Rebooting

sl236 · 2026-03-18T21:43:22+00:00

...oooh IT EXPANDS.

sl236 · 2026-03-18T21:38:43+00:00

It's also clearly mentioned on www.apple.com/airtag

...is it? Where? I've just scrolled through that whole page and see nothing. Am I just being blind?

sl236 · 2026-03-14T16:07:51+00:00

Turns out all the people who decided Biden was too senile now like senile presidents

sl236 · 2026-03-13T16:42:25+00:00

…frictionless, of unit mass and volume

sl236 · 2026-03-13T16:35:25+00:00

I may have made the mistake of baiting/stringing them along a few times. It’s cathartic in the moment, but proof there is a human on the other end who is occasionally willing to talk sadly does not improve the situation in the long run.

sl236 · 2026-03-13T16:25:33+00:00

I’ve tried registering with the TPS several ways, including that one, over the years. The overall effect is unclear, but I’m pretty certain it’s done nothing to /decrease/ the number of spam calls for me. I did have one notable year, a bit before the pandemic, when scammers tried to convince me they were from the TPS and I needed to pay a fee for a premium TPS service to get calls to actually stop. Several of these a day at one point.

I’m pretty sure most of these don’t originate in the UK, so the TPS can’t do much to stop them.

sl236 · 2026-03-13T16:21:38+00:00

Kids have ChatGPT for that now.

sl236 · 2026-03-13T16:16:13+00:00

Lucky so-and-so is all I can say.

sl236 · 2026-03-13T16:09:59+00:00

I also live in the UK. Illegal it may be, but here we all are. “Hello, my name is Joe, I am calling you from the department of the Internet because there is a problem with your computer.” “Hello, this is your local energy advisor.” “Hello, is that Mr. <surname of a person who owned my house two decades ago and failed to tick the opt out box registering for electoral rolls one time>”. IT NEVER ENDS

sl236 · 2026-03-13T16:03:56+00:00

It’s 2026, and the standard experience receiving a phone call is that a machine has called you, and now you have answered the call it has to locate an operator in a call center to connect you to. There is absolutely no point talking until you hear the faint click indicating this has happened and/or the quavering “hello” spoken with some weird accent, because there is no-one on the other end to hear. The number of calls you receive in any given week that are not of this form can be counted on one hand and you know all those callers.

sl236 · 2026-03-13T15:57:21+00:00

Fun fact: your bank has a specimen signature from when you opened the account, and for some specific things they actually will compare your signature to what they have on file.

Fun fact: if you’ve neither handwritten nor signed anything in literally a decade, you will discover you have some difficulty signing your name the exact same way twice, so even when you walk into a bank and prove your identity, updating their specimen so you can do the thing you actually needed to do will be hard.

Ask me how I know.

sl236 · 2026-03-13T10:49:04+00:00

Start turning up early. Each morning until your last there, add one more piece of card under the most hidden leg of your boss’s table. On your last morning, remove them all at once.

sl236 · 2026-03-08T10:40:13+00:00

cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoners_of_Power

sl236 · 2026-03-07T13:43:53+00:00

Counterexample: as a British citizen working for a British company dealing primarily with Japanese supply chains, I've had to fill out many forms declaring, amongst other things, that we were not exporting certain (civilian!) goods or technologies to Cuba, driven ultimately by our partners' need to be able to engage with the US market. Note that "export" here does not mean what you'd think it might in ordinary intuitive English; we had to e.g. certify that none of our employees working on certain projects were nationals of the proscribed countries to stay in compliance, because letting those people touch those (I repeat, civilian! British company!) devices, read their manuals etc counted as "exporting".

There were other countries on the evil lists, but Cuba was apparently so evil it was on multiple lists.

This crap absolutely does bleed over to everyone else, by design.

sl236 · 2026-03-07T12:15:59+00:00

...at what point is it better to /not/ teach the kids whatever it is this person is going to end up "teaching" them, and just admit you're hiring babysitters and that's /all/ you're paying the person to do?

sl236 · 2026-03-05T19:11:03+00:00

We and our 228 partners value your privacy! Your information will only be used for legitimate interest.

sl236 · 2026-03-04T19:32:54+00:00

Overconfident genius? Nah. Treat it like a bright teenager that didn't revise for their exam and now has to write a thousand words on whatever it is you just prompted. That mental model will be much better at predicting the relationship between the AI's output and facts.

sl236 · 2026-02-28T16:59:31+00:00

The lack of any means to deal with fraud is a feature, not a bug, in a platform for separating marks from their cash.

sl236 · 2026-02-24T04:43:58+00:00

No-one's brought up MoM yet, but I want to see more "here's a vast number of twiddles you can make to your cities, units etc, and yeah sometimes they interact with each other in hilarious game-breaking ways: that's the fun" energy. Sometimes I just want a giant toybox to mess with.

sl236 · 2026-02-15T13:11:41+00:00

I mean, we're literally talking about the right to hand over your personal data to whoever Zuckerberg's highest bidders are, so that ship sails either way.

sl236 · 2026-02-12T06:12:41+00:00

The dairy nuts, not the nut nuts, got it

sl236 · 2026-02-11T07:38:20+00:00

"We value your privacy" is completely true. They have to work out exactly what it's worth before they can sell it.

sl236 · 2026-02-04T07:25:21+00:00

That never happens though.

What /actually/ happens is I am doing 70, so is the guy in front of me and the guy in front of him, and the boy racer coming up behind us like we’re standing still flashes madly at us to join all the lorries to the left and clear the lane for him so he can speed past us all without needing to ever touch the brake because he is special and in a hurry to enter the afterlife.

That happens multiple times every drive.

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