do I disable enshittification-feature-X" will invariable return nothing but pages explaining how to turn on exactly that feature, just on the off chance someone was fortunate enough to have it broken right out of the gate (which is somehow usually not possible to do in reverse).

Don't get me wrong, I'm not romanticizing DDG, which AFAIK is basically just an alternative front-end for Bing; but if everyone is just out there to fuck us, we can at least favor the ones that bring lube to the party.