So yes, you can just walk into the Electronics Store (Best Buy) and purchase a dumb TV.

Just depression?! You might want to grab a little empathy before writing off something that has been a major problem in a large chunk of the populations lives. In fact, "just depression" has caused me to try to take my life multiple times. I can hardly see a "bigger problem" out there..

They were absolutely wrong as I have serious withdrawal reactions to Citalopram. It took me a month of micro-dosing down to safely get off a drug I was on for 15 yrs. And even then I was having constant brain & body zaps, that feel like short circuiting, for a full month after I dosed down to nothing. 6 mos later & I still can't sleep more than 6 hrs.

How did I know this was going to happen? Going cold turkey when my script ran out. I even told my psych about it numerous times but they just brushed it off.

As it stands right now, no. Luckily, at least for now, I'm tech savvy enough to navigate it. But the 100, mostly immigrant, elderly residents of my building will not be so lucky.

Two months ago I learned, during a water outage on a Saturday morning, that my building's new assistant manager was an AI bot from EliseAI. What was an actual emergency, it thought, was something that could be dealt with the following week. It told me that management would respond on Monday, which is completely unacceptable during an emergency water outage. I had no water for 3 days & on Monday the actual human manager waffled on why it wasn't immediately fixed & thought it was cute (he giggled & got excited) that I discovered that the assistant manager was now an AI bot.

And just yesterday, I got an unsolicited text from an unknown number that looks exactly like a phishing scam attempt, except that it was sent by the assistant manager AI bot. The text said that I had $130 in unpaid rent & had links to remedy it. WHAT?!! First, it's illegal in CA to give a tenant notice that way. Second, it looked exactly like a phishing scam attempt. I obviously didn't click the links, but I did parse them & found that they belonged to EliseAI. This also happened a month after the human manager gave out a notice about back rent that I had already asked about. He told me I had $0.00 debt on the books. So why the AI bot phishing attempt?

I perused EliseAI's privacy policy and there is no way that I will be knowingly feeding any PII into it.

I haven't tracked down the manager yet to give him a piece of my mind. But in what world is this kind of activity OK? How are non-tech savvy folks going to survive these things? Especially the large non-English speaking elderly population in my building. As far as I can see (I live in SF & am surrounded by it), we're doomed.

edit: https://www.reddit.com/r/qBittorrent/comments/14bzdct/psa_qb...

"That means residents and visitors to San Francisco will be able to pay a fare to ride in a driverless taxi, ushering in new automated competition to cab and ridehail drivers." [1]

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/11/tech/robotaxi-vote-san-franci...

btw - are they going to check ID's??

I also could not find their name on the map. It doesn't mean that it's not there, I just couldn't find them. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

The only thing I find a VPN useful for is torrenting w/o your ISP knowing. In my case, I use Surfshark for torrenting so that Comcast can't send me any of those pesky letters.

[1] https://spinfuel.com/legal/ "Spinfuel eMagazine is a professional e-cigarette news and review website, staffed and operated by people that purchase, use, and enjoy electronic cigarettes. As such, we receive sample products for the purpose of review, though more than 50% of the products reviewed are purchased by Spinfuel. We do not receive any sort of compensation from vendors, manufacturers, or anyone else for writing reviews, commentary, or guides."

Credit Unions FTW!