There’s a saying amongst us ass breathers in regards to all you nose breathing assholes: “they hate us because they anus.”

My credit card offers virtual credit card numbers AND the ability to auto-lock the virtual numbers so you can set a date and after that the number will not accept new charges.

I make sure to use a virtual card number for everything subscription based, then I immediately set the auto-lock feature to expire in a few days (give the initial charge time to clear but still plenty of time before the subscription would otherwise renew).

Some subscription services make it super tough to cancel. This method fixes that issue for the most part. Some subscription services terminate immediately once you cancel the subscription, even if you still have “time left” otherwise. This way you don’t really have to formally unsubscribe. It’s easy peasy pumpkin breezy as the common folk like to say.

When someone asks a thing like this on Lemmy, look up the same thread on Reddit (guaranteed to find it was recently also posted there) and copy-pasta some of the top posts. Guaranteed worthless internet up arrows.

Seems like it would depend on the poison.

My best friend has an unnatural talent for this sort of thing and really enjoys toying with conspiracy theory nuts.

When folks start talking about crazy shit, it makes me very anxious and I tend to shut down. Not my buddy. He eggs them on, encourages it, and gets them to say things or agree with things that are even more outlandish than where they conversation started. Things will start at “China invented covid to kill off old people” and somehow end up at “Hillary Clinton paid to have her chromosomes added to the covid vaccines so that DNA evidence can no longer be used against her in the courts”.

Scramble it.

Exactly, I don’t get the appeal.

I dunno if it is intentional, but there’s a an additional layer of humor in this for me:

Where I live, there’s a company called Labcorp and they are basically the de facto company for pre-employment and random drug testing. I’m sure they do more than just drug tests, but drug testing is about all non-medical folks know of the place.

5 layer burritos got me through some tough times eons ago when I was a young adult. I could get a drink and a couple of those burritos for just over $3 - $5 USD (prices rose over the years and different locations charged different prices). And it would be enough to stave off hunger for the rest of the day.

Back in 2022, I was traveling and decided to stop at a Taco Bell for the first time in close to a decade for old times’ sake. That same drink and 2 burrito order now costs over $12. Three of those five layers were spread microscopically thin. The tortilla wrap wasn’t even warmed or steamed, so it was dry and crumbly. They couldn’t even roll it properly. Yuck. It’s not an exaggeration to say that I could have gone to a sit down Mexican place and gotten more, better food plus table service for the same price. So, lesson learned.

Needless to say, I haven’t been back since. With the descent into madness of Taco Bell and Subway, I’m afraid to try my other young adult fast food savior, Wendy’s, in case that’s totally been ruined, too.

Sounds dirty. Will there be cheese?

Earlier this year one of my relatives came for an extended visit. We were discussing what we might have for dinner that week and both of us were on board for the same ingredients, such as asparagus. My relative was also happy with the video services I’m currently subscribed to because I have a couple options they don’t have at home, so they were telling me about how they were rewatching some older Harrison Ford movies. And then there’s the age-old (or old age) conversations about our current health issues.

In the following days, my relative kept bringing up the fact that their phone and tablet are listening to our conversations. Proof? After we had the food conversation, their news feed was suddenly filled with asparagus recipes. They were also getting ads for more Harrison Ford content on the service that they don’t subscribe to. And to top it off, they were seeing ads for a prescription my dog takes but that they had never even heard of before our conversation the day or two before. Isn’t it obvious? They’re listening to our conversations.

To me this was easily explainable by Occam’s Razor. All our devices are on the same IP address. After we discussed the asparagus I went online that night and did a search for asparagus recipes. And when we were talking about my dog’s health condition, I used my phone to look up the active ingredient because I couldn’t recall off the top of my head. Plus, when Hulu or whatever random service sees you’re watching a lot of Harrison Ford movies, it makes sense they’d advertise others you might like.

That makes a lot more sense and is a lot less complicated of an explanation than “our devices are always recording our conversations and uploading them to the internet as a basis to send us advertisements”.

Sure it’s technically feasible, but if it were happening, surely they would be a lot more incontrovertible proof than a questionable and likely misinterpreted news source that seems to be more of a “sly” advertisement for a tech solution that the big players aren’t actually using.

Encryption.

I don’t really ever travel with my laptops, at least not to put them in bags. I think the Mac laptops had a known issue with defective batteries, though.

It’s true! My last mac cost me nothing because it was provided by my job. And the case popped open after the battery swelled within a year of me getting it, something my personal laptops have never done before.

Are you finding that the assistance it provides has gotten worse over time? When I first started using it, it was quite helpful the majority of the time. In truth, it’s still pretty decent with autocomplete, just less consistently good than before. However the chat help has truly gone into decline. The amount of unfounded statements it returns is terrible.

And the latest issue is that I’ve started getting responses where it starts to show me an answer, but then hides the response and gives me an error that the response was filtered by Responsible AI.

Glad I’m not directly paying for it.