“People find the right-click menu overwhelming, so we’ll reduce it from 23 options to 19 options. That’ll make it less confusing and won’t annoy the people who now need an extra click for basic functionality “

Up until basically after the last election this was essentially a two-party state. However much of a shitshow Labour is, the Tories were guaranteed to be much worse.

Also, there was a mind of unspoken assumption that human rights lawyer Keir Starmer would gradually move the party back to the left once in power, instead of spending 99% of his time trying to court the small minority of far-right voters who’d never vote Labour in a million years, which is what has actually happened.

And, unless there’s electoral reform in the next 3 years it looks like the actual far-right party will win the next election, because we’ve still got a system designed for a two-party stare in what is now really a 5-party state, meaning that Reform’s current 30% polling would see them with 100% control of the country, if the voting matched the polls.

The thing is, Let’s say that there’s a foolproof system in place which makes you press an “ok” button every time is going to take an action on your behalf…how many people are actually going to check everything that it’s going to do every single time it asks? And for those that do, is it actually going to save them any time?

Just look at cookie pop ups. I have Consent-O-Matic and when that fails i manually reject and on those sites where you have to individually untick 100 boxes I just find another site, but i can’t tell you the number of people I’ve seen just accept everything because it’s quicker. That’s exactly how most people would treat a “do you want me to do this?” prompt from an agentic AI without checking what it’s actually asking to do.

They’re obviously going about it the wrong way, but this is inching towards the right way to go - keep age verification like biometric verification, encrypted and on-device. That’s a million times better than getting random pron sites to ask for your biometric data.

If they’d started with this thought and then kept thinking from there, they could have ended up with something decent and effective, rather than the current shitshow.

I once watched a German YouTuber talk about learning English and how quickly she improved when she started working in an English office because she _ had_ to. In the video she says one of the things she’s always had difficulty with but is now much better at and almost never slips up on now is vs and ws. Then, immediately afterwards in the next sentence she goes “now in this wideo…”

Or, even better, let’s start developing for separate platforms again, and optimise software for the platform that’s going to be running it. Rather than just developing everything for Chrome.

I use Perplexity for most of my searches. Not because of ads (I have robust adblocking to the point that I’m genuinely gobsmacked whenever I’m in a situation where I can’t browse any other way, like on someone else’s machine), but because of third-party SEO and first-party paid-for search results. Perplexity is far from flawless, but unlike google, Bing, etc. and the engines which rely on them (DuckDuckGo is Bing, for example), it’s actually designed to return you the answer to your question.

We can discuss the exact meaning of “ads” and whether the paid-for search results count. I’d say they’re similar but with subtle differences. And it’s not what’s being suggested for ChatGPT here, although for over a year now I’ve been suggesting that the AI-equivalent of SEO & paid-for search results is where we’re headed.

“We’ve released this feature which works 80% of the time and which we feel morally obligated to tell you can install malware, or simply send all your files to a malicious actor. Why aren’t you jizzing yourselves?”

I do have several external harddrives, three monitors, and a MIDI keyboard. But “this computer will run fine as long as you don’t use the usb sockets” isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement itself.

I literally don’t turn my computer off because even with an SSD windows takes so long to boot up properly. I still have to restart it every few days because memory management is shit.

Here’s the thing - the same thing that Microsoft is being roasted for saying they’re going to implement is the thing that Apple are being roasted for not having implemented yet. The difference is -rightly or wrongly- people trust Apple in a way that they simply don’t Microsoft.

The promise of passkeys when i first grad about them was that it would be quick and easy - that you wouldn’t need to enter a username or use 2fa. The reality appears to be that this is that it’s used ** as** 2fa

https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-improve-battery-life-tips-myths-smartphones/

Here’s a fun fact: phone manufacturers know this. So what they call “100%” is not actually 100%. Your phone will not charge your battery to full. Battery charging is already designed around this.

I already said you didn’t read the article. You didn’t have to prove it.

I’m not sure if this kind of thing is just about enriching himself. Of course that’s a big part of it. But he also wants to be a great man of history. He wants to be the person who saves the world. He wants to be forever remembered as the greatest hero who ever lived.

He won’t, of course. Because he’s a clueless idiot. A clueless idiot who managed to fuck up his own PR so hard that he’s burnt away the reputation as a genius that he used to have.

But he really does want to be adored.

This seems like a) you didn’t read the article, and b) that you yourself are homophobic.

https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/06/30/russia-rising-toll-of-lgbt-extremism-designation

Not any more, there’s a blanket

It’s tricky business. The idea has to be plausible enough to attract investors, but implausible enough not to get looked at too closely by clever investors. Similarly, you have to drum up enough publicity to get interest, but not enough to get scrutiny.

Get the balance wrong and you get Theranos.