johnisgood

Got me at "You hit the nail on its head!", it is Gemini!

You and I both. :/

Cannot they just make you implement the ability and make sure you are shut down till you did?

Same thing happened in Hungary earlier this year, after 16 years of Orbán (and FWIW, the two are / were "good friends").

Interesting times.

I would probably go down the Lojban route though!

I remember using LLMs a couple of years ago, back when there was no mention of "AI" in our country whatsoever. Not that much mention of it online either (much less widespread). I felt like I was holding a magic wand nobody else knew existed. :P

You are correct in EU politicians being liars and corruption, though I want to mention the recent events in Hungary, and our fight against corruption and the corrupt politicians, many of them have been arrested after almost 2 decades of no accountability. There is hope, it seems! I would have never expected this to happen. Seems like our new PM and Govt wants to be on the good side of the history books.

And if you require a one-time SMS code for purchase (which can be adjusted via their website, most likely), then you still have an option that is not Apple and Google. I use a dumbphone for "banking" (SMS)... and a credit card, and the website. Those are really all the 3 things I need to do banking, as you have said so correctly.

They can be taken away from you at any point by locking your account for whatever.

You often cannot run even single player games without having connected to Steam (no need for account to be locked for this, but requires connectivity for one).

Multiplayer games almost always require Steam these days.

I used Steam as an example but applies to other platforms as well.

So yeah, I would say you pay for the license only, and you do not own the games at all, not anymore, and this has been true for a long time now.

I see where he is coming from. I believe his point is not that tobacco companies never paid anything (they paid over $206 billion in the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement to cover health costs, according to my quick searches). What he is calling out is the disparity in how the state punishes these harms today. The reason Meta's penalty hit $25 billion is not because ad-data misuse is worse than giving people cancer anyways, it's just a quirk of software-era consumer protection laws (which I should be responding to him, but hopefully he reads this comment). In New Mexico every single automated digital interaction was counted as a separate statutory violation which multiplies a basic fine into an astronomical sum. His point is that state governments are aggressively leveraging anti-tech outrage and these statutory math tricks to extract billions for state coffers whereas deadly industries like tobacco were allowed to negotiate structured settlements over decades while continuing to sell. I think... Well, this is how I interpreted his comments.

TL;DR: I think he already put it this way, but if Meta gets hit with $25B for ad-data tricks then why are we fining social media far more aggressively per user than companies that literally gave (and continue to give) people cancer? The answer is partly in my first paragraph but I still do not find it particularly reassuring.

Probably. I had the same issue in high school. :/

Oh my goodness, I remember having installed Flashget on my parent's PC about 20 years ago! And yeah of course I remember FileZilla, and DC++ and so on. :P

Thanks! :D

Huh? Yeah, of course they can do what they want. That does not preclude me from having an opinion about what they should prioritize. I am criticizing their product decisions, not claiming they are not free to make them...