I am not really scared. But that’s because i am old and will most likely not live long enough to experience all the negative things that will hit us. Yet, my heart goes out to you youngsters, and i do hope you can fix at least some of the issues that are about to kill this world.

We learned that from politics in general. Vote for the lesser evil, not for the optimal choice, as there is none, sadly.

A webshop, where I wanted to buy tools. Choose things, put into cart, then go to check-out. The “check-out” was a page that they wanted you to print out and fax to them. Nope, nope, nope. :-)

How about starting your own sub - here or on Reddit? Then you are the mod.

So why is a real “thinking” AI likely impossible? Because it’s bodiless.

Why would anything need a body to be intelligent? Just because we have bodies and whoever said that cannot imagine different forms of life/intelligence? Not that i think, current LLMs have the experience and creativity to be called intelligent. i just don’t think that everything that’s intelligent needs an arse :)

Once, someone sent me an Amazon link for baby nappies, and fool me clicked on it. Now Amazon showed boomer me baby nappies suggestions for the next six months. AI at its best… These things annoy me, so I try to avoid being tracked whenever reasonably possible.

OTOH, I am old and hope to not live long enough to experience any rogue government or whatever else persecuting me for having clicked on a baby nappies link years ago; so my threat model is short term only. I keep my privacy to a level, where it hopefully prevents as many annoyances as possible, but does not hamper what I am doing online too much. If I was younger, I’d likely do more.

I could see this as a potentially helpful tool for the blind or visually impaired. Combined with a service like ‘be my eye’, that could make sense.

I think, the “threadiverse” is more akin to the old (also federated, just in a different way) Usenet / Newsgroups than web-forums. So “ScoopGroups”, maybe?

Mastodon or Pixelfed come to mind.

You mean a “contact form?” They’re everywhere.

Yes, I tried to “wget -S” some of that stuff in the Linux console. Yikes!

Yes, personally I use DDG more than Google, but we are in our 70ies, so it would be hard to convince the wife (who has been a dev 40 years ago) to change her habits. I am already looking into SearXNG, though.

I changed the user-agent of my browser to “Error: No browser installed”. Can’t be more unique than that, I guess. That was 30 years ago, though, I don’t think it will hurt me today 😆

That was my first thought as well.

Shamed be he who thinks naughty of it. 🤣

Not sure, whether it is relevant for this thread, but my phone (POCO F3) does not get any notifications if Google Play Services has no access to the internet. I scratched my head for a while to find out, why I never got them on mobile data. Not sure, what it does, if you disable the store.

The shareholders of the pharma-industry will not be happy. You have to manage a disease, not heal it; that would be detrimental for the balance sheet.

And unhappy shareholders of big pharma is definitely not what we want; if they are happy, we will be happy.