Incredibly well said. And couldn't agree more! Especially after working as a game dev for Apple Arcade. We spent months proving to them their saving architecture was faulty and would lead to people losing their save file for each Apple Arcade game they play. We were ignored, and then told it was a dev problem. Cut to the launch of Arcade: every single game has several 1 star reviews about players losing their save files. This cannot be fixed by devs as it's an Apple problem, so devs have to figure out novel ways to prevent the issue from happening using their own time and resources. 1.5 years later, Apple finishes restructuring the entire backend of Arcade, fixing the problem. They tell all their devs to reimplement the saving architecture of their games to be compliant with Apples new backend or get booted from Arcade. This costs devs months of time to complete for literally zero return (Apple Arcade deals are upfront - little to no revenue is seen after launch). Apple used their trillions of dollars to ignore a massive backend issue that affected every player and developer on Apple Arcade. They then forced every dev to make an update to their game at their own expense just to keep it listed on Arcade. All while directing user frustration over the issue towards developers instead of taking accountability for launching a faulty product. Literally, these companies are run by sociopaths that have egos bigger than their paychecks. Issues like this are ignored as it's easier to place the blame on someone down the line. People like your manager end up getting promoted to the top of an office heirachy of bullshit, and everything the company makes just gets worse until whatever corpse is left is sold for parts to whatever bigger dumb company hasn't collapsed yet. It's really painful to watch, and even more painful to work with these idiots.

Also don't forget all the suicides happening with hard to obtain poisons and shooting oneself in the back of the head three times.

You don't even need a VPN. Only the legit sites will play ball. Porn will still be there.

A nice "trick": After 4 or so responses where you can't get anywhere, start a new chat without the wrong context. Of course refine your question with whatever you have found out in the previous chat.

Call me an optimist, but I still hold the hope that we can one day do better as humanity than we do now. Humanity has become a "better" species throughout its existence overall. Even a hundred years ago we were much more horrible and brutal than we are now. The current trend is not great, with climate change and far-right grifters taking control. But I hold hope that in the end this is but a blip on the radar. Horrible for us now, but in the grand scheme of things not something that will end humanity. It might in the worst case set us back a few hundred years.

I remember an Arthur Clarke novel where a space ship needs water from the planet below. The easiest thing is to lower cables from space and then lift some ice bergs.

Did I say that it did? No? Then why the rhetorical question for something that I never stated? Now that we're past that, I'm not sure if I think it's okay, but I at least recognize that it's normalized within society. And has been for like 70+ years now. The problem happens with how the data is used, and particularly abused. If you walk into my store, you expect that I am monitoring you. You expect that you are on camera and that your shopping patterns, like all foot traffic, are probably being analyzed and aggregated. What you buy is tracked, at least in aggregate, by default really, that's just volume tracking and prediction. Suffice to say that broad customer behavior analysis has been a thing for a couple generations now, at least. When you go to a website, why would you think that it is not keeping track of where you go and what you click on in the same manner? Now that I've stated that I do want to say that the real problems that we experience come in with how this data is misused out of what it's scope should be. And that we should have strong regulatory agencies forcing compliance of how this data is used and enforcing the right to privacy for people that want it removed.

The thing about compelling lies is not that they are new, just that they are easier to expand. The most common effect of compelling lies is their ability to get well-intentioned people to support malign causes and give their money to fraudsters. So, expect that to expand, kind of like it already has been. The big question for me is what the response will be. Will we make lying illegal? Will we become a world of ever more paranoid isolationists, returning to clans, families, households, as the largest social group you can trust? Will most people even have the intelligence to see what is happenning and respond? Or will most people be turned into info-puppets, controlled into behaviours by manipulation of their information diet to an unprecedented degree? I don't know.