I pay attention to credit card readers.
I have gotten to know their makes and some models. I have developed preferences. When I go to a run down establishment and they have a nice reader, I am pleasantly surprised. I know that walmart uses ingenico isc250s, and they do not support tap. I know that dunkin has high quality readers, and sometimes tim hortons does too, but less frequently.
When leaving a place, I might say something like “damn, you don’t see that model of verifone very often”, and my friends will look at me funny.
Semi-related, did you know that most receipt printers have embedded telnet servers in them?
Fucking time zones and daylight saving/summertime. I live in a place that doesn’t change my clocks twice a year, but constantly deal with people that do. The number of times I have people say EST when they mean EDT is too damn high. Worse when they say MST, cause then I have to ask “are you in Arizona?” to which they look at me confused and say no. Then I about blow a gasket cause “then you’re not in MST!” If you’re going to live in a place that always changes your clocks, get your own terminology right dammit.
I never remember whether we’re currently in daylight savings or not since it’s so stupid. I just started saying ‘eastern time’ instead of the abbreviation to avoid getting it wrong
Fall back, spring ahead is how i was taught to remember.
But now that my phone updates time automatically i occasionally notice a couple clocks arent correct and dont know how long they have been wrong for lol
I didn’t even know there’s another name for timezones in daylight savings time. Good to know I guess
I base everything on GMT + X. When I’m inviting people to meetings. You work out your own Timezone. Also tell me when you want to meet in terms of GMT. It helps stop the summer / winter crap for both northern and southern hemisphere.
Digital privacy.
It was very recently revealed in unsealed court documents from I believe 2013 that the Facebook app pushed a certificate to mobile devices that funneled all of everyone’s decrypted traffic through their servers. That means every webpage visited, every file sent and received, every word typed passed through and was stored on a computer at Facebook HQ. One engineer was quoted as saying that Zuckerberg had a particular interest in looking at people’s Snapchats. It was also revealed that Facebook had a data exchange partnership with Netflix where Netflix had open ended access to user’s private messages.
Now you don’t have to be a Snapchat or Facebook user to see how wrong and downright creepy that is, but if you bring it up with the average person you can see their eyes immediately glaze over. It’s hard to blame them, it feels like a hopeless situation and it’s much more convenient to pretend it’s not happening. People have been completely indoctrinated into abandoning their right to privacy. It’s a real shame because if we were paid as individuals what our data is apparently worth I’m sure that perspective would quickly change.
*Formatting
My eyes don’t glaze over. I’m FURIOUS that they even exist, and have been since they killed myspace.
I knew back in 2008 something wasn’t right about facebook. I had no idea what, but I knew they were sketchy.
By 2010, I knew they were invading peoples privacy. I’ve never had a facebook. And yet, they have my phone number. My mom has facebook, and she stores my phone number in her contacts list.
Thing is, what can I do?
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Speaking of bulletins, when I first heard of the fediverse, I had the total wrong idea.
I thought it would be like you can post on Lemmy, as a bulletin, and Masodon users could see it on their end. (Assuming they were subscribed to the poster).
MY envisionment of how the fediverse worked, based on my misunderstanding would have made for a WAAAAAAAAAY cooler site/collection of sites.
And the fictional ideas I had to take it further would probably make the fediverse the dominant social media standard.
It can work like that, and in some ways it does (Mastodon and Lemmy have a small amount of federation compatibility), but we aren’t really there yet. I think the real next step would be entirely disconnecting the interface from the content. ActivityPub allows this but we haven’t taken full advantage of it yet.
Couldn’t agree more. I was having this conversation with friends back in 08/09. No one took me seriously, but the red flags were all there for everyone to see. Facebook was caught using their platform to run sociological experiments on their users without consent, for example. That alone would get an academic or real researcher in serious trouble. But for an evil-corp like Facebook? Nothing but skepticism or disbelief from most people. It happened, people were harmed. Oh, and remember Myanmar?
The general publics’ overall sense of helplessness, apathy, and/or disbelief that the tech industry is doing anything untoward is their biggest victory. People are happily falling for it all over again with LLMs.
I’m curious what steps we can take as individuals to further protect our privacy online.
Also, what do you think we can do as a society to change the status quo? How do we get more people to see that this is a significant problem?
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Hope your pipe situation got resolved easily.
We had a pipe burst right at the entrance of our crawlspace a few weeks ago and it took a bit to realize. It was a nightmare and now we have to get some foundation work done.
Wow, ouch! That is my nightmare!
Thankfully, mine was not nearly as bad. We just bought the house a few months ago and a bad repair to a reservoir attached faucet led to my yard being completely flooded. Luckily a neighbor alerted us to the issue and we were able to circumvent the water before it got into our foundation.
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Step one: Disconnect
How do we get more people to see that this is a significant problem?
This severely inhibits this part of their question. If the only platform you have to communicate with people are places like here, you’re preaching to the choir
I’m curious what steps we can take as individuals to further protect our privacy online.
A few to consider:
- Ditch Facebook and Whatsapp.
- Invest in a VPN
- Switch to Firefox for web browsing
- Install GrapheneOS on your phone
- Pay with cash where possible
- Switch to XMPP with OMEMO encryption for messaging with your favorite people
When some but not all bullets end with a period in a PPT. Drives me nuts! Either have none ending with a period, or all need to have a period, but please don’t mix.
Oh fuck you.
Not because you suddenly made me aware of this, but because I catch myself doing this with slides sometimes and figured I was getting away with it!
What if one bullet is two sentences… Then should ask bullets end with a period?
Yes.
The way I do it is if a list only has single sentences or sentence fragments, I omit the period.
If there is at least one point with two sentences, everyone gets a period.
If a list has sentence fragments and double sentences, I cry. Then I rewrite the fragments into complete sentences, complaining about it the whole time.
Any second sentence in a bulleted list gets it’s own sub-bullet.
No periods.
The count of cars with single occupant on the highway. It’s crazy how inefficient our car transportation is.
Agree in general, the problem is it’s the only method those folks have to complete whatever their daily mission is.
So really, cars are great, they comfortably take you where you need to go, many miles away, pretty fast, relatively comfortably. But a robust public transit network is even better.
Civil asset forfeiture in the U.S.
We’re supposed to be “innocent until proven guilty” but they get around this by saying that they’re essentially accusing the money (or car/home or whatever) of being used for crime. Then they confiscate it and the only way to get it back is to go to court and prove that your money is innocent.
The fact that cash/possessions can be taken away from you at anytime by federal agents (or by police in almost every State) without having to follow it up with any sort of case to prove that a crime occurred is ridiculous. And on top of that you can’t get the money back that you spent on attorney fees, so it’s pointless to spend money on an attorney if what was taken was less than a few thousand dollars.
Most people don’t know that this can happen or don’t seem to care enough because, “it would never happen to me, right?”
The total stairs a staircase has. I cannot walk up or down a staircase without counting, and it makes me satisfied when the number ends in an even number.
Be careful of the bottom-step error!
Typos in published books. Though it’s involuntary. It’s a bit of an (undiagnosed) OCD kinda thing.
But also, consciously, how much my presence affects others. I hold doors for strangers, I make space on sidewalks, I try not to talk loudly in public, etc. It’s the people who don’t notice these things at all about themselves that really drive me nuts. Like people speaking loudly on a phone that’s on speaker. I hate that type of behavior.
Armor and clothing in movies and shows with historical settings. I really appreciate when they get the details right and it can be really jarring when it’s bad. The Northman is a good example of what vikings probably dressed like, which is basically the same as how all medieval people dressed. Simple wool and linen tunics and big cloaks fastened with broaches. No fur capes or leather armbands or cornrows, looking at you Vikings on the “history” channel.
Birds. Even in urban areas you wouldn’t believe how many birds there are. Not just pigeons and sparrows, but hawks and falcons will readily live in many urban areas too. Herons and egrets are particularly adaptable to urban areas and easy to find along rivers and ponds. In the spring and fall warblers will pass through as well, and I even see them on busy urban streets sometimes if there’s a few bushes or trees along the path. I’ve even had a few lucky owl sightings while walking in the suburbs at night.
Delightfully since I live in the southwest and grew up on the east coast, where they’re incredibly shy of people, we also have tons of bold urban ravens. In the late spring and early summer sometimes I see big flocks (recently independent juveniles?) just soaring and diving for the fun of it.
I put up a bird feeder and few months ago and now we constantly have at least 20 birds all around our yard. My son likes to throw bird seed all around now so its really cool to see them just walking around and pecking.
I absolutely fell in love with morning doves
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Hell yeah, birds. When you get to know the songs of birds it opens up a deeper way of hearing too. And you get a lot better at spotting them. Birds are amazing.
I was into Geocaching for a while and was always amazed at the things out in plain sight that people casually walked by and never noticed every day
Very true! And once you’ve done it for a while, you start to notice other cachers by the way they are awkwardly standing in unusual places trying to look inconspicuous.
Heh, that’s why we refer to other people who don’t geocache as “muggles”.
What’s on random screens in the background of movies / TV shows. People hate watching stuff with me because I’m always pausing it to look at that stuff.
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My favorite is the Beetlejuice bit in Community
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Haha what are the odds! On the odd chance that you haven’t already, you should definitely watch arrested development it is full of background jokes like that. MDMA optional but probably works too
The types of shoes a person is wearing, and if they’re polished or not. Forest Gump’s mamma was right, you can tell a lot about someone by their shoes.
Any movie that is acting out one of my hobbys. I always appreciate it if the writers/producers actually took the time to research it. Stuff like:
-boardgame setups
-videogame gameplay
-musical instruments/singing being performed
I also always look in a carscene wether they are actually driving or if it’s a video/screen playing Basically I look a lot for clues behind the scenes with movies instead of enjoying the movie as is.
Camerawork in film and tv. I have been volunteering doing camerawork for a small broadcast tv station, so whenever I watch stuff I’m always teeing to see how all of the shots are taken, and also the color grading and stuff like that.
