Oh shit! So is mine!

On the stable channel, it seems like (from comparing notes with friends) a recent update introduced crashes into older games that did not crash previously. In my case, Proton is always involved.

Perl is the only language that looks just as incomprehensible before and aa rot13 transformation.

Lol. You’re not wrong.

I’m kinda jealous. I don’t miss maintaining production Perl code, but Perl was more fun to code in.

Lisp is the more logical choice.

Relevant XKCD. Python has replaced Perl, but things have otherwise changed quite little.

The only way to know if you are competent coder is for other coders to tell you. If none are telling you, your imposter syndrome isn’t.

Or, considering that they’re mostly introverts, if they look approvingly in the general direction of your shoes…

Yeah. If Valve releases a remotely viable desktop console OS, I’ll immediately build one for my living room. If for no other reason, to keep the rest of the family away from my SteamDeck.

As in if you live in a state with sales tax but down the road is a state without sales tax- why ever shop in your state?

Mostly the states are quite big, so it’s not worth the trouble. But along various state borders, it distorts the shopping experience in odd ways.

I’ve been to towns that are missing common retailers entirely, because everyone drives to the next town over (in another state), to avoid a tax.

We also have a rich history of driving across state lines to purchase stuff that’s illegal in our own state. It’s also illegal to bring it back, but the borders aren’t patrolled, so the only way to get caught is to have a traffic violation while doing it.

Or so I’ve heard. I never break any laws, myself.

Cool chart.

It really makes the point to me that the PS1 and PS2, when adjusted for inflation, and for relative compute power, were just such a fantastic deal.

I was recovering from some serious console-purchase fatigue, when I bought my PS1 to replace my garage sale purchased Super NES. It was a big deal to me.

I’ve paid PS5 prices (inflation adjusted) for a game system a few times (my first Switch and SteamDeck), but they’ve been a lot more mind blowing than what appears to be on offer today.

Disclaimer: My favorite game is 8-bit, anyway.

You’re not wrong to give the benefit out the doubt and believe their PR person isn’t lying.

But I’m not inclined to give that benefit of the doubt. I don’t trust these folks farther than I can throw them. I don’t, myself, need proof, to believe they would try this crap.

And this is definitely evidence.

But without hard evidence I don’t believe random apps are just recording clandestinely in the background.

I certainly do. Malware attempts to record you is old news.

We have always assumed voice was off the table for practical reasons - voice recordings are expensive to decode and correlated usefully.

Cox has particularly deep pockets, which makes this interesting.

I do actually agree, this really could just have been a vendor bullshitting. Normally I would say Occam’s razor points there. But Occam’s razor points the other way, to me, when I consider that basically everyone I know has experienced a voice targeted ad.

The big ugly question is which apps are recording voices?

It might just be name squatting spyware. I haven’t seen confirmation that any do this, and I always assumed it was too expensive. Maybe it still is, but my guess is Cox isn’t the only ones who got that sale offer.

The creepy part is, if you’re not inclined to take Google, Amazon, and Meta at their word, then one wonders what other apps are recording voices…

Here’s the conspiracy part:

• Apps by Meta famously ask for more permissions than they should reasonably need.
• Both Google and Amazon publish operating systems that promise us they are enforcing our permission preferences, while definitely collecting more behavior data than most people would feel comfortable with, if they were aware.
• We know that all three companies thrive on tracking our behavior, and selling what they learn.
• One of the three had to change it’s corporate slogan away from “don’t be evil”.

The conspiracy emerges when we look at these data points and squint a little.

Edit: I think many of y’all are in denial about how much you shouldn’t trust Meta apps on your phones.

We know Meta wants to use things you say to build an ad profile. We have evidence they don’t have any moral qualms about doing it. We know they have unfathomable terms of service and closed source apps.

And now we know there’s been at least one closed door conversation about buying the recordings that supposedly don’t exist.

I don’t have proof but I also don’t have any apps by Meta on my phone.

Security researchers would’ve noticed this.

They did notice. Malicious apps that use everything they can to spy on you are old news.

To your point - this isn’t confirmation that any of the big players are listening directly. That would probably have been caught by security researchers, although it would be really difficult in Google’s or Amazon’s case, as they run proprietary software at a very low level.

The news here is two fold;

1. Cox got caught buying that data, and when confronted about it, Google, Amazon, and Meta all failed to deny that they also buy that data from those malicious app makers.

2. This is strong evidence that someone is routinely collecting that data. That’s news. We’ve suspected for awhile that, at minimum, the malware apps do. Occam’s razor says at minimum, we should now assume many malware apps are using microphone to collect speech and submit it elsewhere for analysis.

The unprovable part of this that smells much worse is: a kid in a basement writing malware does not have the computing power to turn tons of raw voice recordings into useful correlated data.

That kid needs an ally with a lot of computing power. Google, Meta, and Amazon all have a motive here and have the necessary computing power.

And all three worded their denials pretty carefully, I noticed.

In summary: Google, Amazon and Meta all deny that they directly access your microphone, and all three failed to actually deny purchasing voice data from third party apps that definitely do use your microphone and pair that with your ad targeting profile.

This is getting more attention because an internal slide deck from Cox Media Group was leaked. Based on the nature of leaks, it’s safe to assume that Cox isn’t the only organization up to this, they were just the least careful.

So yeah, they’re listening to anyone who isn’t incredibly careful what apps they install and what permissions they give those apps.

Exactly as we all have suspected for years, while they gaslight us promising that they definitely don’t.

Notice that they’re still denying it, and trust that as you will.

I think they forgot to pay themselves to use their product.

You are supposed to be tracking when they expire and then renew/replace them before they expire.

I’ve been told that, as well, but I’m not sure I see it… Seems like a lot of effort… (This is sarcasm. Or is it just too much honesty?)

Thank you for this. This is awesome.

shittingTurtle and victimTurtle are going into one of my professional slide decks as soon as I think I can get away with it.

I love it!

All great code started out as a shitty work-around that happened to work.

(I say this as someone with one of the more prestigious pedigrees in “not writing shit code”. All the theory I’ve learned helps, but at the end of the day the most important qualities of a line of code are: whether it got the job done, and whether is was obviously correct enough that the next developer left it alone.)

At this point I think there is no software dev topic that is somehow not devisive.

Now I want to try something:

“Boolean variables don’t suck.”

Wow. “peak shareholder value” is what I shall now call “multiple inheritance”, from now on.