Last time I had free time and was looking for a new game someone told me “Get Control. Just get it. Trust me.”

My trust was not misplaced. It’s one of the best games I’ve ever played.

Edit: Later I tried AW1 and didn’t really care for it much (mostly because i sucked really bad at it) until I started using “all guns” cheats so I could play it like a horror/action. Then I enjoyed it.

Internal RAID1 as first line of defense. Rsync to external drives where at least one is always offsite as second. Rclone to cloud storage for my most important data as the third.

Backups 2 and 3 are manual but I have reminders set and do it about once a month. I don’t accrue much new data that I can’t easily replace so that’s fine for me.

Might vary by locale? Around here (South US) it seems like every single store has their own rewards/discount/whatever system that requires your phone number but it’s not necessary for the transaction… It’s just an extra info grab.

Sometimes the user facing POS/credit card reader will let you handle it (enter/skip) but many places rely on the salesperson to ask and then enter it or skip.

But, I also don’t get around much so my experience is limited.

Same.

Cashier: “What’s your phone number?” (For the store tracking/rewards/whatever)

Me : “Don’t have one!” (As I remove the credit card from the case on the back of myphone)

Nobody has questioned it once. They don’t want to ask in the first place but are forced to.

Generally speaking, programmers like to program (many do it just for fun), and many dislike review. AI removes the programming from the equation in favour of review.

This really resonated with me and is an excellent point. I’m going to have to remember that one.

I feel your pain.

Years ago I threw a party for work friends and acquaintances where I had 30 confirmed and 10 tentative (from calendar invite). I bought a variety of drinks (alcoholic and non) and bought/cooked food for about 50 to ensure there was plenty.

… 4 people showed up.

That was the instant that I stopped giving a fuck. Ever since then I’ve adopted the approach of “I’m going to do something, you can come if you want, but I’m not planning for you”. Or, more commonly, I just don’t organize anything :)

EDIT: I should note that this was a recurring yearly party that got bigger and bigger over 5 years until it just died. Pre COVID.

Damn, beat me to it.

I can also recommend this service.

Ooo, I’ll have to check this out. Thank you

Same here for the most part. Every now and then I’ll see something recommended that may be on the edge but I’m not clicking it to find out.

I should note that I’m not talking about shorts so I guess I’m off topic here. They wouldn’t stop nagging me so installed a plugin to permanently hide it :)

It was weird that it needed my social security number, bank account, mother’s maiden name, and the name of my first pet to make the order but I guess it was worth it to stay healthy. Thanks bud!

O, and tell Derek I said hey.

Slashnet still exists and it’s fairly active depending on the channel. #xkcd was bumping last time I checked my client.

You’re supposed to put a link to where we can buy your miracle vinegar/silver mix in your post. Have you learned nothing from these marketing geniuses?

: D

I think they just fixed it

Yeah, Linux can capture and playback the spoken distinction between lowercase and uppercase letters. Windows can’t do that.

You’re not taking advantage of that functionality?

The one I remember from school was phrased slightly differently (but same concept) :

Poor little Jimmy is lying on the floor, for what he thought was H2O was H2SO4

Ah, delete the windows partition. That should keep me safe.

There was a big headline recently about a tech company accidentally hiring a North Korean “hacker” (I’m just going off the headline) so that might be fresh in memory with regards to your laptop farm reference.

Wow, that is impressively sneaky to use the legitimate domain.

The last round my company did was pretty damn good. The email itself was well done and professional looking. They even registered a domain that was one letter different than the company name for the source email domain and the phishing form.

It was still one of those things that makes you hesitate like “your password has expired, click here to reset it” and the email client blatantly flagged it as being from outside our true domain. The client warning was the easy thing to spot, the rest was really well done.

I’ve been carrying around multiple little baggies of pills in my backpack for years and over 20+ flights, several international, they’ve never asked.

Some are separated but loose in the bag (ibuprofen, cetirizine, diphenhydramine, from a bottle), and some were trimmed to minimum size from a blister pack and placed in the bag.

They focus a lot more closely on my headphones, charging cables, battery packs, etc.

So whatever is most convenient for you, in my opinion.

EDIT: they didn’t flag my epinephrine auto injectors (see: needles) either the three or four times I forgot to put them in the bin separately. Granted, those were domestic US flights.