On one hand, I absolutely abhor governmental blanket data collection and the storage of this data. Both from a personal privacy, independence and freedom point of view, and from a “you know they’ll just leak the data and then everyone will have it” standpoint.

On the flip side:

In March, President Trump signed an executive order calling for the federal government to share data across agencies

Any sane company or government would have already done this… not sharing data between agencies/silos is leads to inaccuracies, duplication of data and work (wasted time/money), additional complexity in data storage and gathering, plus it provides multiple attack surfaces for data breaches.

Also, I read that as “if one agency needs something they can ask the other one for it” which has likely been happening for centuries at this point and this is just another “Trump said we need to do what’s already happening so he can look smart and like he’s doing something besides golfing and accepting foreign bribes”.

My wife’s parents recently passed. It took months to slog through their stuff and my wife was over it only weeks in. She dumped so much but constantly fights with herself for both taking more than she wanted/needed to and yet less that what she feels she should have. We’ve told our daughter multiple times “our stuff May mean a lot to us, it doesn’t have to mean anything at all to you. If you don’t want it, never feel bad dumping/selling/letting it go.” Out of all the stuff we all collect in life just by living, barely anything has any sentimental value.

On one hand I’ve got a huge collection of photos and albums I’ve taken and collected. I’m trying to clear some out as I go… but I’m not looking forward to that process when my parents go. My dad’s an avid photographer and I know he has a few hundred thousand photos, most of which are near duplicates and he rarely cleans them up.

He doesn’t actually know what the team ”racist” means, he just knows energizes his base to hear things called that. Whatever shocks his voters into action and belief is good publicity for him and his cronies.

To be fair, the traditional web models were falling apart prior to AI as well. We’ve gone so far past “ad driven” that Everything has to be full of ads and clickbait to drive revenue just to run the infrastructure, let alone pay for the pages creation and upkeep. Journalists and developers, services and goods are all using adword soup to try to get anything close to a useful revenue stream and it’ll just keep getting worse until we figure out a better business model. We’re going to increasingly see paywalls to try to make up for that, but a large part of people on the internet won’t want to spend money on quality sources when they use to be able to get it for free. It’s been a race to the bottom for a while and it’s at a point that isn’t sustainable long term. AI just accelerates that to the next level.

It’s okay, we’ll just get rid of the regulations on everything else so this one fits the norm.

That would be awesome, and I regularly do so on vacations, but let’s be real here: I like having a job so I can have a house and food and pay for goods and services when necessary. Being constantly connected is a basic requirement and responsibility for employment, so I’m going to choose the connection with the least impact on my daily life.

Ironically, owning a smart watch is what helps me keep focused. I can put my phone down and not be tempted to look at things on it. The watch will alert me if I get a call and only certain notifications go to it while my phone stays parked somewhere else in the house.

Honestly, I’ve been tempted to get an LTE one and stop owning a smart phone… the only thing holding me back is my job requiring one.

On one hand, having been forced to use Skype, I’m happy to see it gone. On the other hand, they somehow made it worse and called it Teams.

Thus far, they’d basically be right. Any fines are simply chocked up to “cost of doing business” expenses and since no one wants to either make solid laws against this stuff OR hold them accountable for current ones, they’ll just keep at it.

I’ve read about this phenomenon in the past. Generally it’s found that due to audio processing cost and the sheer amount of other data easily gathered, there’s no reason for them to snoop with your microphone because other data is so readily available, much easier to process, store and ship.

No company will stop attempting to achieve mega corp status in a capitalist environment. Gotta make that line go up and to the right!

Or we could, you know, NOT do that. That’d be the better option.

It’s actually pretty depressing how little money it takes to buy a senator. We’re talking hundreds to single digit thousands of dollars. Not really going to set that off, sadly.

That’s just what a scammer would say!

I actually just pulled some files off of one from 2004-ish. No issues. Found another one from 2008 about a year ago that had no issues as well. Not sure why… maybe because they were so much lower capacity? Like, one was 64MB and that was huge back then.

First off, I’m not here to defend anyone. Biden and the Democrats should have been further left, and told our supposed ally to pound sand when they wanted bombs for Gaza. But they are an ally, and these deals came from Congress, so the democrats have basically zero say in what actually happens there because the republicans hold enough power there to make it so.

Secondly, don’t gaslight me. There’s plenty of news sites, it was pretty well covered, and I lived through it. I know what I read and saw. I don’t think it went far enough, and I’m pissed off it went the way it did, but it happened. A quick Google/bing/kagi search reveals plenty of results.

Thirdly, it doesn’t really matter. If you have the choice between “we’re going to let them bomb the shit out of them” and “were probably going to let them bomb the shit out of them” you don’t really get a choice on that front. You can NEVER truly be a single issue voter anyway in the US, so the fact that you choose who you didn’t means you liked the rest of Trump’s Project 2025 platform as well. You choose who’s more closely aligned with what you think is best and then you petition your congressional representative with your position. And I know we’re all looking forward to see just how far down economic security can go.

Yeah, because Trump didn’t make it clear enough that he was going to hand over as many bombs as possible to speed the genocide up so he could build a hotel/resort there. What the hell did you think would happen with the “I’ll just buy stocks in defense contractors before I escalate a war” Republican party?

Gimme a break. I hate Biden but at least he was trying to talk Netanyahu down and setup a peace deal. Biden even held bombs back until the republicans threatened to impeach him. Do I think he should have stuck to his guns, absolutely, but it’s congress that makes those decisions, not the president. Either way, thanks for choosing the worst timeline, directly or indirectly it doesn’t matter at this point.

passengers will also be able to upload their passports to their phone and travel through airports using their face for verification. Instead of manually checking in, which would let airlines know who intends to board their flights, airlines will instead be alerted when passengers arrive at the airport and their face is scanned

They can’t even reliably scan a QR code, how can they pull that off with 100% accuracy?

Because X is definitely the right place for that, and something older generations will have access to and know how to use…

Can we stop this timeline now?

Honestly, if I were TikTok and saw this, I’d just shut off all US access to TikTok, make it clear the Tarrifs and Trump are the reason, and watch gleefully as a good % of the US that use it start revolting against Trump.