So much this. I started using it during Covid, and it’s been so great that I prefer Sams over any other shopping experience.

Clearly you haven’t spent 3 minutes playing with StableDiffusion. AI has already plumbed the depths of human awfulness.

If you only do the easy part, then yes that’s infinitely replaceable. Being a pretty face is exactly that, and AI can do that all day long.

Being actually entertaining and engaging, though, is a different story, and AI is struggling to pick that up. And of course teams of corporate marketers continually fail at this.

But yes, the “job” of “being attractive on the internet” can now be outsourced to machines.

Is it “don’t use them and just keep track of your stuff”? Because that seems like the most right answer here.

NLRB is going to have to convince a court (probably several) that their stance is the correct one before that ruling becomes at all real, though.

Oh, are we acting surprised because we forgot all the people that got screwed exactly like this on Kindle books in 2009?

Welcome to digital media. If you can’t play it without some company’s say do, you don’t own it.

Yep, I use a VPN just in general, and wipe my Reddit history every 30 days or so. I would make new accounts, but the ones I have are from before they demanded an email address, so they haven’t got one attached.

Not blind at all - that’s just what I do for the ads. 😉

That’s fine I guess. I only use Reddit from a uBlock’d browser behind a pihole. I’ve yet to see a single Reddit ad in 14 years.

That’s not the easy way, though. People go for home automation in the first place to make something easy. Getting some awful proprietary spyware doodad to work with HomeAssistant is usually not the “just works” experience they’re looking for.

I bought a new Brother laser printer in 2021 and it has no problem with third party toners.

And why exactly should I or anyone else confine our research to what these monopolies want?

This. Anything with a million users is chock full of megacorps. The noteworthy bit is that this isn’t run exclusively by one of them.