How often do your change your passwords? Assuming they are decently long and all that, why would you change them at all other than when a site gets breached?
The only reason my Keepass database changes is because I make new accounts on sites every now and then, and that's a fairly rare thing these days. And if I get so ungodly unlucky that my house burns down before my off-site database is updated to have that new account listed, I'll still have access to the email that account is associated with, so I can still recover the account either way.
Every time I add an account, for one. And there's still plenty of (dumb) sites which force me to change my password and sometimes username periodically.
Keeping an offsite database in sync is tedious, especially if it's delivered via sneakernet.
I add an account to that database maybe twice a year, probably less. Do you make a lot more accounts than that?
The off-site solution I have updates a lot more often than that, although that's only because only the really important stuff is backed up in that way; the stuff I truly need to survive my house burning down.
I'm almost done with that aspect of my life now, but every school year it feels like there's a new slate of apps, parent communication portals, etc. I need to manage these as well.
It's way more often than twice a year for me. And it's accelerating.
Fair enough, but it’s genuinely super easy to have a regular copy of your password manager saved in the cloud. You can also have a less frequently updated version stored somewhere physical that isn’t your house. My house burning down has never been a concern for me, as I’ve taken the proper precautions for my data.
I unfollowed everyone except for a few family members. It really wants to give you the infinite scroll and started showing me some really bizarre stuff. So much AI slop, and random content.
For about a week it kept showing me nursing mothers, no matter how many times I said "I don't want to see this" and blocking. I have no problem with women nursing, but these were done in a way to be sexually provocative.
After that it started showing me AI houses and kitchens, with kitchen taps but no sink basin.
I made a Facebook account a few years ago for a private group related to a class I was taking. I didn't want to do this, but it is what it is.
Being paranoid, I ran a VM just for Facebook. The browser never went to any other sites, so as far as I know there is no way it could track me or get any actual information about me, other than maybe a very rough location based on my IP. I also setup a burner email just for this and used a fake name/picture.
On a fresh account with no info, my feed was much like that of the linked article. A bunch of thirst traps and various "news" and memes. Occasionally it would tell me to follow stuff so it could actually populate the feed, but when it wasn't doing that, it was giving me this kind of garbage. This was before the advent of generative AI, so I assume these were mostly real photos, but who knows who was actually behind those accounts.
Twitter was fairly similar, but would show a lot of high school kids fighting or general street fights... along side the thirst traps.
I can recommend using Social Fixer addon [1] on your laptop. On my phone, I use Nobook [2] which isn't quite as effective. They both do a good job though of removing loads of the useless stuff on Facebook.
Thanks for the suggestion, I just installed the socialfixer userscript and am going to give it a try. I now just need to start telling Facebook I'm not interested everytime I see an AI post and hope it eventually gets better.
I remember at some point which I think was a bug: it started showing a specific type of food, I think some kind of barbeque, prepared in various ways from across the globe. And by "started showing" I mean the feed was pretty much that for an extended period of time. Also at some point a large part of the feed was reposts of random reddit posts in screenshot format.
I've never seen a website break because of ublock, at least not in the default config. If it's that much of a problem you can just remote in on grandmas computer and disable it for whatever website.
I think that beats remoting in when granny inevitably gets scammed by an ad.
There really is no excuse in my mind for not running an ad blocker. It's as vital to personal computing security as firewalls and anti malware.
Blocking ads helps grandma not accidentally leak private information that could have disastrous consequences, for example, getting scammed out of their money.
Not blocking ads helps grandma visit a few more websites that don't work well with adblock.
I wasn't a SAHP but I'd spend time with my kids at a park nearby and people would give me dirty looks for playing with my kids if my wife wasn't present.
The internet convinced me it was going to be a problem, but it literally never happened once.
We rotate through parks because the kids love seeing new parks. Nobody has ever given me a dirty look for bringing my kids to the park. It’s a completely normal thing for parents to do.
This is why "Moms clubs" are a thing. I get that safe spaces are wanted, especially if the mothers needed to nurse, but dads were unwelcome in the chapter near me.
Allegedly Sony saw the writing on the wall and secured a good amount of GDDR supply for their consoles. Microsoft did not, and has had to raise the price of the Xbox Series X as a result.
I don't think that Microsoft knows what Microsoft is doing.
> I wonder if this is helpful? 'You are screwed no matter what you do' is not a good way to motivate people to action. People have heard this all before, and don't trust it. You can only cry wolf so many times with apocolyptic stories.
The PFAS are underground and will likely be down there indefinitely. I assume that their "racing to fix" bit has more to do with filtration and reducing the PFAS levels to something deemed acceptable.
Given the changes at the EPA recently it would not surprise me if they simply change what is deemed acceptable and claim that the problem has been solved.
The challenges will be great and felt by all in some way.
I live downstream from W.L.Gore in Maryland, the creator of this miracle substance, and a few years ago I myself began asking questions. I came to learn that they just dumped the stuff in the stream for decades and that stream is the source of my family's water via the town system. I had my water tested and came back at 70 ppt of which I then spoke to some doctors. This inspired me to write up and speak before the political board of my town and they did not believe me. Hilariously however someone knew because they stopped publishing PFA numbers in our water reports in 2022 but as a result of my speaking a few months later they brought in Inframark Corp who runs our town water and sewer. After they spoke to the town board at the meeting the town board was no longer smiling nor doubting my words. They were told that they must filter the drinking water and the operation will capex at about 4 MM USD with an opex for filters of around 2 MM USD annually. The town board was floored, but wait there's more, Inframark then told the board that they also must filter the sewer too since it must be removed as liquid products we use have pfas as well as RO systems which just re-concentrate it back into waste water. This sewer system capex was quoted at 10MM USD minimum and no opex stated since the plant already runs and filters costs were not known at the moment.
My story is real world for nearly the entire East Coast of the USA but since the problem cannot be seen few know about it or even concern about it. A town close to me, Newark DE, just announced a few months back going to spend tens of millions to filter their water with taxes ballooning from that and more. While a town to my West stated needing to spend about 20 MM USD to filter theirs. This is an absolute issue and I'd wager, polymarket conveniently makes it easy now, that this post ages well with time, or maybe I should say unwell. I have also been speaking with a lawyer in a big state that is running a class action and his information of course should be blasted on the news as more and more folks continue to consume liquids from plastic containers. Veritasium did a great piece on it a while back too but I have yet to have my own blood tested. For perspective I immediately bought a PFA specific filter and I installed it by extending our existing 3 stage to a 4 stage kitchen water tap at a cost of 600 USD for supplies. I then bought a whole house PFA filter a few months later and installed it too, costing me about 2000 USD in supplies, it is the size of a large compressed air canister so room is needed. I have so much more on this PFA topic but I am already going on too long. Your health doesn't matter until it does and no pill is going to filter this stuff from your organs.
So the problem from the post then becomes: the water that we do have to drink probably isn't safe either.
This leads me to question how many other chemicals we continue to "create" that in time will too show health impacts to many. We are certainly leaving our mark in this layer of soil for some future species to find and ask their own questions about us, such as how smart we really could have been given what they dig up.
