That’s the state of computing in 2023: a browser disguised as a native app running 15 layers of Javascript is used as a friggin terminal. And nobody bats an eyelids, as if the utter insanity of it made any sense.
And the installer is 117M compressed. That’s MEGABYTES… For a terminal!
“I’m looking for a privacy respecting vacuum robot” must be one of the most dystopian sentences I’ve read in quite some time.
I mean there is no lack of dystopian stuff going around these days. But if you imagine someone saying that 30 years ago, that someone would have conceivably ended up in a lunatic asylum. In 2024 however, it’s a perfectly valid and apropos question.
I don’t know. I didn’t do the printing. The law firm did it. But I remember our lawyer mentioning that they fedexed over 20 cartons of printing paper. Assuming 500 sheets per ream and 5 reams per carton, that would be 50,000 sheets, or 100,000 pages since it was printed on both sides to be even more annoying.
No idea. That company folded before it could even respond. It was a typical dot-com with a completely ridiculous business model. That’s why our lawyer decided to fight the suit: he figured they’d collapse soon anyway, so we might as well milk the lawsuit for the publicity.
Aah yes, appimage, flatpak, snaps, progressive web apps, electron apps… The cross-compatibility of the lazy 21st century developer, where a simple IRC-like chat client comes with an entire operating system or an entire browser (which itself is an entire operating system too nowadays), takes up half a gig of disk space, and starts up in over 10 seconds with a multi-gigahertz multicore CPU.
Yeah but if you were a parent or if you are one. Would you do it?
I am and I did not. Kids need to grow up without feeling they are being watched all the time. Or rather more accurately: kids need to grow up without being watched so they can sense when they are and take measures. Kids who grow up without any personal space don’t even realize they’re not free, and that’s a perfect recipe to create adults that accept tyrannical governments without question.
My kids grew up doing stuff they didn’t tell me about, and I didn’t know where they were half of the time. And yes, at times, I worried. But it was important to let them be.
the crazy kidnappings nowadays
I’ve heard people of all ages say that all my life. This is a well-know cognitive bias (i.e. “things were better in the past”) and it’s simply not true. I’m fairly certain our society is much safer today than it was in the past.
lawsuit that claims the company has a misleading menu that promises privacy but fails to provide it.
Really? What a shocker…
Google gave users a placebo button that doesn’t work to make them feel in control. But rest assured Google has no intention of giving anybody control of their privacy if they’re not legally obliged to do so - or if they can get the law rewritten to their advantage.
Fake buttons are a very common psychological trick. You can read more about it here.
Gen-Xers are also guilty of letting corporate surveillance happen, thereby letting their children grow under the watchful eye of big data.
I never said my generation was virtuous. In fact, I blame people my age for not affording the next generation what they themselves got to enjoy. Just like we blamed our boomer parents for enjoying the good life after the war and leaving us the crumbs. Little did we know the ones after us would have it even harder.
The fight for privacy is not new, and it predates the internet by far.
The problem is that, in the past, the state was on your side in the fight for privacy. Today, it sides with Big Tech and whoever offers it the most data to conduct its own privacy violations, or pays our elected officials the most.
It’s a bit overwhelming when giant, unchecked and unaccountable monopolies and your own country, both with almost infinite resources and legal ways to do whatever they want with impunity, gang up on you at the same time.