Don’t forget the inevitable “3 months ago we were made aware of a breach of the BONTO! servers. What information was taken? Bet you’d like to know wouldn’t you. What have we done about this situation? Fuck you, that’s what.”
23 and Me customer here, and I couldn’t relate more. When I reached out to support to ask what data was stolen and how much they were planning on compensating me for having my genome leaked to the web, their answer was basically “We have no idea what you’re talking about. lol fuck you”
BUT . . .But. To make it up to you we’ve also sold your info to a “Privacy Lock” company who will sell you something imaginary for as long as you pay them. That’ll totally fix it.
3 months later; privacy lock company is breached
Oh it was an Eastern European shell this whole time and they have my social security number for some reason
You can’t use this service unless you give us your social security number. Whoops! Your SSN was stolen three months ago and we just found out.
I used to unironically enjoy skimming my spam folder for fun scams, but nowadays there are no fun scams, it’s all fake amazon gift cards, fake pharmacies, and fake iCloud and Cash App emails.
I miss the days where it felt like a sexy single was interested in me, purely by my email, or I had been singled out by royalty of some sort.
You forgot the part where BONTO leaks user information, and now you get a torrent of spam…
Folks, we need to learn to use aliases.
Fastmail has quite nice implementation of this, they call it “masked e-mail”, but I bet there are many (perhaps under other names). (Disclaimer: I have no connection to FastMail other than I use their service and like it.)
I’ve learned to just create new masked email for every domain where i share e-mail – legit or not. Then you can just disable the alias if it gets annoying. You can also reply to an e-mail you got to the alias without revealing your real address (as long as you do it from FastMail UI).
TBH I think if your email is filled with garbage you need to do a better job of managing your email.
If they think email is bad now, then obviously a lot of people dont remember the 90s before spam filtering got decent.
At least then it was only Bill Gates personally sending me chain letters
And that Prince dude in Nigeria. He was chill.
He never did get around to sending me that Windows 98 license. Ended up having to use a keygen.
I was so excited about the thousands of dollars I was going to get in the mail when a friend and I came up with the brilliant idea of sending that one back and forth to each other.
I was going to get so many Pokémon cards.
Don’t forget the 4500 emails suggesting you upgrade to slorp pro-premium-plus-max
You make fun of this but I really had bonto pro-premium-plus-max and it comes with many benefits like not getting these mails anymore
“You have 17 messages in your Slorp-box! Click here to log in”
“Loser McDouchebag from high school recently Slorped! Click hear to read it!”
And, after the rebranding: “Someone looked at your BONTO! profile! Want to know who? Get BONTO! Premium and send them a BONTO!-Gram! Remember, this could be the beginning of something wonderful! Get it now for only $9,99 (first 6 months, conditions apply)!”
And if you already did, then you’re really missing out on the pro lifetime plan that includes a lifetime license!*
^(* lifetime license only valid until we release the next version in 2 months)
Then when you finally upgrade to premium plus max lifetime, the acquisition happens and lifetime licenses get cancelled.
CEO is my cat. He got some teeth pulled. Slorp slorp…
signs into portal
ding!
“New sign-on to Grek Ultra Product Manager Plus!”
Why is this the default
“Security alert: Login from a new unknown device!” - it’s the same computer on the same network as the previous 300 logins!
ie. Fuck you for deleting our cookies
That automatically expires after 30 days anyway. So even if you didn’t do it, we did.
How dare you use a browser that doesn’t let us track the fuck out of you! Delete cookies and cache every time!?
You deserve this.
Glorp! Glorp!
Wait…. It’s Custard, not Carl
And then the email nine months later telling you that your account information was stolen from BONTO in a data breach.
I’d argue that email is as useful as regular mail. I get about 2 letters a year written by a person. The rest is bills and marketing.
Email is basically a central notification hub for users, and I’d much prefer that than having to log into each specific app to be notified of things.
Love these anti-features
Click. Report spam. Just as it deserves.
Linkedin also send you emails even if you repeatedly turn them off
Last I checked LinkedIn doesn’t even have a way of straight up turning all emails off. I had to individually turn off email notifications on bazillion categories. …Then they just invented more categories.
Add it to your spam filter. Have it auto forward the email to LinkedIn’s customer support email with a request that they stop if you wanna be extra.
Honey, I live to be extra.
Ooo baby, extra is my middle name
me too! look at us, we’re fucking fabulous. LinkedIn should fear us.
I miss Slorp. All the modern copies of Slorp suck.
Yeah. Nü Meowmeow Beans was a disaster.
Is this a Community reference? Fantastic.
average BONTO! enjoyer here, go slorp yourself.
It seems like it’s been a while since you last checked in with BONTO! We’d love your feedback on how we can improve. Log in to get started!
*Your 2FA login code for SLORP
*Your password reset link for SLORP
*Your password reset link for SLORP
*You have (2) new messages from other SLORP users
*There has been a login attempt from a new device on SLORP
*Your SLORP password may have been compromised
I always get 4 fucking emails when I login into firefox on a new device
Remember when email was useful? I remember when it was magical!
Time for a story from the ancient times. I had this idea and asked my professor for advice. He said he knew a person on the other side of the world who would know all about it. “This is his ‘email’ address.”
I had never heard about ‘email’ so I needed to learn what it was and how to send one. I wrote my message and off it went. The very next morning I had a reply. One of the best experts on a topic I was keen about had shared their thoughts from the other side of the world, just like that.
In that time, a long time ago as you’ll appreciate, that interaction was magical.
In an instant I understood the power of the Usenet. A while later and with a couple of additional protocols they started calling that the Internet.
Heh, that’s nostalgia. I always wonder what the young people of today’s equivalent will be. Probably something quantum.
There is no equivalent, because it’s not new, and even if it was, it’s monetized and manipulative. The internet back then was wide open, free as fuck, and completely new!
I was specifically referring to the ability to communicate in writing at that speed. I guess the telegraph technically existed as well, but it was expensive and awkward.
And couldn’t reach across oceans, required special training, and only accommodated short messages because of the tedious nature of signaling.
You could definitely send telegraphs overseas, and sending or receiving them required no training.
and sending or receiving them required no training.
If you mean paying someone to send them, then sure. But it required learning Morse code, and learning to use a keyer.
You couldn’t send them overseas until after the invention of radio. Before that the signal traveled along a wire.
The first transatlantic telegraph cable was laid down in 1854 and radio waves weren’t even theorized until 1873… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_telegraph_cable
It’s happening right now with AI. It’s currently in the Usenet phase. A few people understand it and are using it to positively alter their daily lives by improving their ability to gather and filter information, but (ironically) thanks to the internet the vast majority of people are distracted by some niches like generative art or writing book reports. In the next year or two, we’ll start to see mainstream people have AI personal assistants that will have conversations with other AIs. Even without the robotics component, daily life will change. Remember before you could order Amazon same day delivery, or Door Dash a meal? Imagine that level (and better) of tracking and communication for every service you could need, all completely automated. Your sink broke? A perfectly fine plumber can be here in 20 mins, be advised to expect an 80% chance that you’ll see their buttcrack, a 40% chance that they aren’t wearing deodorant, and a 100% chance there will be multiple off-color remarks about the current political situation. Does this bother you? Your AI already knows and an instant deep dive of reviews and social media has found a plumber that may in fact be your soul mate. They’ll be here on Thursday. Your AI queued up a playlist of your mutual favorite songs.
In a slower but possibly as life altering revolution, AR. Apple is starting this with Apple Vision Pro, but this will need to be miniaturized down to a discrete pair of glasses (like Meta Ray-Bans) with 3 pieces of tech that aren’t there yet:
- Even smaller computers (remember when they were the size of shipping containers?)
- More efficient batteries
- A display technology that both adjusts focus depending on the distance your eyes are focusing at while also occluding reality.
I’m confident these will exist in our lifetime, but probably not within the next decade. Once they all come together, the way people experience life will change. Both for the better and worse. If capitalism hasn’t been legislatively reigned in a bit, the ads are going to be insane.
I actually work with ML a lot (at the intersection of my domain with it), though I am not an ML/AI engineer.
I think short-term, ML/AI has a great chance of helping hugely with accessibility issues with users of various systems. My secondary thought is maybe related to elder care, but I’m not sure yet.
I have largely had bad experiences with AI assistants (coding, search, and other domains), except maybe helping with finding/generating code samples for libs/packages with poor or missing documentation (though I go to the docs and code first and those results aren’t always correct).
I do see virtual assistants in various forms being a possible near-term implementation with promise, but most are still heavily trained on and biased to. A handful of languages (in the case of LLMs and such) which limits global appeal.
I am both frightened (the race to market without considering the near- nor long-term costs to society as a whole neither ethics in many cases) and hopeful about the whole thing.
I think you are probably correct, though I also feel we might have something in physics or robotics that has ripple effects opening new avenues. Only time will tell, I suppose. Cheers!
I am both frightened (the race to market without considering the near- nor long-term costs to society as a whole neither ethics in many cases) and hopeful about the whole thing.
Same! I’m downright terrified about the impossibility of determining what should be legal/illegal because our politics move at a glacial pace and rarely involve experts in the field. Some bad actors can AND WILL really fuck things up here. I do think that the possibilities are a net positive. If I were in charge, I would pump the brakes until we could better ascertain what the fallout will be.
I have largely had bad experiences with AI assistants (coding, search, and other domains), except maybe helping with finding/generating code samples for libs/packages with poor or missing documentation (though I go to the docs and code first and those results aren’t always correct).
Maybe my current scenario is in some Venn diagram of the perfect situation, but I’ve been having the opposite experience. I’m a game designer changing from about a decade of Unreal (and another decade and a half of various proprietary engines) to learning Unity. I’ve got a pretty clear idea of what I want to do, I’ve just got no clue how to do it. I’ve been using a combination of GPT-4o and co-pilot to figure things out and it’s been great! GPT has been a combination of pair programming and Google replacement. I’ll tell it what I’m trying to do and it not only spits out a code example, but it describes what each section is doing. Occasionally it’ll tackle problems from the wrong end, like yesterday it was placing a UI element and then clamping it to ensure it was drawn on screen instead of figuring out the proper screen space scale first and properly converting world space to that specific space/scale. But if you’re familiar with the methodology and need help with the syntax/structure, it’s kind of amazing. Co-pilot is SO FAST! I’ve got no idea where a property I’m looking for is being stored and that shit auto-completes (almost always) exactly what I’m looking for, purely based on context or comments. Some times it hallucinates properties that don’t exist, but the IDE calls my attention to that pretty quickly and co-pilot usually sets me on the right path.
The pre-Google YouTube is probably the closest thing I can think of. And just a time before when everything about the Internet was about profit.
Back when Google were cool.
Google was the absolute coolest for a while. It’s a damn shame what they’ve become. Fuck you Sundar Pichai!
I’ll admit that I didn’t really get YouTube when I first heard of it. I think justin.tv was the thing that made me realize there was something there, even though I only watched it all of about twice. Then again, I thought music CDs were a scam for the longest time. I’m old.
I remember in like 1997 or so, my friend’s dad got VoIP working on his computer, and we would talk to random people from around the world. I still have fond memories of my first conversation. It was someone in Australia! All the way on the other side of the planet, and we were talking in real time, FOR FREE! I’ve been a computer nerd ever since.
I had a similar but very different experience. At the beginning of COVID my buddy and I got our ham radio licenses.
One of my earliest contacts was a guy in Japan, over 6000 miles away! Nothing between us but some wire strung up in a tree, and a couple of radios. Using the ionosphere to bounce our signals around the world.
So. Stinking. Awesome.
I’ve been hooked ever since.
It’s funny because it’s almost the opposite of your story, you were using the amazing new technology and infrastructure to make the trip. These days we take that very infrastructure for granted.
It’s fun to try doing it with as little infrastructure as possible!
That’s rad! I bought a ham radio during covid too, but I still haven’t got my license. I’ve studied for the test several times, but never felt ready to take it.
What time were you talking to the guy in Japan? I live in Japan and am (very slowly as technical and legal japanese are hard) working on my HAM license and would love to chat with my dad in the US eastern time zone. Still not 100% sure about propagation and other such. Thanks!
I’d have to check my logs, but it was something like spring or early summer. Honestly though the solar cycle has a much larger effect on propagation, and right now we’re near solar maximum so things are really hopping. At the beginning of COVID we were just starting to come out of solar minimum.
I haven’t been super active lately, so I can’t comment on how often you’d be able to make contact. But with some coordination it’s definitely doable. Especially if you get some decent metal in the air.
You still have US citizenship? You might be able to do your testing in the USA over zoom and use a reciprocal license, though I haven’t looked deeply into it.
It’s possible to get my US license and transfer it, yeah. I was unaware zoom was an option, so I might look into that. The 13-hour time difference (to US Eastern) might make the test a bit rough, hah. Cheers!
Usenet is now INTERNET!
…
…
The INTERNET is shutting down (?)The Usenet actually still exists.
Yeah, man. Good times. Good times.
