Unfortunately, at least in the tech world it seems to be a great success. We now have walled gardens and unskippable updates. The next step, "trusted computing" (which is ultimately using a whitelist to forbid the usage of certain software), is already halfway here.

Although corruption was probably present, I would say that this kind of politics is precisely what we would expect from pro-business parties (in this case, the People's Party). They do have a long history of eschewing environmental policies as soon as any big company has money to lose because of them.

I'm from Málaga, by the way.

Now, Finnish? It's way, way more regular. Each letter is pronounced always the same, no matter the context or the letters surrounding it (there aren't even consonant groups like ch). The grammar might be more complex, and the vocabulary might be difficult because it lacks the indo-european roots from all the other languages I know. But phonetics? Yeah, it's one of the simplest languages out there, in this sense. I love Finnish because of that, and I actually listen to a lot of Finnish music (despite not understanding almost anything), just because I love the way it sounds.

Still, I with I had fewer issues with a and ä... I can pronounce both separately, but when I hear someone speaking, I still have trouble when I need to differentiate between these two.

I'd like to think that this insanity will be stopped relatively soon, since tech workers are still in high demand, so people mostly don't put up with this shit. For the vast majority of workers, who don't have that luxury, I don't think they will be able to get rid of this kind of software.

Related link from two days ago: an article from Cory Doctorow describing workplace surveillance or "Bossware": https://doctorow.medium.com/workplace-surveillance-is-coming....

Yes. There is a related issue, which is that a lot of people just can't accept that something they like is actually detrimental. Since I've never drank, I never experienced this specific kind of cognitive dissonance (if you can even call it that), but I've seen in so many people, it's depressing. There are some things that I love despite knowing that they are bad for your health (like certain unhealhty foods), but I would hate to deceive myself about it (knowing that they are bad allows me to manage the risks, like being aware that I should reduce consumption if I'm indulging too much). But a lot of people have the exact opposite attitude. Which is curious, because the damages are some times very obvious.

Unfortunately, since social media has replaced blogs as the go-to place for discussions and user-generated content in general, this means that a lot of the platforms that people use most frequently don't have an RSS feed, or have it but it's not very useful for whatever reason.

However: many, many other webpages out there do offer RSS, and I'm guessing that plenty of people use it, at least on technical circles. I use it mostly for comics and, to a lesser extent, for a few personal blogs and even news. A lot of people use it for podcasts. It has also been used to automatically download new episodes of TV shows in torrent downloaders (I'm guessing that you could mark this particular application as controversial; I won't comment on that. But it is useful at the very least). Also, if used properly, it allows for a lot of user control. You could, for example, pipe a youtube RSS into yt-dlp so that videos from a particular creator are automatically downloaded into a folder in your computer, or use any alert of new content to trigger whatever you want to do (like custom alerts when someone comments in a blog of yours, or whatever). RSS has a lot of potential, and because of that I don't think it's going away soon.

Now, you are also worried about the problem of content discovery. There is a problem here, because whenever we as users want a source of curated content, advertisers are going to do whatever they can in order to squeeze their shit into our pipes. So I personally prefer a "dumb" protocol like RSS where I just say "give me new updates from just THIS site", and leave discovery to more organic, less automated (therefore less gameable by advertisers) means. The closest I can think of to solve your problem is the usage of blog rings/networks (they used to exist, ten years ago... I don't know the state of the art right now), but this still means that there is someone doing the aggregation.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continued_fraction#Infinite_co...

For me, it's not about the amount of money, but the peace of mind (no additional bills, no additional shit to renew when I my debit card expires, and most important, I don't need to engage in any bullshit cancellation process). In the rare cases where both a subscription and a single payment is offered, I've done the math and from time to time I actually estimate that I'll spend less money on the subscription (although normally it's the other way around, of course), but even in these cases, I prefer paying upfront. I hate that this is becoming less and less available.

More generally, this is why I'm wary of indirect indicators. They never tell the whole story, and because of that they're used disingenuously in order to muddy the waters. You see this a lot in big scale PR campaings, such as climate change denialism, and pro-sugar and pro-alcohol disinformation (we had a lot of pro-tobacco as well, but it has subsided in the last two decades or so, at least in the West).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenwick_tree

I miss the times when UI didn't necessarily mean web. I guess I'm obsolete.

I'm afraid that we are going to see these kinds of issues proliferate rapidly. It's a consequence of the usage of machine learning with extensive amounts of data coming from "data lakes" and similar non-curated sources.

[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2507738.Swindled

Windows users are also suffering a similar problem because of the smartphonisation of the desktop (side note, I hate that people still use that meme about "one version of Windows is bad and the next one is good". W10 still has most of the problems of W8, and some of them are even worse. I don't think we're ever going to get a "good" Windows ever again). We need to choose between being able to run old, trusty software or being actually in control of our computer (in terms of privacy, updates and so on). Then again I suspect that I have only a few months left of personal Windows usage.

It really infuriated me, especially the usage of the word "need" and the fact that the dialog doesn't offer an option like "no, and don't bug me with this ever again". Fortunately, after hitting the "remind me in 3 days" button, I looked a bit and found an option that does make it go away forever.

My Windows is in Spanish, so I don't know the exact name of the configuration settings in English, but you can find it in the Win+I configuration dialog. Look for "notifications and actions" (or something very similar), and there, look for a checkbox whose text reads something like "suggest ways to finish device configuration to get the most out of Windows". In fact there are six checkboxes in that screen and every single one looks like an annoyance, so I disabled them all.

While this might be generally true (and it's especially true in the sense you wrote the message, i.e., there's a good chance that no one could see it coming), I would add something. It's, as I said, mostly true, but far from being the case 100% of the time. Ok, that was probably obvious, but the thing is: sometimes we interpret it as the contraposition (which is, after all, equivalent to the original statement): the ones who broadcast their intentions are not serious about it. And that's a huge mistake to make, when it happens to not be true. Someone who broadcasts that kind of intentions might be overdoing that kind of millenial "everything sucks" gallows humor you see a lot in Twitter... or they might be serious.

So, pay attention to people talking about that suicidal ideation. Many times, it's more than a joke.

BTW I also agree that in many cases an intervention can only delay the decision but not prevent it completely. I know it can be a hard pill to swallow for many people (and for good reason), but I strongly believe this to be true.