That was my first thought. If I walked outside and saw some douchebag in a paperboy hat writing on my vehicle with a permanent marker I would start throwing rocks at them. The little game of fraud cat and mouse I play is between me and the government.
I wasn't aware that mental health apps were a thing that existed, though I have seen quite a few that have the opposite effect. I always assumed I would be dead and gone before we got to the point where people cried into their electronics in exchange for positive affirmations and pills. I think I have finally done it. I have lived long enough to see the dystopia.
My kid goes to a small school and they buy new chromebooks every couple years. Most of them don't make it to that two year mark. I offered to fix some of the broken units for them for free since they don't really have an IT department, but I couldn't get 90% of the parts I needed. The parts I could find weren't justifiable over just buying a whole new chromebook. I guess people will tolerate planned obsolescence as long as the item is not too expensive to replace, but it feels like a huge waste.
I wasn't overly excited about my child having a google account either, but at least I got them to let me make a throwaway dummy account for him to use instead of his actual information.
I switched to Arch as soon as ubuntu started pushing snaps and never looked back. Of all the reasons to hate snaps what did it for me was the loopback device spam when trying to list block devices. Canonical has a track record of doing things the community doesn't agree with, carefully reading all the feedback, and then doubling down on whatever terrible idea they had and continuing anyway.
I don't use tap to pay so I decided to do away with that attack vector entirely. If you shine a flashlight through your card you can see where the antenna traces go. One hole punch later and I don't have to worry about it at all. These stories about cards being read from several feet away sound like bullshit. I am more concerned that if I leave my card somewhere it could be picked up and used for several small purchases before hitting the tap to pay limit. We just now got to move past signature based transactions to chip and pin, so why they would immediately add a feature that bypasses the pin is beyond me.
I don't know what they are doing. Google search is so bad that people are appending site:reddit.com to every search just to find something that isn't SEO spam, and bard feels like it's from five years ago. Whatever they did to google search a couple years ago was sudden and quite noticeable, so I am not sure why they didn't revert immediately. I guess they thought since they had no real competition they didn't have to worry about it. As soon at it started ignoring my quotation marks in searches so it could continue to feed me pinterest garbage I jumped ship to a paid search engine. As far as bard goes I think it's dead in the water. Nobody wants to use the 4th best LLM on purpose.
It's pretty amazing. I forget what I was searching the other day, but it was a fairly straightforward general programming question. First page google results were blogspam and weird aggregate sites. I went to ddg, pasted the same question and got a serverfault top result that answered my question precisely.
I like ddg, but they recently stopped honoring quotation marks, and google started honoring them again.
Google search is still generally unusable, but when DDG goes into “too few hits” mode, I find myself using g! to good effect.
This is after using DDG for about a decade, and never once having g! produce better results than it.
Anyway, I’m confident that llm integrated search will make these problems 100x worse. Now, if it can’t find questionable blogspam, it’ll just start pathologically lying. Great.
Counter-anecdote - I was searching for an error message verbatim recently (can't remember if I used quotation marks or not). Google literally had zero results, but the first DDG result was the exact one I needed.
Given how fresh the DDG result was (< 48 hours, from memory), I did wonder if Google was slower in updating their index.
I've been using ddg for years but I still have to use !g almost daily when searching for a particular page on particular domains because ddg just seems not to want to index them properly.
I found out that if you add about 60 decks and then hit shuffle it breaks physics, space, and time. I am using it to play solitaire now and it works well.
