If you care, then care enough to do small, practical things for yourself. A little loop of tape. Paint marker. Even just sorting them into drawers/boxes/whatevers by type.

Imagine traveling somewhere, and run through the things you'll need to work without tinkering. Camera, eSIM, GPS/maps, more "exotic" messaging apps that for some reason people use instead of Whatsapp.

It seems like most Linux phones are barely suitable for someone that just goes home to work 99.999% of the time.

The solution is that in the West, many Boomers are isolated from their families because many of us move for work or college. Get them some friends, a community, a local shuffleboard group or something so they're not so desperate for any connection that they answer every phone call and email with desperation.

The elderly still want autonomy, and the scams adapt and change faster than education can get most of the elderly caught up to the risks. That's entirely removed from the technical aspects, which are a whole other level of education on risk. Scams always will move faster than defenders and efforts to block them.

All of which are divorced from the real problem, which is isolation of the elderly. The elderly often jump in to these scams simply because they just want someone to chat with. Many romance scammers will report that all they do is strike up a conversation with people, and quite often that's all it takes to get in deeper on an emotional level than the victim's entire family. The family treats this like a money problem, when it's an emotional gap the scammer is exploiting.

I had a neighbor once who was so poor her gas got turned off. Blind due to diabetes. Still managed to send half her meager social security check to a televangelist, because the televangelist was on TV in her face all day, and her family visited once a month. The elderly were prime candidates for 1-900 psychic numbers for decades because it was someone to talk to. I imagine your grandfather wanted to feel like he was helping someone, and scam letters gave him a perfect way to convince himself he was doing exactly that.

I could be wrong, but it may be more of an age demographics issue, really. People too young to default to internet forums as where they would go now that reddit sucks (many of whom call reddit "an app" and only know it as the post-API single platform on mobile) just started showing up from FB or IG or Tik Tok only because reddit had a certain amount of huge critical mass.

How do you generate a new key if you need one? Same process as a password reset. Does it prevent session stealers? Not at all.

Its "benefit" is grandma can't read it to an attacker. OK, well can grandma click a link and have a session stealer bork her life instead? Yeah, and attackers know that and just shift methods. Session stealing isn't a sophisticated attack, and so all that's being done is shaving a cost on PW resets in the interest of shareholder value, at the cost of security theater and locking up your keys in a single domain that holds control over our access to everything.

Futo just has all the languages I need, and does a better job with EN swipe than Heliboard. 100% convert. Plus, learning about Clearflow is a game changer.

So for feel, you start at F, go to E, loop once, then L. For fell, start at F, go to E, then loop on L. Very easy to pick up as a physical habit.

I just tested those two on futo, and it easily picked them both out.

One could argue that it's a failure of law enforcement or telcos or regulators to do enough to prevent fraud and maaaaybe bring a class action or something, but that's a massive stretch.

Considering most of those same telcos are donors and employers of large numbers of people across many constituencies of almost every nation, usually no politician has or is willing to spend political capital to shoot themselves in the foot like that. And no nation with a national telco company runs it well enough to ever even dream of spending money for something like IP addresses, they typically barely keep the lights on.

Debunked or not, people will repeat this idea for a generation or two until, ironically, anyone that's read the book has shuffled off this mortal coil.

Same as how Garrett Hedlund is neither a youthful stock owner in a computer company, nor intrinsically knows Unix shell commands.

Anyone tied to the old regime that isn't immediately, obviously, and hugely beneficial to the top of the new ranks is scrapped. Business arrangements and government contracts have to be re-negotiated to cut in new leadership. If business owners don't hedge on both sides, and get in there immediately after the election, they become castigated as loyal to the old regime, leading to more friction, costs, and work to simply get back to normal operations.

I ordered the DVD box set during COVID, later sent it to my parents, who also enjoyed the re-watch. Great show that mostly still held up over the years.

A few of these services ask you to go find your record among their lists first, so you can confirm which record you want removed using the URL of the record. So either it has to guess on that, or simply isn't doing it.

Someone spends a few hours doing a large tag mural under a freeway and it's not a painting to honor the gods because that spot on the freeway gets sun at a certain time of day.

There's often practical reasons people do things that anthropologists can incorrectly attribute to something larger.

Literally 5 minutes of online search and a white noise app solved the problem.

I know this is a post on a blog designed to sell us on Martin, but it's sort of like a movie where a single text message would spoil the whole plot. AI didn't really need to help solve this problem. Martin didn't "let" AI build a tool, he just asked (Claude, probably) how to build something that is replicated by existing apps that record sound and are activated over certain decibel levels. Comments seem to confirm many of us have done the same. Just seems a a bit over-engineered for the sake of it. Sorry, Martin.

It's so bad the FTC and states had to sue Deere over just the right to repair. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/01/...

(Late 90's Pop Group Framework)*(Dead Internet Theory) = Clicks and Streams

No one knows how much the bribe is? "Relationships are Important", "Cost of Doing Business", "An Investment in Us"