You could then build a reputation system, much like a spam blocklist, using some sort of hash of the payment details.

Really wouldn't recommend it though, all sorts of consequences for the food (if present), your hand, the hygiene of the plate and potential damage to underlying surfaces. Generally preferable to pick it up and put it down again.

FWIW, I experimented with dark theme extensions (paid and free) and gave up on them after a while: it just all felt a bit too clunky and unreliable, the flashes of unstyled pages were annoying too.

I've now standardised (this is in Firefox) on a combination of:

- Reader mode

- a very simple extension that allows per-domain custom CSS…

- …and another that lets you disable Javascript completely per site (which adds a bit of security, generally improves the experience, including the side effect of removing cookie popups.)

I can fully understand “hoarding” for people who don’t understand how tabs work, or that they can slow things down/get in the way, so don’t realise (on iOS Safari for instance), they have dozens of old tabs in the background.

What I don’t understand is:

(a) as I see it, surely the default behaviour is… you’re working on some project or other, gradually accumulating more and more tabs, the space for each starts to get a bit small, you can’t tell what they are, you know you don’t need most of them, your computer starts to feel a bit sluggish (and frankly something will be hogging memory, I can’t imagine how bad it would get with hundreds of them, never mind figures like 7,800 in the comments) so… therefore “oh I have too many tabs open, let’s close a few / them all”

(b) why don’t more people make use of History? That’s got me out of a hole many times, especially as I can often remember roughly when looked at something and Firefox offers a filtered search by page title.

c) Tab Groups make my head hurt every time I’ve tried to use them, it feels like more effort organising the groups, and knowing that sooner or later i will place a tab in The Wrong Group, and then I have to move it to the correct one, and mentally debate if I should even still have that group at all, get distracted by the stuff in those tabs instead of what I should be working on etc.

—-

Wearing my ecology hat, you could argue if barely any of their customers will use it for contactless, then it’s a waste of resources manufacturing a chip.

(Of course there are plenty of other areas of Apple’s business where they thoroughly undermine this - persuading people to buy wireless in-ear headphones, iPads that have so much glue inside when you ‘replace’ the battery they just give you a new device because it’s too much hassle etc.)

Or… maybe insisting on using Titanium means it’s an PITA adding a chip as well, versus plastic? (At least one of my UK cards claims “made from 100% recycled plastic” now).

You could well be right, though I have a couple of theories why they Apple haven't rolled it out here:

- maybe they think it'll just be too messy, having to market different cashback reward rates and so on for the US and UK, due to the capped interchange fees - too much "it's not fair" style moaning like everyone did about Black Friday, even though we don't even celebrate Thanksgiving here.

- Apple have somewhat de-prioritised UK/Europe generally given their dealings with the EU

- (as others have hinted) most banks simply aren't interested

From the outside it does seem as though there was basically nothing in it for Goldman Sachs, other than perhaps useful spending data (they must surely have got some data, regardless of Apple's privacy claims) and a bit of industry prestige for being the ones to work with Apple?

However you quickly realise that's logical, as otherwise you'd need a second cable, or to embed it in the tube somehow.

What's less defensible is not duplicating the +/- buttons on the vacuum itself, so if the coin cell battery fails you can only turn it on and off.

Though I wish he'd tone it down a little occasionally. (This is why I'm not an activist.)

It's interesting as for the first time I've found myself mildly encumbered by DRM, notably some old Apple FairPlay files I bought prior to 2007 (or 2009) - which I can't play in non-Apple software.

But these are minor inconveniences compared to servicing costs of trains, tractors and so on, which get passed on to the rest of us indirectly.

I'm not sure if "disenshittificatory" will ever catch on. I'd propose d17n for disenshittification, except there's already a d18n for a project that masks sensitive fields in databases..

Let's hope nothing further up the food chain eats crickets in large quantities. You know, like birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, inverts...

Anyway, to me, it’s a big red flag. (For the record I did use Duolingo for over a year as a paid member with a 365 day streak. At which point I stopped.)

In my experience you get a degree of dopamine from the inevitable schadenfreude felt reading of the author's difficulty or perceived "failure", but there is a steep law of diminishing returns when it comes to learning anything new, until eventually you realise this and that, even if you are not addicted to your phone, you are almost certainly addicted to something else yourself (e.g. Wordle, some podcast you could almost certainly live without, websites you would be ashamed to admit to using, damaging personal relationships, the spotting or collecting of pretty much any real or virtual object and so on.)

The secret is to (a) tell yourself not to click on the stories in the first place and reward yourself for doing so (b) look but quickly scan them. Also, actually check who wrote the article, so you can decide whether or not you know or care who they are.

My own phone tips are:

- deleting apps (especially anything social but also YouTube and anything that feeds you random content - the advice from another commenter about considering the business model of the app is good) - inserting gaps between apps on your home screen so it's not cluttered (iPhone users: do a search for "Invisible iOS Home Screen icon Template" - it's ridiculous Apple don't let you add blank spaces, but we are (still) where we are) - turning all the badges/counters off - massively pruning notifications - having a mobile browser home screen filled with icons for 'meaningful/useful' favourite sites - using text only news sites (less distracting) - placing the phone face down or across the room - keeping it in silent mode the entire time - putting it in airplane mode at night - books/audiobooks (because more effort's gone into them but also they're longer, so there are far less frequent occasions when you have to decide/browse what to listen to next) - personally I'd also recommend turning screen time etc OFF - on iOS at least you can get a decent enough idea of usage just from looking at the battery page and time limits inevitably never work.

I'm aware if I was truly free of any addictive behaviour myself I'd have skipped writing a comment about it, but I don't comment on this issue that often and the above have genuinely worked for me for quite a long time.