Then you could agree with any barely computer-savvy person that such things should be killed with fire.

Now a lot of very competent person will try to persuade you how you are a luddite and wrong, except 5-10 years ago they’d also promise some bright tech future in addition to that, and now you’re just wrong because they can exist in that environment and like it, and you can’t.

So not just they pirated them, which may or may not be a crime and where I may or may not be impartial, but they are also leeches who would be banned on any decent torrent tracker of the olden days.

Generally speaking, when a much stronger party forces upon you a mechanism, it doesn’t work in your favor. Whether they call it free speech (for bot campaigns too, while you get banned) or moderation (your opponent insults you in every comment, and they are fine, but you insult them once - you’re banned).

The super weirdest thing is that people again and again believe that the strong party belonging to “their” side will do things right this time in history.

It’s cheaper and more dangerous, and usually done where natural gas is much cheaper than gasoline. Yes, explosions.

I love such headlines, as if every minute or every cycle don’t.

Admittedly my eyesight is in sad shape, but better than my mental state, so.

Security concerns usually don’t talk about themselves

That’s politics, all big companies do politics.

It doesn’t even make sense. One can have a voice bot with an LLM, if it’s so bad. One can ask if the customer wants to get an SMS with an URL to support page. Asking them if they want to be sent to operators after that.

But just 15 minutes basic wait so that less people would reach operators - why the hell, I don’t get it, how is it better than just waiting in queue when all operators are busy and not waiting when, well, not. If the operators are overloaded and perform worse - then allow bigger ACW times, more breaks, maybe hire more operators.

Especially for a computer hardware company one can script most support calls pretty unambiguously. They are not going to be helping out a grandma via phone when “Internet isn’t working”.

Not exactly aphantasia, though some kinds of imagination are close to that for me. Rather that something remote is very hard to imagine, while triggers, like sounds and smells and physical feelings and harmonic progressions, make something very easy to imagine.

So if I know that I have to do something or else my head rolls off, the deadline being in 3 hours, I won’t be as concentrated as the typical person.

Yeah, see, I even have a mental condition which should supposedly make that my problem more than that of most people.

I’ve seen your wrong opinion, but without arguments it’s useless.

Yes, about service problems and Steam - I understand why it happened, but sanctions on Russia causing my inability to not buy, but even find in store some games kinda affect it. One small nuance is that family members of those, well, making decisions in Russia are often in the western countries feeling themselves very well (including Steam games), and those who are not do not, I think, have problems dealing with this. And, btw, topping up your Steam wallet is possible, just via intermediaries with some additional expense.

OK, this is not about Steam, this is about sanctions efficiency.

EDIT: On the subject - I pirate MP3’s. I like having my music stored locally and not dependent on various services. I may start some day using some of those services, probably.

One can use natural gas (usually combined with some amount of gasoline). In terms of safety - if you’ve ever seen gas stations with concrete walls between fueling spots, that’s where this is popular, so not very safe.

Removed by mod

In some Star Wars book, of the period between PT and OT, there was a similar moment, but I don’t remember details. Context - it’s described as some slow transition, while the Republic of the Clone Wars had military censorship and many freedoms curbed, after the war supposedly ended and the Empire proclaimed, it legally and procedurally was mostly the same and the military limitations were in part lifted. So there were protests and attempts to use legal mechanisms, with such funny events.

13+ years ago when I’d say why I hate social media, cloud services, all this convenient dependence, everybody would act as if this was stupid.

My logic was that if there’s a mechanism allowing such influence, no matter how small, its power will grow almost until the death of such an ecosystem. Because the returns of abusing it will always be more than the expenses.

I don’t like this Cassandra feeling really.

Compared to what? I didn’t name a specific country, but you can pick some and let us compare.

Ah, yes, there’s also extrapolation here though.

Yes, it’s called human brain. If it makes sense that a missing punch card would contain jump to address from some register, then make another one such.

I’m joking.

In WoT game there was such a category of mods called “оленеметр”, literally “deer-o-meter”, where “deer” is a word for, ahem, the worst kind of “noob”.

I suppose that’s what they mean - a tool that analyzes players in a match by their previous games and stats and shows some colors and icons indicating that this one has good reaction, this one is likely to become erratic when their team starts losing, and so on. Also suggests best course of action against them.

I suspect that this is also how they are weaponizing these things IRL.