hogwasher

Whether Facebook/Meta can read the plain text of the messages or not depends on whether that encryption is "zero knowledge" or not, aka: does Facebook generate and retain the private encryption key, or does it stay on the users' devices only, never visible to Facebook or stored on Facebook servers?

In the former case, Facebook can decrypt the messages at will, and the e2ee only protects against hackers, not Facebook itself, nor against law enforcement, since if Facebook has the decryption key they can be legally compelled to hand it over (and probably would voluntarily, going by their history).

I'm hardly a fan of Epic, but considering inflation and rising supply chain costs, a price that remains flat may be a price that would have otherwise risen.

They might also direct the money towards funding more exclusives. Epic's funding has enabled some games to be made that wouldn't have been otherwise, or that wouldn't have been as full featured without that up-front cash.

They sell gambling to children via lootboxes; I'm not saying they're the good guy corp. But removing Apple and Google's monopoly over phone apps and app stores would only be a good thing, in my opinion.

^this is the way.

You can buy a domain name for like $10 per year; I recommend getting it from porkbun.com.

Cloudflare.com is good too, EXCEPT if you buy your domain from them, you'll be required to use their nameservers until and unless you transfer your domain elsewhere (which you won't be able to do for a while). Though to be fair, their free DNS is good and lots of people use it anyway. It makes email setup slightly more complicated, but it's still doable.

Spaceship.com also has a pretty good reputation, but I think their customer service isn't as good, they're quite new, and they're owned by Namecheap (a bigger domain registrar with a much worse reputation).

Whatever you do, DO NOT buy from GoDaddy. Do not even search for the domain you're considering on GoDaddy. Literally any option is better than GoDaddy.

By far the most reliable TLD options are .com, .net, and .org. These will look relatively trustworthy for email, and the price stays very very stable from year to year. If you don't want to think about it, just get one of these. You can even still find single dictionary word domains for .org or .net relatively easily.

Do not buy any domain marked "premium". This means the owner of the TLD can change the price at renewal as dramatically as they want, for any reason (e.g. if you have a website hosted at that domain that becomes popular). Your $20 per year domain might suddenly become a $300 or $3000 per year domain for no reason but greed, and you wouldn't be able to do anything about it.

Non-premium nTLD's (.club, .horse, .rocks, .theater, etc) can increase quite dramatically in price, BUT the price is required to be set the same for all domains using that nTLD, so they can't target any individual person for having a successful website or whatever. Also, you can pre-buy up to 10 years, which locks in your price for those 10 years. I'd still not recommend them for a primary email, but it's better than buying a "premium" domain. Just be aware that the yearly price might unexpectedly increase in the future.

Some country code TLD's are also good, but for email, probably stay away from the ones that spammers like to use.

___

Anyway, what I actually originally meant to comment about is: if you set up forwarding from gmail and don't check that account regularly anymore, I recommend setting up a gmail filter rule that forwards all your gmail spam to you (their regular forwarding setting leaves it out and just sends it to the gmail spam folder). It's a little annoying to have to re-flag some of the spam as spam in your new email, but gmail has a habit of marking non-spam as spam for me, and if you're not regularly checking that spam folder you can easily miss important email.

Google also takes the lion's share of the ad revenue. They're the reason youtube creators resort to sponsorships instead of relying on youtube's inbuilt ads. They even put ads on the videos of new youtube accounts and profit off them while telling said new accounts that they can't get any of that revenue for their own work until they hit Google's arbitrary threshold of subscribers/views. And they've been abusing the hell out of their chokehold monopoly on ads, via adsense, at every level of the system.

Point being, the fact that google ads currently don't yield much revenue per click/view for most people isn't necessarily just because they are ads.

Even so, corporations will never voluntarily conclude that they're making enough ad money. Line must go up, forever, because reasons.

And your grandma and parents pay for it, do they?

Free ChatGPT chat has made the company a household name, and helped it to persuade investors, but every single one of those free users costs the company money. Most of those free users have proved unwilling to convert to paid users, and adding ads to the free service promises to send it into the same enshittification death spiral so many other companies have fallen into.

Also, how on Earth would your grandma and parents not have heard of crypto? Crypto is frequently front page news, even in print newspapers. There have been crypto superbowl ads. Are they living under a rock?

Indeed, that article doesn't support a single part of that claim.

It kinda feels like an LLM-generated article that another LLM picked as a "citation", and then no human bothered to check if it actually said what the LLM said it did.

And, really, advergroup.com? Who sites an advertising agency as if it's a reliable resource?

https://advergroup.com/digital-marketing/

"AdverGroup Web Design and Creative Media Solutions is a full service advertising agency that delivers digital marketing services. We manage Google Ad Word campaigns and/or Meta Ad Campaigns for local clients in Chicago, Las Vegas and their surrounding suburbs."

So credible a resource on Gemini's performance/profitability... /sarc

But yeah it doesn't even actually say anything about profits, let alone attribute any specific percentage of profits to Gemini. It just vague marketing copy.

Its hottest service by far is completely free, the vast majority of users of its free service aren't converting to users of its paid services (and often stop using the free service too because they were just tourists seeing what all the fuss was about, or they were compelled to use the free service by their employer), and its data center plans are an impossible money pit.

The fact it's become a household name internationally (giving it the appearance of success) can't save it from spending dramatically more money than it makes. It's been coasting on investments, but it's not even close to being actually profitable.

Huge or well-known companies have collapsed before, even though - because people become so used to them existing - it never quite feels like it will actually happen until it does.

If that's the case, I want to see studies on how blue light filtering glasses fare versus just regular-ass sunglasses (of equivalent tint). Is it the reduction of blue light that helps people, or is it just the reduction of light, full stop?

Just the latter on its own is quite thoroughly proven to help people sleep, and helps with migraines, and so on.

Or what about UV light? I've never seen anyone say that an anti-UV coating/lens material in glasses helps with sleep (nor that it doesn't). But UV is still high frequency light that enters our eyes, even higher frequency than blue light, and there's at least some research to suggest it might affect human circadian rhythms despite its invisibility to us. But I've never seen anyone suggest that wearing your regular glasses (because most regular glasses these days are UV-blocking) before bed, or before a nap during the day (or before trying to sleep through the day, for a night shift worker), could help someone get to sleep.

I'd imagine it could also depend on exactly how much blue light is filtered; it's not like all blue light filtering glasses are tinted to the same degree. Glasses that all but make the world look like a reptile house might do a lot more than glasses that have only the faintest of orange tints. It's not like lenses either block blue light fully or don't block it at all; there's a spectrum here. How much blue light is supposed to get blocked for it to matter?

Were the studies that showed blue light blocking glasses to improve sleep done with lenses so tinted they were essentially sunglasses, or did they use nearly clear/only slightly tinted lenses akin to the blue light blocking lenses that are marketed as alternatives to regular clear lenses?

Even "mine.fyi" would be better at not making me think "landmine", although that would instead get read as "belonging to me".fyi.

I assume this is probably because most people don't see mines (as in gold mines) mentioned in plural very often. Or if someone does refer to multiple mines at once, they usually also specify the type of mine at the same time, like, "the cadmium mines in [country]" or similar. Or if talking about old, abandoned mines in an area, they're usually referred to as such.

The word "mines" on its own without an adjective usually does mean landmines, I think.

(I also immediately assumed this was about landmines.)

I think it is important to remember that only a tiny, tiny fraction of most facebook groups is actually posting, commenting, or even viewing the group at any given moment. Most people who view don't post/comment. (True of reddit and other social media as well.)

And the thing about poorly moderated groups (especially on platforms with rage-boosting algorithms) that let assholes go off without consequences is: the people who both a) actually look at the group ever and b) aren't assholes either leave entirely, stop looking at the group, and stop posting/commenting to the group (if they ever did in the first place). They go find places to hang out where there aren't a bunch of assholes. Nobody wants to hang out with the assholes when they can easily just not.

And at the same time, the assholes all gravitate to the same few places because they get kicked out of all the other places. Or if they don't get kicked out outright, they get shouted down or ignored, which they hate. So instead they congregate where they can get away with or get praised for saying whatever vile things they want.

The purpose of the broad list is removing AI-generated content from search results, so that the user doesn't have to wade through (as much) slop to find the human-created content they're looking for.

While I applaud the honesty of sites that are open about their content being AI generated, that type of content is never what I'm looking for when I search, so if they're in my search results it's just more distraction/clutter drowning out whatever I'm actually looking for. Blocking them improves my search experience slightly, even though there is of course still lots of other unwanted results remaining.

Granted, I definitely count as an AI hater (speaking of LLM's specifically). But even if I weren't, I don't think I'd be seeking it out specifically using a search engine; why would I do that when I could just go straight to chatgpt or whatever myself? Search is usually where people go to find real human answers (which is why appending "reddit" to one's searches became so common). So I see this as a utility thing, more than a "I am blocking all this just because I hate it" thing. Although it can be both, certainly.

Edit: removed an off-topic tangent