A lot of them have wiggled around this problem by offering “atms” at the cash register. You pay with a debit card, but it’s not a normal transaction, it’s an ATM withdrawal! I don’t understand how the money is vended to the business, but it keeps it out of the store

I try. I swear to god I try. Then the DDG search results come up, and they're just dumb. It's like they trained some dog to bring the search results. If it were a dog coming up with them, you would be amazed and rightly so. The dog reads, it vaguely understands the topic you're looking for. It can sort of find something related to it, but not really relevant. But look, it's actually a god doing it. Woohoo.

Of course, there is no dog, sadly. It's just some half-assed algorithm and a company too poor to spider the entire internet often or consistently. And when it fails, as it does more often than not, I search again on Google. This is the part where I'm dumb though. I know Google won't find what I want. This is 2024's Google, not 2015's Google. It has been nearly a decade now since it returned good results, useful results. Maybe I am performing a ritual, praying that the original Google returns. Maybe I have defective cognition and an addictive personality.

I no longer even know for certain whether Google was ever as good as I remember it to be. Maybe I have imagined it.

Where did you find a laptop with a fifteen foot screen?

> What benefits are you guys reaping from taking root, these days?

On stock Android 12+ (LineageOS 19+), superuser access is necessary even to customize the default color scheme. (Except on Google Pixel devices, which have the UI for this built-in: but that's proprietary, not part of AOSP.)

The most common use cases would be easily installing and updating apps from third-party stores (such as F-Droid through their Privileged Extension) [1] and ad blocking.

1. https://f-droid.org/packages/org.fdroid.fdroid.privileged/

This is just bureaucracy, which has existed long before AI.

Ok, it's not just bureaucracy, because the mistakes that AI makes to favor efficiency are different than those made by a large chain of overworked and sometimes corrupt people. But the root issue is not AI, it's the badly-implemented policies that the AI is designed to carry out. Look at any other strained system (food stamps, DHS, IRS, not government but Google and Amazon customer support), we have real humans carrying out bad policies and it's not much better.

Most people really do have morals and don't like hurting others, but those morals only go so far when you're part of an underfunded system, apathetic from burnout, and you literally don't have the resources or ability to make the morally-correct choice. All this debate on how AI lacks empathy and common sense place way too much value on humans who also lack empathy and common sense, and while an AI programmed to do something unethical won't hesitate, history and experiments show that some humans won't either.

We definitely should be learning and understanding the limits of AI and its hold on ethics, and not delegate policies like laws and income to 100% automated systems. But AI and improved efficiency really can help a lot of government institutions. Especially when the AI takes over the mundane, and the people in charge can handle the more difficult cases. Because then those people can spend more of their "human" empathy and decision-making better.

I was going to say, having read the chart: a little surprising that Windows 11 isn't on here somewhere, wonder if it just advertises as 10.0 still. And apparently it does.

I wonder if we can get to a default User-Agent string for a browser where just none of the information it contains is accurate. Lying to say you're "Mozilla 5.0" is ubiquitous, now we've got lying about the version of the OS you're on and lying about the architecture... the only stumbling block is that browsers pretty much all admit who they themselves actually are and their version somewhere. So we need to get a browser that's lying about those things, too.