Cut to a younger me looking at HDDs in Walmart, and wondering why the fuck they were using much higher numbers than what the drive actually had. That’s when I learned the difference, and started grow my hate for advertising bullshit.

Don’t do this to me, man. Don’t bring real shit into my escapism. 😣

They can be good quality, yeah. But I’m more worried about having to basically present a digital-equivalent of a driver’s license if I want to sign up for Netflix, or watch porn, or order food. And if ID system routes every request to a central location first, then you get stuck with de-facto tracking on everything you ever do, no matter how good the company’s privacy record is. That’s what I meant by creepy.

When I was a teen looking for a job, I checked the classified section of the newspaper. Saw a job post I thought I could do and called them. Ended up giving them some of my info, and maybe my social security number, don’t remember. All I know it I put them on hold to ask my parents a question about something, and they said “anybody can put things in the paper”. That’s when I learned that scammers just post their shit in public with little to no consequence.

At my last job, the fire system kept calling the fire department with false positives so often that they told us to fix it or the city was going to start fining the company LOTS of money. One of the dumbass HR people asked if we could just disable the fire system to prevent it from making false positives. The very patient fireman had to explain that no, we could not intentionally disable fire safety equipment in a populated building, and the company had to actually fix the broken detector.

The elevators also broke down a lot, one time with my intern inside. I called the fire department to get her out, and my boss’s boss said I should have waited longer before calling the fire department, for some reason. I forget why.

I never signed an NDA, and I think I’d be fine telling you the name of this global company. But to be safe, I won’t. I’ll just say that most of the people here have probably interacted with customer service run by this company before. I AM CERTAIN OF IT.

Same. Pass phrases seem like a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist anymore. We don’t live in a world where people should be reusing and memorizing strong passwords. We live in a world with frequent user data theft and scams to glean your login info. Just last week, I started getting random login attempts from around the world for a Microsoft account I haven’t used in over a decade. No idea when or how that info got leaked.

And people aren’t equipped to memorize a different passphrase for all 30 of their accounts.

So, we should do what we always do: Get machines to make the issue easier for us to manage. Right now, that means password managers with a strong master password and secure storage.

In the future, maybe we’ll have some kind of creepy central government ID based password-less login method. Who knows?

Edit: Besides, most services require ThIrTeEn dIgIt lOnG PaSsWoRdS WiTh fIvE SpEcIaL ChArAcTeRs aNd sIx nOn-cOnSeCuTiVe dIgItS Of pI ThAt dOeSn’t mAtCh aNy kNoWn dAtE Or eVeNt oR SpEcIaL StRiNg oF NuMbErS. It’s just too annoying, and I’d have to memorize all the special characters in addition to the phrase.

Using the internet without everyone and their grandmother spying on them and blocking access to stuff the busybodies don’t personally like.

Getting ‘Alucard from Hellsing Abridged’ vibes.

These. Get some have that special dividers or pouches for extra comfort. So cozy.

This is barely related, but I’ve recently discovered it using Firefox and just wanted to share my misery. If you’re not using Chrome with the Google Docs extension, then Google Sheets will REFUSE to let you copy and paste with a right click context menu. But you can just press the keyboard keys to do so, or use the menu options to do so.

Like…what? It works, but they refuse to let you do it with the context menu, despite including them in the context menu.

If you try, it pops up a window and tells you that you have to install their extension or pound sand.

I bit the bullet and was the cringy person at work who said “peeps”. After a few months of do this, it was amusing to see the word spread until my boss’s boss started saying peeps in meetings.

Clothing stores too. Especially the “high end” ones that supposedly have their own factories just for them.

Calm down there Satan.

Never heard of a minifier. It’s a brilliant idea though.

I would have an exploding corkscrew penis. I’ll find ways to entertain myself.

I see you’re a person of culture.

“I’m switching from Chrome because they killed ad blocking.”

“OMG! Firefox takes 5 seconds to even load webpages! I’ll just go back to Chrome.”

The goal is to prevent the competition from growing.

“5E3”

I was thinking of the inserted text as a user-side thing. If someone sends you an emoji, your software inserts the name of the emoji next to it for the benefit of the user. That kind of thing.

It helps a complete newbie like me get started and even learn while I do. Due to its restrictions and shortcoming, I’ve been having to learn how to structure and plan a project more carefully and thoughtfully, even creating design specs for programs and individual functions, all in order to provide useful prompts for ChatGPT to act on. I learn best by trial and error, with the ability to ask why things happened or are the way they are.

So, as a secondary teaching assistant, I think it’s very useful. But trying to use the API for ChatGPT 4 is…not worth it. I can easily blow through $20 in a few hours. So, I got a day and a half of use out of it before I gave up. :|