How online ads actually work.

Very simplified TLDR: you visit a news site. They load an ad network and tell it "put ads here, here and here".

The ad network now tells 300 companies (seriously, look at the details of some cookie consent dialogs) that you visited that news site so they can bid for the right to shove an ad in your face.

One of them goes "I know this guy, they're an easy mark for scams according to my tracking, I'll pay you 0.3 cents to shove this ad in their face". Someone else yells "I know this guy, he looked at toasters last week, I want to pay 0.2 cents to show him toaster ads just in case he hasn't bought one yet."

The others bid less, so that scam ad gets shoved in your face.

That's extremely simplified of course. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_bidding has a bit more of an explanation.

As usual, it's not a shortage of talent, it's a shortage of talent willing to be exploited.

The article explicitly explains that they "needed" to hire 25 foreign workers to deal with the shortage... after they made 50 local workers quit by cutting pay.

Absolutely not. They have way more money than they can sensibly spend, keep begging for more as if they could barely keep the lights on (they could probably easily keep the core mission going with about 10% of the money they're getting), and then expand their spending to match the donations they collected.

They then created an endowment (i.e. a pile of wealth that generates enough interest to sustain them indefinitely), using both additional donations and some of the money given to Wikimedia (which reduces the apparent amount of money they spend and is not listed as money Wikipedia/Wikimedia has, as it is accounted for separately). The $100M endowment was planned to take 10 years to build, got completed in 2021, five years before schedule. Wikimedia also has a separate cash hoard of almost a quarter billion dollars.

It's actually all in their article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#Finances

I still don't understand why he committed suicide-by-Putin.

Did he really have more influence as a martyr in prison than a free man in exile?

Y2038 is my "retirement plan".

(Y2K, i.e. the "year 2000 problem", affected two digit date formats. Nothing bad happened, but consensus nowadays is that that wasn't because the issue was overblown, it's because the issue was recognized and seriously addressed. Lots of already retired or soon retiring programmers came back to fix stuff in ancient software and made bank. In 2038, another very common date format will break. I'd say it's much more common than 2 digit dates, but 2 digit dates may have been more common in 1985. It's going to require a massive remediation effort and I hope AI-assisted static analysis will be viable enough to help us by then.)

Can we not have clickbait titles on the Fediverse?

The baked in garbage is a result of you using shitty sources, possibly because there are few good sources available and thus you find more of the shitty ones.

Usually while the movie is not released digitally, only low quality copies are available. Many sites/groups don't bother with those because few people want to watch that.

I'd just wait for the release. You'll instantly find stuff that's not just clean, but also in a decent quality.

Without having read the whole thing, so I'm not sure how clear the article is about it: the important part is that donations to Mozilla go to the Mozilla Foundation, which does the political campaigning/social justice etc. stuff, while Firefox development happens in the Mozilla Corporation funded with search engine deals etc.

So again:

Donations to Mozilla do not go towards Firefox development

Dealing with it.

Weather gets hotter, more people get A/C. Disasters get more frequent, more people get fucked by disasters.

Areas become less habitable, some people die, some people deal, some people flee. Migration gets more pressing? Borders get closed with increasingly violent measures.

We just had inflation make life 10% more expensive in many countries. Life went on. That's about the impact of climate change people in "rich" western countries can expect from climate change, except it will happen more slowly.

As much as climate doomers would hope for collapse, climate change is a slow moving disaster. Humans are adaptable, especially when there is time to adapt. Even the more pessimistic among the realistic/scientific predictions are on the "life will get X% worse" side, not "doom, we all die, no food no water" side.

Forbes is just a blogging platform where "contributors" can post their clickbait. Forbes adds their reputation and the ads and then splits the profit with the "contributor"...

I'm not gonna risk my computer by turning off my ad blocker, but I wonder if that article comes with exactly the kind of chumbox ads that they're rightfully criticizing.

Germany: "we have nothing new to say about Taurus deliveries since our last 'nope'."

Crimean bridge: explodes

Came here to make this (half)joke.

Sadly, it's not just a joke, it's also the only way to actually do this.

My guesses, in this order:

1. Confirmation bias
2. Carbon monoxide or mental health issues on your side (I'm being serious, don't rule it out).
3. Some low tech way (you're speaking very loudly, you somehow managed to broadcast to their Bluetooth speaker)

With a strong likelihood of it being 1, slightly less 2, unlikely 3 or anything else.

owner wouldn't even put the electric on for viewing because she didn't want to pay £1 a day standing charge

I bet the real reason is that turning on the power would reveal more trouble.

How many holes does a donut have?

Now make the donut higher. A lot higher. Now you have a donut-tunnel. Now make the walls thinner. Now shrink it. Now you have a straw.

One hole.

Sometimes they also came up with literal malware as DRM.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal

Tell that to the custom binary serialization formats that all the applications are using.

Edit: and the long-calcified protocols that embed it.

In terms of energy, the major fuckup was making gas cheap and electricity expensive (with taxes and renewable subsidies paid by private consumers).

If gas is 6 cents per kWh and electricity 35, no wonder people were installing gas heaters instead of heat pumps. Gas now being 9 and electricity 40 doesn't make it much better.

A heat pump would have to give you 4.4 kWh of heat for 1 kW of electricity to make financial sense even if it didn't cost more (Wikipedia: "Test results of the best systems are around 4.5. When measuring installed units over a whole season and accounting for the energy needed to pump water through the piping systems, seasonal COP's for heating are around 3.5 or less.")

There are stock news site that churn out "why did $STOCK move in $DIRECTION" filled with bullshit speculation. I bet it was mostly automated even before chatGPT and has gotten much worse now.

The Iron Dome is there to stop rockets, not cars and paragliders. (The latter could potentially change.)

Any air defense system is vulnerable to saturation.

Well, now we'll see if the EU finally pulls its head out of their ass and clarifies that no, "consent" gained this way isn't "freely given", or if they legalize the practice and make GDPR even more of a joke.

Various DPAs have taken different positions on this, unfortunately encouraging this practice.

The rest I understand, but tiny doorknobs and tiny say in legislation? Can you elaborate? I thought door knobs were a US thing and Europe had mostly handles. And what is different in terms of say in government? Do you mean the states' direct democratic votes?

For those who don't know who that is, from Wikipedia:

Michael James Lindell, also known as the My Pillow Guy, is an American businessman, political activist, and conspiracy theorist. He is the founder and CEO of My Pillow, Inc., a pillow, bedding, and slipper manufacturing company.

Lindell is a prominent supporter of, and advisor to, former U.S. President Donald Trump. After Trump's defeat in the 2020 U.S. presidential election, Lindell played a significant role in supporting and financing Trump's attempts to overturn the election result; he spread disproven conspiracy theories about widespread electoral fraud in that election. He has also been an active promoter of unproven medical treatments.

I get the joke, but for those seriously wondering:

The epoch is Jan 1, 1970. Time uses a signed integer, so you can express up to 2^31 seconds with 32 bits or 2^63 with 64 bits.

A normal year has exactly 31536000 seconds (even if it is a leap second year, as those are ignored for Unix time). 97 out of 400 years are leap years, adding an average of 0.2425 days or 20952 seconds per year, for an average of 31556952 seconds.

That gives slightly over 68 years for 32 bit time, putting us at 1970+68 = 2038. For 64 bit time, it's 292,277,024,627 years. However, some 64 bit time formats use milliseconds, microseconds, 100 nanosecond units, or nanoseconds, giving us "only" about 292 million years, 292,277 years, 29,228 years, or 292 years. Assuming they use the same epoch, nano-time 64 bit time values will become a problem some time in 2262. Even if they use 1900, an end date in 2192 makes them a bad retirement plan for anyone currently alive.

Most importantly though, these representations are reasonably rare, so I'd expect this to be a much smaller issue, even if we haven't managed to replace ourselves by AI by then.

I see two three pin 3.5mm stereo plugs (one of them color coded for the headphones and one for the mic), and zero 4-pin combo plugs?

Decent? I know I've heard about him before he decided to go to Russia to be arrested and slowly killed.

Endless approval processes are a good one. They don't even have to be nonsensical. Just unnecessarily manual, tedious, applied to the simplest changes, with long wait times and multiple steps. Add time zone differences and pile up many different ones, and life becomes hell.

As if that stops Windows from spamming you with popups that you should be using Edge with Bing instead.

I'm sure there are worse, and it's not one company, but the companies that provide malware to dictatorships are pretty bad, and western countries are sheltering them/not doing much about them.

Examples:

• NSO Group (Pegasus)
• HackingTeam
• Gamma/Lench/Vilicius (FinFisher)

Claiming that they want to allow it is pretty worthless if it has been killed off for months with no fix (and no fix in sight)...

"Apparently, providing my login credentials doesn't prove that the account belongs to me" given how bad people are with password reuse, phishing etc. - no it doesn't, unfortunately.

That suggests he had more balls than most of Russian leadership and was actually at least somewhat near the front.

I don't understand how many business practices by airlines don't result in criminal charges. Selling so many tickets that you know you will occasionally fail to fulfill your contract should be fraud. Jail time for leadership and full reimbursement of all damages (e.g. private air taxi to still make to to the destination on time) would quicky make the airlines competent at finding voluntary agreements that make everyone happy.

Likewise, deciding that a flight isn't profitable and cancelling it - WTF. That's called making a bad business decision, you eat the cost. You don't just decide "eh, let's just not" and leave people stranded because it's cheaper.

Since you already received the genuine answers:

You need to be really careful. The expiration date isn't exact, but after that, they'll quickly ferment and turn into Surströmming on the inside.

That sounds like something Jackass would do.

They might be able to relay them in a way that the end to end encryption is actually handled on the phone and the relay only relays encrypted messages.

That would likely still give them a capability to MitM but it's plausible that they couldn't passively intercept the messages.

The smaller it is the less power it needs. That also means it generates less heat, allowing you to do more computation without the device melting.

Technically, you're probably not supposed to.

Practically, yes, it works and is reasonably safe (unless the adapter is cheap garbage). Make sure the adapter has a fuse.

Long term, you could also consider replacing the plug on one of the multi-sockets with a UK plug.

However, the PC almost certainly uses a standard C13 cable. If the monitor also has a cable like that (e.g. a C13 or C5 going to the power supply), consider just buying replacement cables with UK plugs.

Not too good to be true, but too good to be low risk.

15% ROI is definitely possible. Him screwing up and ending up bankrupt is also possible.

The red flag for me is "I know nothing about business" - you can't judge the risks. You should absolutely not invest money you can't afford to lose into risky stuff like this. In particular, taking out a loan just to loan the money to your friend would be a really stupid idea, and if he asked you to do that, he either is stupid, reckless, or doesn't care if you get hurt.

I'd only consider loaning my own money with which I can afford taking the risk, and only if he could plausibly explain what he's doing, and I felt like I can understand it and be confident that he can pull it off. I'd consider it a high risk investment on par with cryptocurrencies.

Given that you don't seem to fully understand and there are other red flags: stay away.