I don’t know why he’s associated with socialism and at this point I’m too afraid to ask.

I was annoyed, like the OP, then I read your comment and now I’m impressed and have an urge to buy a copy of OED I most certainly will never open. They owe you a commission on my sale.

Alright youve convinced me, I’m a sucker for drama

Whenever I come across YouTube drama I’m always a little sad that I’m out of the loop and can’t participate in whatever is going on and tempted to go down a rabbit hole to figure it out, but then I realize my ignorance has saved me probably hundreds of hours of time that would otherwise be wasted worrying and arguing about things that haven’t the slightest impact on my life. Still, for my sake, enjoy your drama guys.

There are no red flag laws in Maine. There was no legal way to take his guns even if they thought that was necessary. Also, the christofacist supreme court is set to strike down laws that prevent people convicted domestic violence from owning guns, which will chip away at the legality of red flag laws everywhere. Happy Thursday everyone!

I’ve used it just to access Bing Chat, which has become my go to AI chatbot for a couple of reasons: 1) you theoretically get access to gpt 4 without paying 20 dollars a month, 2) it cites it’s sources, and 3) it can create images via DALLE from within the chat (which is handy, you can chat with the AI to help you think of an image prompt, the just say “ok make an image based on that description”). Other then that, i use Firefox at home. At work our choices are chrome or edge, so I use edge because of bing chat and I kind of like the layout better. It feels like choosing between buying something from Amazon or Walmart, which terrible corporation do I hate more in a given moment.

I’m sure you’d be fine, the baby will absorb most of the impact.

It’s all the coffee you drank you make that poop a reality.

Without ice cream, there are only screams.

I just want you to know you just gave me my new life moto

I know literally nothing about computers and I’ve been daily driving Linux for well over a decade. I just use Ubuntu and I’ve been pretty much using all the default settings, apart from some customization here and there. There was a time years ago when I wanted to learn and tinker, but in reality I never learned to use the command line for more than running updates (I still sudo apt-get update cause it makes me feel like hackerman).

My point is, Linux is super easy to just set up and run. If you want to learn more, there’s plenty of opportunities for that. But it’s not something to be intimidated by at all. A lot of the community is enthusiasts (who’ve I’ve found extremely helpful back when I used to have problems) so you’ll hear more jargon in these spaces. But I’m sure there are tons of others like me that use Linux just fine day to day without understanding a ton about computers.

That’s hilarious, but more than likely that’s exactly what happened. I listened to someone explain the process on a podcast recently, can’t remember which one maybe the Vergecast or vox today explained. But the example they used is you go to a country club you hang out with a friend who just bought a Porsche or whatever. They use your phones location to know you are always going to this location and sticking within a few feet of this other phone, the owner of which has the new Porsche. Well they figure that’s your friend and he’s probably talking up his porche, and your in the right demographic to buy a Porsche and you haven’t bought a new car in x years, so guess what now you get Porsche ads. So what you described perfectly fits that example, they figured you’d all be suckers for some totes.

Yes! I was going to mention that, I heard about that years ago, so things have to be way more sophisticated now. Just looked it up the story was from 2012, and target was just tracking credit card numbers and noticing when women started buying things like unscented lotion. So this is waaay less sophisticated then the information companies are sucking up in present day.

As Pole’s computers crawled through the data, he was able to identify about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a “pregnancy prediction” score. More important, he could also estimate her due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to very specific stages of her pregnancy.

One Target employee I spoke to provided a hypothetical example. Take a fictional Target shopper named Jenny Ward, who is 23, lives in Atlanta and in March bought cocoa-butter lotion, a purse large enough to double as a diaper bag, zinc and magnesium supplements and a bright blue rug. There’s, say, an 87 percent chance that she’s pregnant and that her delivery date is sometime in late August.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/?sh=75e6dd266668 The story I found was a girl who got a target mailer for pregnancy stuff and her dad was pissed, only to find out later that his daughter was im fact pregnant. Target changed tactics, instead of sending mailers with just baby stuff, they start sending personalized mailers with some baby stuff mixed in, increasing as the due date approaches. And again this was 11 years ago and just used credit card information and target purchase data. It’s wild to think of what they can do now.

Here’s the fun part, they don’t need to listen to you. You are far more predictable than you realize. They already know everything about you, what you search, what apps you use, what kinds of exercise you do and when, what you eat, what articles you read, movies and podcasts you consume, music you listen to, what you buy, where you go, who you hang out with, and everything about the people you hang out with. Every minute of your life is meticulously tracked and analyzed and compared to the hundred thousand people who are just like you in terms of interests and patterns. They can predict to a scary degree what your thinking before you might even realize it yourself. They know you better than you know yourself. Why waste the resources sifting through hours of recordings when they already know everything going on in your head from the million data points you voluntarily transmit to them everyday?

The other part of this to keep in mind is that you are bombarded with ads all day most of which you ignore. It’s just that those few times where they manage to hit a straight bullseye, showing you an add for something you were just talking about or even just thinking about, those are the ones that will stick in your memory.

Investors care about the potential for future growth and thus future increased profits. They don’t give a shit about what a company is doing today, except to the extent it is predictive of the future. Investors look at this and see lots of activity of users who actively hate the company, that’s not future growth.

To take an unfortunate example, imagine if Bud Light had a bump in sales because a bunch of right wing lunatics were buying extra just so they could make videos of them throwing away, shooting, blowing up, or otherwise destroying the beer while vowing never to drink it again. Does an investor look at that bump in sales and say “oh neat, look how well Bud Light is doing, I should invest!” or do they say “A lot of Bud Light’s core consumer base is pissed as hell and probably not going to be buying this product in the future, there is limited potential for future growth, I’m out”?

Ah there was a time when Prime Day was kind of fun, a Christmas in July kind of feeling. But now Amazon is just so loaded with knock off junk that doesn’t work, spam postings, review manipulation, etc I absolutely dread shopping on Amazon for anything other than something I need right away, can’t get in a local store, and don’t care if it breaks in 2 months. I’ve never given less of a shit about Prime Day than I do today, and that’s even without factoring in the price manipulation noted by OP.

This is the advice I heard on the Vergecast. The best printer for anyone is whatever Brother laserjet is currently on sale.

Remeber that time a couple wanted to sail around the world, bought a boat but didn’t know how to sail rally, took their newborn on it, then had to get rescued at sea? People were pissed about the cost of that rescue, calling the couple dumb and entitled and whatnot. I think they had to pay some of the rescue cost back. Personally I don’t know that I’m wild about charging people for rescues, it’s hard to draw a line between legitimate adventure travel, say hiking in a national park, and a reckless stunt.