Isn’t daylight savings time 8 months of the year? The four “winter” months are when we’re on standard time, so seems like it would be pretty easy to ignore DST during those 4 months. Or maybe I am misinterpreting?

Honestly, I sometimes miss the earlier days of Lemmy when folks were generally kind to each other by default. Seems like this kind of comment is becoming all too common.

I wouldn’t have thought it would be so quiet, what with the coffins.

My credit card offers virtual credit card numbers AND the ability to auto-lock the virtual numbers so you can set a date and after that the number will not accept new charges.

I make sure to use a virtual card number for everything subscription based, then I immediately set the auto-lock feature to expire in a few days (give the initial charge time to clear but still plenty of time before the subscription would otherwise renew).

Some subscription services make it super tough to cancel. This method fixes that issue for the most part. Some subscription services terminate immediately once you cancel the subscription, even if you still have “time left” otherwise. This way you don’t really have to formally unsubscribe. It’s easy peasy pumpkin breezy as the common folk like to say.

When someone asks a thing like this on Lemmy, look up the same thread on Reddit (guaranteed to find it was recently also posted there) and copy-pasta some of the top posts. Guaranteed worthless internet up arrows.

Earlier this year one of my relatives came for an extended visit. We were discussing what we might have for dinner that week and both of us were on board for the same ingredients, such as asparagus. My relative was also happy with the video services I’m currently subscribed to because I have a couple options they don’t have at home, so they were telling me about how they were rewatching some older Harrison Ford movies. And then there’s the age-old (or old age) conversations about our current health issues.

In the following days, my relative kept bringing up the fact that their phone and tablet are listening to our conversations. Proof? After we had the food conversation, their news feed was suddenly filled with asparagus recipes. They were also getting ads for more Harrison Ford content on the service that they don’t subscribe to. And to top it off, they were seeing ads for a prescription my dog takes but that they had never even heard of before our conversation the day or two before. Isn’t it obvious? They’re listening to our conversations.

To me this was easily explainable by Occam’s Razor. All our devices are on the same IP address. After we discussed the asparagus I went online that night and did a search for asparagus recipes. And when we were talking about my dog’s health condition, I used my phone to look up the active ingredient because I couldn’t recall off the top of my head. Plus, when Hulu or whatever random service sees you’re watching a lot of Harrison Ford movies, it makes sense they’d advertise others you might like.

That makes a lot more sense and is a lot less complicated of an explanation than “our devices are always recording our conversations and uploading them to the internet as a basis to send us advertisements”.

Sure it’s technically feasible, but if it were happening, surely they would be a lot more incontrovertible proof than a questionable and likely misinterpreted news source that seems to be more of a “sly” advertisement for a tech solution that the big players aren’t actually using.

Encryption.

I don’t really ever travel with my laptops, at least not to put them in bags. I think the Mac laptops had a known issue with defective batteries, though.

It’s true! My last mac cost me nothing because it was provided by my job. And the case popped open after the battery swelled within a year of me getting it, something my personal laptops have never done before.