

I’m glad he has you/y’all Toadski
<3
I’m glad he has you/y’all Toadski
<3
I wonder what the most manual part of the whole process is
Massive shoutout to my teacher who taught us this junior or senior year. Was absolutely shocked.
Thanks errer
Disposable income Lemmings, this is the way
❤️ love you Internet Archive
Not even in an interesting or corrupt way. “Our engineers think it would be better to do it this way, any objections?” And then everyone talks about it.
And this was the mental roadblock I hit trying to imagine a world without lobbyists.
As if we could ignore every voice with some connection to a profit motive (ignoring thousands of experts), etc
Well said!
Thanks
Not great for adjacent vehicles either
YOOOOOO that’s friggin AWESOME
Great idea!!!
Awesome, what’s keeping you busy these days? (If this is an account where it’s OK to share that on)
Come on tell tech daddy where you go on weekdays & weekends for how long at what speed with how many passengers!
Interesting, wonder how the economics work for the different players. Also, tangentially:
A decade or two ago, a lady working in dealer finance lamented how internet bank rate comparisons had really rained on their parade
“I want this rate”, she explained customers would say, pointing at a printout or their phone and expecting a match.
Imagine how fat those margins would’ve been when they knew a customer hadn’t yet called around researching rates!
I can’t imagine a court in the country seeing a problem with the call and cancel trick. Although,
personally, I want to get a great deal in a way I’ll feel good about… maybe have a story to share with fellow misers.
But I do put myself in the business’s shoes and I think it’s fair for everyone to walk out knowing how good of a deal they got and how much money they made.
And when you’re inside the building and they run their numbers and based on that they shake your hand, to go outside of the building and reach back to change the numbers–in a way that’d make them take back the handshake–it exceeds the level of cunning I’d want to be in a negotiation.
Also Lemmings, I promise I am not the parent commenter’s mother. Someone, take my soapbox before I make someone else want to log off! 😇
The buffer only stores one video, for direct user experience purposes only, and is wiped upon playback of a subsequent video.
Well that’s just my assumption based on the company’s data privacy reputation (lul I grinned typing that)
Love how aggressive Alphabet’s Google’s YouTube is after watch history’s disabled.
WATCH HISTORY OFF!! CLICK TO ENABLE (NO RECOMMENDATIONS B/C YOU DESERVE A BLANK PAGE) OTHERWISE, AGAIN !PLEASE! !!CLICK!!
#darkpattern
Thank you for the follow up!!!
The way Salima found out that Boulangism had gone bankrupt: her toaster wouldn’t accept her bread. She held the slice in front of it and waited for the screen to show her a thumbs-up emoji, but instead, it showed her the head-scratching face and made a soft brrt. She waved the bread again. Brrt.
“Come on.” Brrt.
She turned the toaster off and on. Then she unplugged it, counted to ten, and plugged it in. Then she menued through the screens until she found RESET TO FACTORY DEFAULT, waited three minutes, and punched her Wi-Fi password in again.
Brrt.
Long before she got to that point, she’d grown certain that it was a lost cause. But these were the steps that you took when the electronics stopped working, so you could call the 800 number and say, “I’ve turned it off and on, I’ve unplugged it, I’ve reset it to factory defaults and…”
There was a touchscreen option on the toaster to call support, but that wasn’t working, so she used the fridge to look up the number and call it. It rang seventeen times and disconnected. She heaved a sigh. Another one bites the dust.
The toaster wasn’t the first appliance to go (that honor went to the dishwasher, which stopped being able to validate third-party dishes the week before when Disher went under), but it was the last straw. She could wash dishes in the sink but how the hell was she supposed to make toast—over a candle?
Just to be sure, she asked the fridge for headlines about Boulangism, and there it was, their cloud had burst in the night. Socials crawling with people furious about their daily bread. She prodded a headline and learned that Boulangism had been a ghost ship for at least six months because that’s how long security researchers had been contacting the company to tell it that all its user data—passwords, log-ins, ordering and billing details—had been hanging out there on the public internet with no password or encryption. There were ransom notes in the database, records inserted by hackers demanding cryptocurrency payouts in exchange for keeping the dirty secret of Boulangism’s shitty data handling. No one had even seen them.
Boulangism’s share price had declined by 98 percent over the past year. There might not even be a Boulangism anymore. When Salima had pictured Boulangism, she’d imagined the French bakery that was on the toaster’s idle-screen, dusted with flour, woodblock tables with serried ranks of crusty loaves. She’d pictured a rickety staircase leading up from the bakery to a suite of cramped offices overlooking a cobbled road. She’d pictured gas lamps.
The article had a street-view shot of Boulangism’s headquarters, a four-story office block in Pune, near Mumbai, walled in with an unattended guard booth at the street entrance.
The Boulangism cloud had burst and that meant that there was no one answering Salima’s toaster when it asked if the bread she was about to toast had come from an authorized Boulangism baker, which it had. In the absence of a reply, the paranoid little gadget would assume that Salima was in that class of nefarious fraudsters who bought a discounted Boulangism toaster and then tried to renege on her end of the bargain by inserting unauthorized bread, which had consequences ranging from kitchen fires to suboptimal toast (Boulangism was able to adjust its toasting routine in realtime to adjust for relative kitchen humidity and the age of the bread, and of course it would refuse to toast bread that had become unsalvageably stale), to say nothing of the loss of profits for the company and its shareholders. Without those profits, there’d be no surplus capital to divert to R&D, creating the continuous improvement that meant that hardly a day went by without Salima and millions of other Boulangism stakeholders (never just “customers”) waking up with exciting new firmware for their beloved toasters.
And what of the Boulangism baker-partners? They’d done the right thing, signing up for a Boulangism license, subjecting their process to inspections and quality assurance that meant that their bread had exactly the right composition to toast perfectly in Boulangism’s precision-engineered appliances, with crumb and porosity in perfect balance to absorb butter and other spreads. These valued partners deserved to have their commitment to excellence honored, not cast aside by bargain-hunting cheaters who wanted to recklessly toast any old bread.
Salima knew these arguments, even before her stupid toaster played her the video explaining them, which it did after three unsuccessful bread-authorization attempts, playing without a pause or mute button as a combination of punishment and reeducation campaign.
She tried to search her fridge for “boulangism hacks” and “boulangism unlock codes” but appliances stuck together. KitchenAid’s network filters gobbled up her queries and spat back snarky “no results” screens even though Salima knew perfectly well that there was a whole underground economy devoted to unauthorized bread.
She had to leave for work in half an hour, and she hadn’t even showered yet, but goddamnit, first the dishwasher and now the toaster. She found her laptop, used when she’d gotten it, now barely functional. Its battery was long dead and she had to unplug her toothbrush to free up a charger cable, but after she had booted it and let it run its dozens of software updates, she was able to run the darknet browser she still had kicking around and do some judicious googling.
She was forty-five minutes late to work that day, but she had toast for breakfast. Goddamnit.
The dishwasher was next. Once Salima had found the right forum, it would have been crazy not to unlock the thing. After all, she………… 😉
Cory Doctorow’s book, Radicalized, is up for a CBC award. To celebrate, here’s an excerpt.
Sending love, you’re awesome