They can always refuse to serve me anything. That's equally fair.

Copyright lawsuits will save us from political discomfort? Is this bizzarro HN?

Defamation law

is going to stop random number generators from creating synthetic reality on local devices?

No but it will stop a free for all.

I don't know what the hell I just read but I wish I hadn't.

Gives you some sense of what weirdos still have physical media these days.

It's a tragedy in slow motion. Symptom or cause, this will make the next decades very bleak.

Almost everything is based on infinite growth and an increasing amount of consumers/taxpayers. Breaking the ponzi scheme now is as good as breaking it in 50 years

Arguably better, since the ponzi scheme runs on under-constrained fossil fuel extraction and exhaustion that is both unsustainable and risks collapsing the planetary biosphere.

The sooner we stop assuming this planet can support unlimited human beings, the better.

Exactly on point. The more we grow the bigger the future catastrophe.

In my mind, the long term WFH for everybody at every company was temporary. To me that seems obvious. It was implicitly unambiguous.

Is "implicitly unambiguous" anything but an oxymoron? Do you think all humans have access to your mental model of the world?

I think if we work one way for centuries until something happens to disrupt that, we can assume an eventual return to the average rather than "new normal" nonsense.

Except tech has allowed WFH for almost 4 decades now? Teleworking has been a thing since the 60s, it’s us that are just now catching up to not needing an office.

I don't think that was obvious. There were lots of executives praising lots of teams for keeping things running perfectly fine while remote. There is no obvious reason to RTO when everything was working fine with remote workers.

In my mind, it was to be temporary until the risk of infection at the office was back to pre-pandemic levels. I understand that at this point it's more likely that we'll define the problem away and normalize shifting that much more of a health risk onto employees, but going by the original "implicit" agreement we're still in that temporary period. Of course it's not serious to threat it as temporary because companies and people have made permanent adjustments that won't be rolled back.

My (Amazon subsidiary!) employer at no point made anyone(†) go back to the office. I happily returned when vaccines were widely rolled out, but quickly realized people were still getting infected left and right and decided to minimize office visists while strictly masking. A good half of the team moved out of state and never came back, future hires were fully remote as often as not. I got hit by layoffs eventually but as far as I have heard the remaining team has not gotten any less distributed.

I don't think it's reasonable to describe a forced move to full office attendance as an inevitable "return to normal", even if we back in March 2020 would have expected it to have happened by now. But now in 2024, the world has changed and it's an explicit employment policy decision that as a purpose-of-a-system-is-what-it-does thing aims to continue layoffs while paying less severance etc.

(† naturally from atop my ivory throne of tech-wrought hubris, I am discounting actual office staff like facilities and security as well as some portion of IT etc)

Do you use an ad blocker?

You wouldn't block an ambulance from getting to a hospital. You wouldn't block a mother from hugging her child. Why would you block an ad??

I would, and do, actively block all three.

yeah thats wierd, I've only ever run whatever stock browser I've had, and never bothered with ad blockers. but people are really really into ad blocking and thats fine, I'm not going to bother tho, especially now as its becoming a whackamole thing.

the funny thing is most of the time I use firefox on linux with pretty much default settings, I let them give me all the cookies they want and a few sites still think I'm running an ad blocker. hehe whatever, the modern web is getting to be pretty trash anyways.

By whackamole, you mean choosing one of the same two browser extensions that have been around for 2 decades and forgetting about it?

Or one of the DNS blockers that have been pretty consistent too.

It may be a game of whackamole, but it's virtually invisible to end users of these tools.

I'm in a similar boat with one of many android app updates on Google Play. Over the last couple of weeks I pushed out updates to dozens of app listings with one app review rejected due to failing to disclose data my app absolutely does not collect. Specifically, a user's phone contacts. An app has to disclose on the store listing that type of data if it's transmitted off of the device. So I have this false positive with my initial appeal denied. I'm not sure how to move forward. Concede and change my Data Safety form on the listing? Insist false positive again? I'm in a bit of deadlock.

How about you check all the dependencies you loaded into your app and determine whichone is a data stealing malware? :P

Without a doubt it originated there.

Can they be accessed and indexed without being invited to the channel?

I've been saying this for thousands of years.