Sure, Patreon is great, but Patreon alone is not enough for most creators to make a living, considering how hard it is to get people to commit to monthly subscriptions.

This is a bit unnecessarily tough on independent content creators… what exactly do you expect them to do? Make no money from their content? How would they be able to make a living?

simply reading the browser agent isnt really security

It’s not for their security, but for that of genuinely clueless people that are just running an actually outdated browser that might have known and exploitable security flaws.

Read the other comment again

100GB max per disc isn’t that high density, nor are they particularly affordable per GB.

But why would you get two?

Exactly, so it could’ve just been USB C

I also referred to men as males in the post, but that didn’t seem to bother anyone.

Because there’s no history of “males” being used in a derogatory way.

It used to be publicly traded, but it went private when he acquired it.

Which doesn’t mean he doesn’t answer to any investors anymore, of course. He got quite a lot of assistance with that acquisition.

Do Not Track is a browser setting. You enable it in your browser settings for all websites. All it does is ask the website to please “not track” you. Most sites of course don’t even check for the setting.

The law in California is just that the privacy policy must clearly state if / how the site is honoring Do Not Track, not that it must be presented to you as an option or even actually honored at all.

Really just reflect on everything that happened that day and think about how things made you feel, and just write that shit down, no filter. It might seem silly when you end up emotionally analyzing mundane situations, but over time you become so much more aware of yourself and your mind.

As you migrate files off the cloud to your local computer, what are you doing for backups? I’d love to self-host everything personally, but having my life’s data in just one physical location is not making me feel great at all.

Google literally has an official list of IP ranges for their crawlers, complete with an API that returns the current IP ranges that you can use to automate a check. Hardly a moving target, and even if it is, it doesn’t matter if you know exactly where the target is at all times.

The red pill sounds like absolute horror. I’d desperately try to get all the good things in my life back, and probably mess shit up bad.

Though on the other hand, there are obviously a bunch of “you were a young idiot”-type mistakes that I’d want to undo…

Yep. My MacBook pro comes with a magsafe cable and beefy power brick, which is great, but I end up mostly just using a smaller brick and USB-C because I can charge my phone with the same cable. The smaller brick doesn’t hit the max wattage of the thing, but I barely max it out anyway, so it ends up totally fine. Plus all of the MacBook’s USB-C ports accept charge, meaning you can plug it in on either side. Add to that that I can just use one additional small USB C cable to also charge my phone through my laptop all at the same time.

This level of flexibility is just amazing, and I dread thinking back to the days when you had to travel with 4 different chargers for all your tech. Now a single one is enough!

Right but MicroUSB was not enshrined into law as a standard like this.

Which doesn’t mean that it can’t / won’t be changed. It’s in the EU’s best interest to update the law should the industry push for a new standard, so they will. Of course USB-C can and will be updated to handle newer protocol & charging specs over time, so it’ll be a long time before that’ll be necessary.

but on the other this might very well impede progress

I really don’t see how it realistically could. Look at the history of mobile phones so far. Almost the entire industry standardized around USB on their own rather early, and deviations from this (e.g. Apple) only very briefly provided an actual consumer benefit before they became horrible nuisances and cash grabs. The industry has and will continue to develop improvements to the USB spec, and now thanks to this law no-one is allowed to deviate from the common standard anymore. It’s a win for everyone except companies that want to cash grab on proprietary bullshit.

Also does USBC even provide enough wattage to power a gaming laptop?

It supplies up to 240 watts with USB-PD. The standard just says they need to be chargeable via USB C though — it doesn’t forbid additional charging connectors (like Apple’s magsafe or the barrel jacks found often on gaming laptops).

Skimmers are not a thing for Google Wallet / Apple Pay, no. Both these services use tokenization for transactions, meaning that even with your phone unlocked, no-one could grab anything via NFC that would allow triggering a transaction later, let alone clone your card. Even in this specific scenario described in the article (which requires your phone to be in the hands of the exploiter), the CVV of the card wasn’t exposed, so no-one can actually trigger a payment with this info except if they also have your physical card to read the CVV.

Google Wallet / Apple Pay are a million times safer than using your physical card, because the most common skimming attacks either just grab the magnet strip info if available or literally just read the info off the card optically including CVV, which allows for online transactions. None of these things are a concern with Google Wallet / Apple Pay.

But hey you know best right?

I worked as a TPM in financial services for almost 5 years, so yeah I think I’d know.

It was specifically stolen from Google Pay and contactless payments.

It wasn’t.

Did you read the article? Unless someone had physical access to your (unlocked) phone and was able to pin an app, then tap it against specialized hardware (unlikely you could get a normal card terminal to run this exploit), it’s extremely unlikely that this is how your details got stolen.

Many real scams are not this obvious, plus a lot of old people are senile to some degree, which these scammers are exploiting. My grandma was contacted by “her bank” about verifying her identity, and after a few minutes of establishing a backstory they asked her for her debit card info including CVV. It all sounded very legit, and they even “transferred her to another department” with hold music and everything. Luckily, she didn’t fall for it.

… you’re getting into philosophical territory here. The plain fact is that LLMs generate cohesive text that is original and doesn’t occur in their training sets, and it’s very hard if not impossible to get them to quote back copyrighted source material to you verbatim. Whether you want to call that “creativity” or not is up to you, but it certainly seems to disqualify the notion that LLMs commit copyright infringement.