I definitely miss the cached pages. I found that I was using the feature very frequently. Maybe it’s just the relative obscurity of some of my hobbies and interests, but a lot of the information online that shows up in search engines seems to come from old forums. Often times those old forums are no longer around or have migrated to new software (obliterating the old URLs and old posts as well).

I saw something the other day where they were interviewing some people from a republican group in North Carolina. Their response was basically that it’s a non-issue for them. Even if every awful thing about him is true, they said they aren’t electing saints, they’re electing politicians.

Somewhat tangential question: Why do so many sites have links to an external status monitoring site, but when the site is down and you go to check the status on that external status monitoring site, it says everything’s fine? What’s the point of the status site if it doesn’t actually acknowledge that there’s any sort of outage nor provide any info on it?

Ya’ll out there acting like Miss Sassy is just a cat, but to some of us, our lives revolve around Miss Sassy.

Not going to lie, I kind of wonder if Anna Kilgore named her cat Miss Sassy in honor of Lindsey Graham.

When you think of it, so many of them are immigrants. They don’t belong in our suburbs. They don’t belong in our homes. They should go back to the desert where they belong. But no, instead they’re pricking us with their thorns and I shudder to think what they’re doing to our pets and the wildlife.

Well one thing’s for sure, it’s not a good thing. No ma’am, it’s not a good thing at all.

I found it interesting that Trump claims if he wins the election, he’ll have the Russia / Ukraine conflict resolved BEFORE he even takes office. I’m paraphrasing there, but that’s how I interpreted what he stated.

If that’s the case, then it seems like he could choose to end the conflict at any time. Why doesn’t he just end it now? Save countless lives. Minimize injuries. Prevent suffering. Save money. I’m sure that’d change some voters’ minds if he did it. Might even win him the election.

Yes, this is a rhetorical question. I have no doubt that he can’t actually end it without basically giving in entirely to Russia.

To be fair, the social worker is probably too poor to afford most street drugs and too busy to have time to plant the unaffordable street drugs on other people in order to ruin their lives.

Earlier this year one of my relatives came for an extended visit. We were discussing what we might have for dinner that week and both of us were on board for the same ingredients, such as asparagus. My relative was also happy with the video services I’m currently subscribed to because I have a couple options they don’t have at home, so they were telling me about how they were rewatching some older Harrison Ford movies. And then there’s the age-old (or old age) conversations about our current health issues.

In the following days, my relative kept bringing up the fact that their phone and tablet are listening to our conversations. Proof? After we had the food conversation, their news feed was suddenly filled with asparagus recipes. They were also getting ads for more Harrison Ford content on the service that they don’t subscribe to. And to top it off, they were seeing ads for a prescription my dog takes but that they had never even heard of before our conversation the day or two before. Isn’t it obvious? They’re listening to our conversations.

To me this was easily explainable by Occam’s Razor. All our devices are on the same IP address. After we discussed the asparagus I went online that night and did a search for asparagus recipes. And when we were talking about my dog’s health condition, I used my phone to look up the active ingredient because I couldn’t recall off the top of my head. Plus, when Hulu or whatever random service sees you’re watching a lot of Harrison Ford movies, it makes sense they’d advertise others you might like.

That makes a lot more sense and is a lot less complicated of an explanation than “our devices are always recording our conversations and uploading them to the internet as a basis to send us advertisements”.

Sure it’s technically feasible, but if it were happening, surely they would be a lot more incontrovertible proof than a questionable and likely misinterpreted news source that seems to be more of a “sly” advertisement for a tech solution that the big players aren’t actually using.

I recently joined WTF and based on the list of the instances this place is federated with, my assumption is that’s the basis for the WTF name. So, maybe something like this could be useful for choosing an instance that’s not 1/2 filled with bat shit insane posts by default rather than requiring significant and immediate curation (i.e. blocking stupid shit like hexbear and ml).

I don’t really ever travel with my laptops, at least not to put them in bags. I think the Mac laptops had a known issue with defective batteries, though.

It’s true! My last mac cost me nothing because it was provided by my job. And the case popped open after the battery swelled within a year of me getting it, something my personal laptops have never done before.

So how long you been flying? Okay. Good.

Are you finding that the assistance it provides has gotten worse over time? When I first started using it, it was quite helpful the majority of the time. In truth, it’s still pretty decent with autocomplete, just less consistently good than before. However the chat help has truly gone into decline. The amount of unfounded statements it returns is terrible.

And the latest issue is that I’ve started getting responses where it starts to show me an answer, but then hides the response and gives me an error that the response was filtered by Responsible AI.

Glad I’m not directly paying for it.