I think it is important to recognise people as people. I’m not making excuses for intentionally malicious wealthy or powerful people – but the wealth or power itself isn’t the whole problem (although the various systems that perpetuate and enable certain wealthy or powerful people are problematic of course), and we shouldn’t give these adults that as an excuse.

They’re wealthy, yes. They’re also human beings who choose to be cruel, callous, selfish, uncaring arseholes.

They’re powerful, yes. They’re also adults who know what they’re doing and consistently make the decision to harm people with their choices.

Netanyahu’s political power wouldn’t be as much of a problem in and of itself if he wasn’t choosing to enact a genocide. Murdoch’s wealth wouldn’t be as much of a problem in and of itself if he didn’t choose to use it to buy media outlets and push right-wing lies to millions.

No excuses for cruelty; the money and power didn’t “corrupt” these people, because we don’t live in a fantasy world where money and power are magic cursed items. These people intentionally decided to be cruel.

Certainly not in any big budget mainstream movie there won’t be, because the LLMs used to generate script prompts for the LLMs used to generate visuals and audio clips wouldn’t understand why a human using an AI to fake a human interaction because they’re soul-crushingly lonely would be sad.

Honestly, it might even be generated as a “happy” scene, to show a “normal” life in the future as product placement for the AI companies as they try to exploit fomo to dig their way out of their inevitable fifty trillion dollar income deficits

Wow, I’m genuinely not excited for or interested in the future at all. Oh.

Funny enough, I mentioned that in my first paragraph as I’ve had to do that for a client recently who had some specific niche use case for something that wouldn’t allow cookies to be used.

Very true, you’re right.

It’s just that the sort of “depth” and “breadth” of the tracking has evolved, as well as the ways marketers use that information.

Yeah, 100%! And the languages point generally opens up to a third-party system like WeGlot, whether the cookie is first-party or not. It’s sort of amazing to me how collaborative the modern web is, but also just how insecure it can be.

It can be really locked down but I would say at least half of the wordpress sites online (and wordpress powers something like 20%+ of the whole open internet, iirc) pull in all sorts of third-party scripts and code that isn’t vetted by the people including them (including me! Only so many hours in a workday, after all).

Yes, you’re spot on; it’s mostly about elements and functionality not working. Just as a heads up, I work in the WordPress ecosystem so the following brief descriptions will be focused on PHP based sites. I’m sure there are ways round using cookies, such as using localStorage in JavaScript etc. Anyway!

The biggest thing you’ll run into is anything to do with login systems. Any website that offers a login/account typically makes use of cookies, in order to let the website “remember” that you’re logged in, between page navigation.

One of our clients offers a comparison calculator for investments. This calculator relies on cookies when you want to “save” your results, and also makes use of them when you’re not logged in, in order to allow you to access your previous runs of the calculator without having to create an account.

Another of our clients, also in the financial space, produces documents containing financial info about funds, and marketing materials. These docs are subject to strict compliance rules determining what can be shown to users based on what “type” of investor is viewing the site, and where in the world they’re viewing from.

Anybody visiting the site self-identifies by manually selecting an investor “type” and a location. This info gets set into a cookie, and the site serves content based on the values in that cookie. If the site can’t identify the cookie or it has an invalid value, it’ll basically be unusable, in order to protect the company themselves.

As a web developer, I can confirm that there are sometimes necessary cookies that aren’t just for the wankstains in marketing!

That’s sort of what I’m saying, though; I would have thought this would have been a violation of some of the guidelines around consent in the gdpr

I actually do think I’ve seen variations in this wording over the course of a few months. I’m going to go digging around sites I think are probably less scrupulous to see if I can find examples.

Boom, gotcha. First absolute rag that came to mind. Check it! Screenshot:

Edit: also it’s totally on me that you thought the word Reject was in there - I put it in quotes and then provided an example that didn’t contain it, sorry! 😂

A lot of news sites! Let me see if I can find one.

I’m pretty sure I saw it on Autosport earlier today. Just opened it in Chrome (ew) – see screenshot!

Edit: reading the popup, I assume the legal loophole is that you technically CAN revoke consent after accepting, without paying, by visiting a whole separate page and doing it there. Ultra scummy!

I love the way companies simply refuse to not track us. You guys seen those cookie popups that are like “accept and continue” or “reject and pay” where you have to actually pay to reject cookies? I cannot believe that’s legal at all. Total scumbags.

You’re right that’s exactly the same as replacing one grouping of two letters mate

What’s the exhibit? Telling someone else to stop whining? 😂

If you really don’t give non-native speakers of English enough credit to use context and their current understanding of the language to learn one more letter, I think that’s pretty exclusionary. People who don’t speak English as a first language aren’t stupid, mate.

I’ve never used it. Jesus man stop whining, you already don’t read the comments like you’ve said. I swear sometimes it seems like people online just desperately need something to moan about.

Yeah, I’ve got used to it. It’s not a hard substitution to make, and even if it does take you a little longer to read the comments I guess I don’t see the problem. I’m not in a rush to read online comments, and if I was in a rush I wouldn’t be reading online comments 🤷‍♂️

Personally I find it a bit weird how much hate this person gets. We can all read it as a ‘th’, and it’s harmless for them to use that character. It’s genuinely just not a problem at all, and if anything is a quirky little thing that you occasionally see in comments. Who cares?

Why even bother spamming this comment section with a lazy copy/paste like this? You don’t got no brain to think for yourself or something man?

I usually choose to have a podcast or music on, but sometimes it’s really nice to just appreciate my surroundings. I like to hear birdsong, or the wind, the rain. Even cars passing. It’s nice to be grounded in the world.

Even when I have music, I spend most of my time when I walk (which is a lot) not looking down at the ground. I look around, and I try to appreciate the little things. The other day, I noticed a really, really polished front door on a house I was walking past. The wood was so bright red and all of the metal was this gleaming silver, it was really striking! There are wild parakeets in the city I live in, so getting the chance to see these beautiful green birds swoop overhead is a treat, too. Where I live is quite hilly, so getting to see what I think are beautiful views of the urban sprawl interspersed with big tree plumages in the green spaces is pleasant, too. Sometimes it’s quite imposing, it’s not always a pretty and cheery sight, but it’s always beautiful.

When I don’t have music or podcasts playing, I feel like I can appreciate those sights a bit more. Picking up on snippets of other people’s lives is interesting, and I find my mood is easier regulated when I just ground myself in the world around me rather than disappearing up into my head with the podcast or music playing. If I have sound on that I focus on, I’ll often not really remember my walking to and from work, but if I’m just experiencing the world, I’ll usually find something memorable. I find that slowing down and taking the time away from tech has been nice for me, sometimes.

Greed