fallingsquirrel

For those not clicking through, DOGE doesn't refer to Dogecoin, it stands for "Department of Government Efficiency."

That's a complete non-sequitur. If you cut off your feet and get shorter, it doesn't mean the human species has physiologically changed. And if you eat more calories and get taller, it doesn't mean the human species has physiologically changed.

That isn't a change of physiology, it's a change of our external environment. AFAIK there's no evidence to show humans living 100 years ago would respond any differently to modern nutrition than we do.

If the cause of being taller were internal, such as genetic changes: that would be a change in physiology.

Considering:

- a century ago a greater percentage of people were "normal" weight

- human physiology has not changed much over the past century

- our current definitions of overweight/obese correlate with negative health outcomes

I think the classification is largely correct even if you can haggle over some of the smaller details.

(EDIT: That said, people shouldn't be downvoting you just for asking the question, sorry that happened)

They're probably doing the same thing humans on our earth were doing for centuries until ~1600. Surviving. Given how cruel nature is I think we're lucky to have the resources to do more than just survive, to build up all this crazy technology we don't strictly need to live, just for fun/profit.

Of course there is. If someone hits their spending limit, asynchronously shut off the services (using the same API call that your customers can use, so no need to alter the system).

Then apply the hard limit in the billing code. If it took a minute or two to shut off all the instances, maybe the customer's bill should have been $1.001M instead of $1M, but cap the bill to $1M anyway. Given their profit margins of x,000% I think they can afford the lost pennies.

And yet somehow every time they launch a new product they have no problem adding it to their billing code.

The reason Apple and Google continually patch and change their rules is because they have been playing a cat and mouse game with bad actors who, for decades, have continued to find ways to siphon personal data off devices despite the technical restrictions in place.

You seem to have an awful lot of confidence that "iPhone" and "Kansas" are the only pieces of data any app can get from a device.

So can we say that you agree with #1: after decades of playing cat and mouse with advertisers and spyware authors, these latest updates from Apple and Google are the magical updates that finally completely solved privacy once and for all, and there will never be any bugs or mistakes or security holes ever again?

You completely ignored the substantive part of my post, so I'll restate without distractions.

1. Do you believe that with these latest round of updates, our benevolent corporate overloads Google and Apple (both advertising companies to some extent) have at long last fully solved privacy, plugging every possible information leak and fixing every possible software bug, both present and future?

2. If you do, then do you think it's desirable that we expect every participant in modern society to enter into one-sided, legally-binding contracts with companies they've never heard of with every small action they take on a daily basis, and then use complicated technical measures to avoid fulfilling their end of those contracts?

We're talking T&Cs here. How would typing in your location invalidate you agreeing to (what a company would like to believe is legally binding) clickwrap T&Cs? Even if you deny individual permissions, apps will still slurp up your app list/hardware specs/any metadata they can get their grimy hands on, directly and indirectly through side channels. You're saying to give them 999 data points instead of 1000 and you think that's a solution?

It sounds like you're advocating for a world where ordinary people need to choose between:

- not knowing the weather this weekend

- knowing the weather and signing away their firstborn child in the T&C

- becoming an amateur lawyer and spending dozens of hours reading and comparing T&Cs between apps to choose which one to use (until they change the T&Cs again of course, which they'll do without notifying you)

1. Why would you ever login to youtube in the first place?

2. There's strength in numbers. Between adblockers, foss clients, and youtube-dl/yt-dlp, there are probably tens to hundreds of millions of people watching youtube this way. If YT banhammers everyone for that they would end up banning a sizable fraction of the earth's population all in one day. Even Google isn't stupid enough to do that.