Completely separate discussion. Making accommodations to keep living humans safe is good and reasonable. (Keep in mind that in the pre-automobile era, there was no safe way to cross a busy street—you stepped out and hoped you didn’t get run down by a horse.) But a robot is a tool, not a person, and changes that make traffic easier to navigate for robots may be even more unhelpful for human pedestrians than the current status quo.

Someone telling you what they think you want to hear doesn’t help when what you need is a gently and delicately delivered reality check. This is true even if you’re talking to a human.

To sum up: the article is about how tech companies suck at using the information they have about you for anything of value to you, which is nothing new. I’d take the author with a grain of salt, because instead of trying to get rid of advertising, they actually look at it and want it better-targeted.

Might be nice for a certain age group to make them evaluate multiple search engines as a class project. (“If it provided a summary, did it say what its sources were?” “When you checked the sources, did they actually say what the summary said they said?” “How many actual results did it return for these searches?” “How many of the results on the first page were useful?” etc.) Improved media literacy in general, and they all learn that more than one search engine exists.

Actually, “beg the question” is a linguistic fossil from a time when “beg” didn’t mean quite the same thing it does today.

Yeah, but you would think they would have gotten them off the Internet after the first time this happened, even if it means having to hire an extra person to keep an eye on them.

If we were talking about people for whom this was their job, I would agree that they were being way slow, but we’re talking about a group of volunteers who’re cramming this into their free time along with all their other obligations. In that situation, it sometimes takes as long as it takes.

I’d rather they be thorough, and I expect their technical resources are a bit constrained. (Plus, I’m pretty sure the user-facing site is or was built in Ruby, and I have no idea what security best practices are for that.)

Please, please make it useless for as many use cases as possible. Then maybe it’ll go away.

Just disable Javascript altogether and it’ll let you past. 90% of these sites are like that, and they’re often made better by the omissions. (Or don’t bother—it isn’t much of an article.)

What a terrible insult to goldfish.

Judging from the content of the article, the problem is that Google’s local subsidiary started on construction prematurely before the environmental assessment paperwork was complete (but after they already owned the site). Short of keeping a watch on the site 24/7, I don’t see how the local authorities could have prevented that. It’s possible that they may have been lazy and complacent, but absent actual evidence I doubt they were complicit.

Our society operates to a large extent on an underlying assumption that most people will not try to do anything blatantly illegal in plain view. Finland has just learned the hard way that this is not true of large American corporations.

Averaging nuclear over the entire world really doesn’t give it a fair shake, since there are many jurisdictions that won’t build nuclear capacity for political and societal-preference reasons, rather than technical ones. Where I am, the percentage of electricity supplied by nuclear power plants is more than five times what’s supplied by solar and wind combined, and we’re doing just fine (and building out more nuclear in addition to more renewables).

As with most other things, it depends on who or what you’re trying to attract. If you’re trying to attract cats, giving them a nice warm server to sleep on is always a plus.

Arguable. Google has long since jumped the shark, but Yandex was never that great to begin with.

He expects that his potential dates are as unintelligent and lazy as he is. Actually, if he’s looking for someone who shares his “values”, filtering out anyone smarter and more energetic might not be a bad strategy . . . 🤔

I think they’re implying a violent authoritarian crackdown on anyone who doesn’t hew to the Trump Administration’s party line. Probably around the time that Trump refuses to leave office after the next presidential election. As nightmares go, that one isn’t quite as far-fatched as most of the world would like.

I would expect Gentoo’s rankings on Distrowatch to be lower than its actual uptake. I mean, it’s an oddball distro, an old and well-known one whose reputation probably spreads more by word of mouth than anything else.

Gentoo doesn’t do user stats, so it’s impossible to tell.

Um, no. There are many other categories of people who have issues with self-checkouts. Like anyone who’s legally or by the store’s rules due a discount or tax waiver (people with Indigenous status aren’t required to pay sales taxes in some jurisdictions, for instance), since the software often fails to account for these. Anyone paying cash. Anyone who knows anything at all about UI design or has wrestled with a self-checkout that just doesn’t function properly.

I’ll wait in line rather than deal with a machine that’s broken by design, thanks. Fortunately, the stores around here mostly have reasonable staffing practices, so the wait isn’t long unless some idiot tries to price-match against a flyer or something else weird and unusual.