Posts by ThatOne

As he said ^.

I guess the first ambassador of American English has been Hollywood movies, which established in the ears of other countries how "English" (they don't know there are several flavors) is supposed to sound, and then of course more recently the IT world: Internet, but also the GUI's of software. For each mention of "centre" you'll see 100 occurrences of "center".

Re: ∞↔ ∘ ∘

Please use the splittoon.

> And your answer is a foist an extension on us?

It's clearly an issue of wounded pride, like "how dare you not consider us as being the standard one and only English!"... :-p

Joke aside, I have a deeper problem with this: The ability to change anything we don't like on Internet. How long till somebody makes an extension which removes all opposing opinions on the Internet, allowing you to live in you very own little confirmation bubble?... We already live in a time where denying reality seems not only legit, but even normal. There is a term in psychiatry for this.

Re: Obvious solution

> it seems you get a £115,000 annual grant for life for being an ex-prime minister

Really? Can I be prime minister, please, just for a day?... I promise I won't break anything.

> PDF are well quite unsafe to start with

That's because they decided to add scripting to them, so you could package a nice little virus dropper with any otherwise legit PDF document. PDFs get quite secure again once you disable all those scripting and automatic virus downloading and installing features.

(Which is what currently worries me with Firefox: I don't see any settings for that new PDF reader. I don't know if it is currently able to run scripts and automatically go silently fetch stuff behind my back, but the law of increasing bloat says it soon will, and I need to be able to tell it not to.)

Re: Oh, for God's sake

> Yeah, it turned bright green on me. :-)

How do you managed that? I guess you both toyed with the themes, so it's your fault... :-p

I've always kept the inconspicuous "system theme", since my browser is just a container for web pages, not a fashion statement.

Re: Leave my system settings alone.

Yup, same here, everything works, something is broken on your side.

Re: As an adult….

> That is why I said "just a limited group of classmates and friends"

Won't work because the reason kids usually want to use Discord is to follow the (many) groups about some game they are playing, and those groups are neither fixed nor well-defined.

Re: “nudge them towards different content”

> Shouldn't it be creepier that social networks constantly nudge adults towards similar content?

I wouldn't really mind if it wasn't so totally off target. I mean, like everyone I'm usually happy when somebody tells me about something I might indeed be interested in, but the automatic "similar content" algorithm is usually so broken and ad-warped that its suggestions are grotesque and a total waste of space and time. Even an occasional good suggestion is bound to get overlooked, simply because I won't notice it.

Re: Why is age verification an invasion of privacy ?

> The valid credit card seems a good way

Really? You'd trust any obscure website owner with your credit card details?

As for being efficient, do you really think your children are too dumb to copy the numbers on it, and henceforth be able to enter any website they want? They usually live in the same house as their parents, it would be trivial for them to eventually get that information.

A credit card proves nothing at all about the user: It's like saying the car owner's age guarantees the driver's age.

_{(Didn't downvote you though.)}

Re: If government wants to enforce it, they should provide the verification

> But I imagine the government holds them to SOME standards

Yes, election money most likely... Do not fool yourself, the fact they got the contract doesn't mean they're any better than Facebook and al., it only says they managed to win the contract, period.

Also, the system you describe is nice, but there is no profit in it. Quite on the contrary, it costs money! The money is in making sure juicy personal informations are handed around (and can be resold by you and your pals), so that's what will happen, as sure as death and taxes.

_{(Didn't downvote you though.)}

Re: Why is age verification an invasion of privacy ?

> Why is age verification an invasion of privacy ?

Well, it's not the age verification itself, but the way it is done on Internet. When you buy alcohol or enter a nightclub, usually a glimpse at your face is enough to assess age. Driving a car is similar in that unless you're clearly suspect you won't be controlled (I've only been controlled twice in my whole life).

On Internet this is different: You are invisible, and thus to show you're an adult you would need to give the website some personal information (ID, credit card) that website can easily lose or even willingly misuse (for instance, resell).

Given websites generally range from "not necessarily trustworthy" to "absolutely not trustworthy", this is a recipe for disaster - for you, the user. Your ID and credit card details will eventually be lost, resold, misused and you will be the one picking up the pieces. What do you gain from this? Nothing except some vague reassurance that you "saved the children". Did you? No, I don't think so: If your children want to abuse the system they will, it's easy to borrow your parents' credit card (or ID) long enough to copy the data and then pretend to be them as needed...

So it's a lose-lose situation.

Re: Bunch of whiners.

> Its also because of increasing update fatigue

It's also (IMHO mostly) because of the absolutely brain dead way Windows handles updates.

I've shortly used Win11, after many years of using Linux, and was appalled: About all kinds of update seem to require a (very) slow reboot, and they come sequentially instead of all at the same time. It's annoying and a waste of time even on a brand new high-end computer with fast SSDs, I can only guess what it must be like on older hardware with spinning rust HDs. "Nightmarish" comes to mind.

On Linux the only thing requiring a reboot seems to be a kernel upgrade (and even that only requires you reboot eventually, when it suits you, like for instance when you've finished using the computer for the day).

Re: Deja vu again

It's also about the (pseudo) scientific veneer: Take the "personality tests" which were all the rage several decades ago: Initially they were real tests used to triage mental health patients in institutions. Obviously using them to screen job applicants is pointless and would at best help eliminate the totally naive (or stupid) psychopaths, those who would indeed not lie to questions like "Sometimes I feel like eating human flesh" or some such... But science, man, science can't be wrong, even (apparently especially) when used out of context.

Re: Human-like AI

> it's hard to design a recruitment process

This ^. It's hard, if not borderline impossible, to know how a candidate will turn out after some time, after routine and fatigue have erased the last shreds of motivation he might have had initially, not to mention during periods of stress and increased workload. So recruiters actually rely on completely unrelated but visible standards, like "does that person look/sound like upper class upbringing?" or even "would I date this person?"...

_{And totally ridiculous pseudo-scientific tests ("Sometimes I hear voices in my head - True/False")...}

> how they tell the difference between "I was just in a crash" and "I just dropped my phone on the floor"

They probably don't, but that's what the preliminary warnings the article spoke about are there for: You can tell the phone that no, this wasn't a crash, don't call 911.

The problem only arises when you can't hear the warning because you're in a wild ride full of screaming people. Or obviously if your phone drops (off your bike, out of your plane) and you can't get it back to cancel the alert before it goes off.