Oh no, China is stealing your data! Wait, America is also stealing your data and you don’t care? Hmm.

Yeah, it could be, but these guys aren’t looking to replace human workers with a robust, well-trained, and properly-deployed AI, they’re looking to slash and burn their labor costs with whatever they think will squeak by.

I’ve used Amazon’s AI live chat bots a fair bit over the years and I have to say they’re actually pretty good. 90% of the time they can resolve the issue themselves (at least in my experience) and faster than it would take to connect to a person. But most people don’t have Amazon’s budget or customer service-oriented business model.

Nah, cults have other characteristics too, like a particularly charismatic leader, a tendency to have an extreme us-vs-them mentality, a desire for isolation rather than spreading the ‘good word’ far and wide, etc. There are definitely things that distinguish a cult of 100 people from a religion of 100 people, for example.

You could describe literally all human activity in the entire history of the earth that way, so that’s not particularly helpful. :P

Your scale is off there… it should probably be more like: cult(-100)...religion(-80).................atheism(0).................?'

A group of people that is very serious about what they believe in, no matter how illogical it is.

It’s pretty easy to invert that statement: a group of people that is very unserious about what they believe in? That would be folks like DIscordians, the Church of the SubGenius, Pastafarians, etc.

‘Yeah I have no idea whose hand that is stuck up my asshole and operating me like a sock-puppet. whistles innocently’

Yeah, close to probably 10 years for me.

Interesting, I never even knew Brave had that stuff built in, i switched from Chrome years ago and installing ublock origin had already just become the default thing I do to any browser first thing by that point. Though I will note this line in the link you provided:

For as long as we’re able (and assuming the cooperation of the extension authors), Brave will continue to support some privacy-relevant MV2 extensions—specifically AdGuard, NoScript, uBlock Origin, and uMatrix

Which suggests that they’re planning to eventually be forced into Manifest V3 (or something similar) to gimp those extensions, but I s’pose I’ll give it a shot without ublock and see how it goes. Firefox has given me trouble in a bunch of ways (not remembering per-page zoom, hotkeys changing on me unexpectedly, issues with reddit/lemmy on long posts, etc) and I wouldn’t mind switching back.

I liked Brave well enough, but I switched to Firefox when I learned Google was going to force Manifest V3’s adblock-gimp into Chromium. I figure it’s a matter of time before Chromium-based browsers like Brave are forced to either adopt it or fork Chromium and maintain it themselves, and I know which of those two seems more likely to me.

My nephew has a Pixel Fold and it’s kinda neat and all, but he barely uses the unfold feature cause he just doesn’t need a big screen most of the time so it’s mostly just a really thick-ass phone. It’s not even great for watching movies because it’s a weird aspect ratio so you have big black bars on the top and/or sides.

Also we tried folding phones before, we called them flip phones, and the hinges were always the first thing to break.

Hm, that may be, I’ll have to go poke at it, thank you.

It would suck for a while. Then it wouldn’t.

I tried this before and it wouldn’t boot off of drive #3 for some reason. When I hit F11 in the bios I can select ‘Nobara (BPXP)’ (BPXP is the people who made drive #3) and it works tho? shrug

Convince the US that Israeli accountability is in their geopolitical interests, because otherwise the US will continue to protect them and provide diplomatic cover against international law. And, uh, good luck with that.

I just mean I have strictly a layperson’s understanding, wanted to make it clear I’m not claiming to have any insider information or any ability to actually predict what’s likely to happen. I just read a lot of news.

Be sure to remember that I don’t really know what I’m talking about and any predictions I make are likely to be wildly inaccurate, but otherwise I’m happy to help explain the situation a little bit.

I took a drafting class in high school many years ago (late 80s) and for the first half of the year we did all of our drawing on drafting tables with pencil and paper. It was crazy. Fortunately they had computers too, so once we had the basics down we transitioned to using AutoCAD.

But work-related specifically, my dad repaired fax machines until he died in 2014. So many places still use fax machines, especially related to medical and banking records, because it’s secure point-to-point transmission of sensitive information with very little chance of someone snooping on the line or otherwise intercepting it.

Israel will definitely retaliate (for the strikes that are retaliating against its strikes, it just goes round and round.) The US is moving naval assets into the region so they’re apparently taking the threat seriously. It was a combination of the US, UK, France, Germany, and ~50 other nations that voted to declare Iran in violation of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty so they likely have a vested interest as well, but Europe isn’t nearly as gung-ho about this sort of thing as the US is so they’re likely to let us take the lead if it goes that far. Iran’s neighbors have been trying to normalize relations with Israel for a while now but Israel doesn’t have puppet strings on them like we have on Israel so they likely won’t get involved either way. This is probably going to stay an Israel-Iran(-US) thing for a bit, but again it depends on how serious Iran wants to take this. I expect their losses in enrichment facilities were something baked into the cost of the program so they’re probably not too stuffed over that, but they’ve lost at least two high-ranking military commanders that I’ve heard of so far and that thing does tend to get them cranky in the pants. I suppose the Houthis in Yemen are kind of a wild-card considering they’re supported at least to some extent by Iran and have no compunction against bloodying Israel’s nose (see all the ships they’ve attacked in the Red Sea recently), but also they’re not likely to be able to accomplish much more than a token effort.

Honestly it’s all speculation at this point. And I’m by no means an expert on geopolitics nor do I have the latest information on the region, so that’s particularly wild-assed and largely-uninformed speculation to boot, so I’m not going to try to lay odds on it. My gut says it will probably just be an exchange of blows and settle down like these things tend to do, but the rhetoric is in high gear so there’s definitely the potential for more trouble coming down the pike.

You can play with online friends with a virtual tabletop like Roll20 or Foundry and voice chat like Discord. I’m in 4 games a week and all of them are online. I mentioned in another comment, but Roll20 has an LFG section taht lets you search by game systems, time, whether or not they welcome new players, etc. I’ve met tons of people this way.

It really depends, but mostly yes because people always want more people to play stuff with. You don’t need to go to a games store to find tabletop games though, hit up roll20 and search their LFG section, they’ve got a filter on their LFG search for games that welcome new players, you can sort by what time you want to play, etc. It’s mostly D&D, but there’s a ton of other stuff in there too if you know what you want to play.