If that ever happens, I would start bringing duct tape to flights, tape a magazine to cover the screen.

I remember having a conversation with a former friend a while ago, and he, as a guy who worked for a certain company that makes most of its revenue from delivering ads, spoke about requiring use of front facing camera and using eye tracking technology to ensure you're actually watching the ads and not going somewhere else while the ads play. If you aren't looking at the ad, it will play another ad afterwards.

He spoke about it as something he is looking forward to, since it would increase revenue. Pretty sure he was pitching this idea to his boss hoping to get a promotion.

That was both beautiful and terrifying at the same time.

I would have never even thought of checking that. That's very surprising.

Wait, not every phone has compass hardware?

I absolutely despise it when people say "should have known better" when companies mess up. Not everyone is going to spend weeks researching obscure information before buying a phone.

I wasn't aware of her existence or that of the vampire facials, but this is some Carmilla stuff. Next they will tell you they need virgin blood.

If these are signs of being old, I was born old.

They did win because of how the electoral college works. Both Trump and Bush lost the popular vote and won the election because the system is designed in a stupid way.

Personally, I would never give Reddit a single penny. Their garbage CEO does plenty to get people to leave and I am sure it will keep like that.

Your phone's email app is a client, but I digress... I hate using the browser to access emails. I use many different email accounts with multiple email providers to compartmentalize my emails and avoid spam. I used Thunderbird for years before switching to Geary and now back to Thunderbird.

My first time trying to get my mother to switch from Windows to a Linux based OS wasn't successful because there was too much friction and inconvenience for her, and she wasn't willing to even entertain the idea of Linux for years after that. My second attempt was successful because Linux is much more user friendly than it used to be 13 years ago, and I changed my approach to make it as frictionless as possible.

Firefox just set to block 3rd party cookies + some basic extensions like adblocking and some easy privacy stuff is a good way to go about it, because it's better than what she used previously and it doesn't become inconvenient to her. She doesn't know what an operating system is, or what cookies are... She just uses the computer to browse the web, emails, and light office work. She even says she prefers the current setup (though that's because her old computer was chugging with Windows and runs smoothly now with a less bloated OS)

No need for noscript, deleting cookies, fingerprinting, or user agent stuff... Only introduce these to them if they express interest in privacy and are interested in learning more. If you try to thrust it upon them too suddenly they will just think "Linux isn't a good user experience and is only good for tech enthusiasts and programmers".

At this point I'd be surprised if there was a single oil billionaire who hasn't donated millions to his campaigns.

I'm so glad we have GN bringing these stories to light.

So Trump is basically like an AI that has no will of his own and is just a predictive algorithm that is trained on his fan base? That makes a surprising amount of sense when listening to his speeches, they make as much sense as a tripping LLM that was mostly trained on other AI generated text.

This shouldn't surprise anyone. The guy loves coal, oil, and gas, he hates anything renewable with almost the same passion as he hates immigrants. He will literally defund the EPA because in his mind the environment is fake news and because it will make him popular amongst rich business owners who get even richer from deregulation.

At least 60% of my internet time is YouTube. I rely on it for entertainment, news, education, discovering music, technical help, ETC...

Could I live a meaningful life without it? Probably, people have been living meaningful lives before the invention of the computer in general... But I wouldn't give it up because there is an immense amount of incredible content there that genuinely makes my life better.

I think it depends on how good your sense of smell is. Mine is really bad, so if I had my eyes covered and was wearing noise cancelling headphones, I wouldn't be able to tell if there are people in my area unless they haven't showered in a while... Being able to distinguish between people? I can't even differentiate between the smells of popcorn and peanut butter.

On the other hand, I know someone who was able to smell a "coppery" smell on someone which no one else notice. Eventually she convinced him to see a doctor and they found a rare condition that I can't remember which.

I am a staunch opposer to the death penalty, and believe no crime, no matter how severe warrants an execution, but I wouldn't lift a finger to stop the execution of Nestlé executives because they aren't worth a single calorie spent on their defence.

Oh, I wasn't aware of these. Makes a lot of sense people want more eyeballs on their tweets without people knowing they pay for them.