parents and family introduce them to guns.

time compression

Ray, when someone asks you if you’re a God, you say YES!

The phrases “Lower 48” or “contiguous 48 states”, are more typical than “the continental United States”.

Just because the laptop is powered down does not mean that no circuits are getting power. Wake on LAN/WLAN is a thing, and most devices without a physical power switch, (a power bitton is not a switch), mean that there is a miniature power draw listening for that signal. The manufacturer might have other bits that are still active as well, you can’t be sure. If your ultra paranoid about state level actors it might be a good idea. If you’re just worried about somebody swiping your credit card number or something, probably overkill.

when the giggle is held back at the end, it’s a snicker.

if i had an account decades ago (real names only era), and deleted every post (manually) and my account when a .edu wasn’t going to be required anymore, and I currently use noscript + uBlock origin, apple devices with Brave, how much of this stuff do you think the company has?

Do you think my name shows up in other people’s accounts even though I don’t have an account?

if you know how to code, you can vibe code because you can immediately see and be confident enough to identify and not use obvious mistakes, oversights, lack of security, and missed edge cases the LLM generated.

if you don’t know how to code, you can’t vibe code, because you think the LLM is smarter than you and you trust it.

Imagine saying “I’m a mathematician” because you have a scientific calculator. If you don’t know the difference between RAD and DEG and you just start doing calculations without understanding the unit circle, then building a bridge based on your math, you’re gonna have a bad time.

Web pages are not allowed to list your extensions. They can indirectly surmise you have certain extensions based on how your requests differ from expectations. For example, if they have advertisements, but your browser never actually makes any requests to load the images, CSS, JS or HTML for the advertisements, they can deduce you have an ad-blocker. That’s a datapoint they now have to ID you: “has an ad-blocker”

Now let’s say they have an ad they know AdBlockPlus allows, but uBlock Origin doesn’t. They see your browser doesn’t load that ad. Another datapoint: “Not using AdBlockPlus”.

Based on what requests go back and forth between your browser and their servers, they map out a unique fingerprint.

Now you visit another site, and lo and behold, all the same quirks are found. Tada, they now say “hm, probably the same browser,” and start personalizing content. Site use an ad network, so it’s the common denominator, not the sites you visit. The ad networks do the between-sites tracking.

also, VPN does diddly squat when you login to some service like google, facebook, xitter, amazon, outlook, reddit, etc. You logged in as you. They don’t give a shit you’re logging in from another IP. And if the sites are working with the same ad network, if you’ve ever logged in from your real IP even once, they they just add another datapoint about you: “Sometimes uses a VPN” and that gets tucked away in your permanent record.

nothing you do online is private. I’m not saying “give up” but it’s pretty bleak and I don’t see it getting better anytime soon.

you dropped this: \

sudo chown user:user -R / will get me to reinstall.