I try to pry myself away from Google. I've given up the Google Maps app, for the arguably slightly-less-worse Apple Maps. I'm now 95/5 Firefox/Chrome, but I still need Chrome for some things that simply do not work well on Firefox. Gmail is nearly impossible, if I had 6 months I might try to host my own email... but I don't even know how to avoid it. I can't NOT HAVE email, ISPs don't offer that as part of their internet service anymore. You can't host it without jumping through spam hoops meant to keep everyone but Gmail out of email. And I try to use DDG, but it's just abysmal compared to Google search in its heyday... even now, Google search is often slightly better.

All of it's just some tarbaby trap, and now that I'm stuck I can't get unstuck.

Yes, and it turns out I also own the hard drives that it's stored on. The thumb drives. The SSDs. And there is no copyright police in my utility room. But there is a Plex server. The "Netflix sucks and I don't have enough control over my shows" problem was solved years ago. Seriously, you can stream this to any device you own, whether you're at home or in some hotel a continent away. You can stream it for your friends.

>I spent 3 years personally backing up my wife's 1400 DVDs, because with that many of them, at some point the discs are bound to go bad.

I made a list of our DVDs, then gave them away and spend a few weeks downloading those. In many cases, like Star Trek TNG, I ended up getting improved versions... god help me, interlace comb.

I've gone entire years at work where no one ever mentions baseball or MLB. It is a dead sport. The NBA? Sure. NFL? It's practically an official US holiday. So if they want to chase off an octogenarian fan who will buy their season tickets because they demand he get a smart phone that he doesn't want to learn to use and wouldn't use anyway... why not? They've signed their own death certificate with that. This is firmly in "Please drink a verification can" territory, and I have no idea why anyone would be apologizing for them.

The death of newspapers is quite the spectacle too. No one seems to understand how bad it is... the youngest generation can't even seem to recognize that anything is missing. We've effectively amateurized journalism so that only grifters and talentless hacks want to attempt it, and only in tiny little soundbites on Twitter or other social media (and they're quickly finding out how it might be more lucrative to do propaganda for foreign governments or MLM charlatanism). When the death of the software industry is complete, it too will have been completely amateurized, the youngest generation will not even appreciate that people used to make it for a living, and the few amateurs doing it will start to comprehend how much more lucrative it will be to just make poorly disguised malware.

It's not just you. There is something about it that is qualitatively different.

I agree with you in principle, but I worry that the United States hasn't been stockpiling enough ordinance to keep that up for very long at all. We don't keep many munitions factories on a hot standby either.

If there are people who, on principle, demand the superior product then those people simply aren't numerous enough to matter in the long run. I might be one of those people myself, I think.

It's sort of funny to think about how you'd format Thomas Jefferson's email address so that he could be credited as the author of this article or that amendment. I bet someone's already figured out how to do that though.

If the posts talked about third party interactions (movie characters), they try to see everything from all the points of view. If nothing else, because it can be interesting to talk about. If instead the posts talk about personal interactions, then people go into advice mode. Your girlfriend's bad for you and cheating on you, dump her before she dumps you. Your neighbors are assholes, get a restraining order. Your boss is sabotaging you, stand up for yourself so you can get a promotion. When people talk about interactions you have had yourself, they always see the other person as the villain, unless you come across as so unlikable that they hate you and see the other person as the victim.

LLMs picked up on that, possibly.

At risk of stating the obvious, isn't success "hacked it and no one ever found out (at the time)"? By definition, Apple could probably only be aware of unsuccessful attacks. Though that's not guaranteed either, considering all the myriad failure modes that there must be.

In the second, a cult grabs hold of the person and isolates them from their families and loved ones so they can brainfuck them. And, I suspect this has happened to the UK. England doesn't want to be a land for the English, because to do so would make them racist. They have strength in their diversity. Blah blah blah. And the English can't be allowed to talk with anyone else or they might realize how fucked-in-the-head all that nonsense is. They are under the spell of a cult, not as individuals, but collectively. And that cult won't be done with them until it's taken everything from them and coerced them to sign a "billion year contract". And to top it off, you're blaming it on them.

It wouldn't matter. They'd hire some actor to do it. If you insist that they take precautions to be sure the person in the video interview looks like the guy they meet, they'll do that too... but the one doing the work will do so remotely from Pyongyang. There might be technology fixes for this, but they almost certainly involve isolating the United States' internet from most of the rest of the world.