"Had". Google had the best search in town, 15 years ago.

Sometime between then and now, Google became utterly useless at the one thing they really did well. Their main page is bloated to hell and back, exact phrases aren't, Boolean search terms provably return results that don't satisfy the query... And the one that finally drove me to DDG, searching for "how do I disable enshittification-feature-X" will invariable return nothing but pages explaining how to turn on exactly that feature, just on the off chance someone was fortunate enough to have it broken right out of the gate (which is somehow usually not possible to do in reverse).

Don't get me wrong, I'm not romanticizing DDG, which AFAIK is basically just an alternative front-end for Bing; but if everyone is just out there to fuck us, we can at least favor the ones that bring lube to the party.

Progressive and proportional fines are definitely an improvement, but it's still just a matter of shifting the "don't be evil" line to a simple calculation.

If the EU will seize 4% but a company can boost gross receipts by 5% by e.g. torturing endangered baby seals... I wouldn't bet on the seals in that situation.

1) And that differs from US companies how?
2) I "trust" Xi Jin Pooh more than Uncle Sam simply because China has no legal authority over me.
3) You go right ahead and do without; we couldn't care less about your holy war, we just want sub-$10k BYDs.

The GP merely rephrased the old idea that fines are nothing more than a cost of doing business. When the only "punishment" is financial and knowable in advance, that's neither punishment nor deterrence; it's simply an above-the-line calculation.

How many of us have intentionally chosen to risk a speeding and/or parking ticket to make it on time to an important appointment? Same idea, just at a much larger scale: Ford famously chose to literally let Pinto owners DIAF rather than pay an extra $11 to make key parts of the fuel system safer in a rear collision. Despite that, Ford is somehow still in business and not a single executive from that era was sent to prison over knowingly choosing to kill people as a cost cutting measure.

In practice, audit trails are 99% about reporting and monitoring needs, not liability after-the-fact. By the time the insurance companies are involved, you're already tossing thousands of dollars of food and possibly have sick people lining up to sue

If there was any sort of centralized monitoring involved here, they would have caught the problem as soon as the temperatures rose above $AlarmHigh or remained above $AlarmLow for more than X minutes. They did not. The exploited interface was therefore a function of convenience, not compliance.

More or less, yeah...

You can use ArcaOS, you can use CSM mode, or you can chain-load it with any of a number of EFI loaders.

CSM mode is probably the closest to "pure" OS/2, but obviously it's not really using UEFI. ArcaOS is the closest to pure UEFI support (and probably the best choice if you plan to really use it rather than just prove you can do it then move on), but it's not pure OS/2. Take your pick.

/ I am not affiliated in any way with ArcaOS / Arca Noae.

I hate Zuck as much as the next geek, but preserving human rights is a governmental-scale responsibility, not an issue we leave up to every random company to do their own due diligence (or we'd have none).

It's great Wyden and Markey are taking an interest in this, but the issue is far bigger than one major brand of spy-glasses; there are dozens of brands of similar glasses that don't even pretend to try to protect privacy; and moving beyond that specific form factor, there are thousands of styles of spy cameras available to any random Joe for under $100 (many in the $20-$30 range!) right from Amazon. This isn't even trying to squeeze the toothpaste back into the tube - This is drowning in a vat of Colgate while pissing and moaning over a stray blob of Crest.

Two engineers (one of whom is a stuffed shirt being thrown a bone post-acquisition) are going to rewrite Cisco's legacy code using AI and an unlimited budget.

I'm sorry, can even the most delusional pro-AI executive out there seriously say that with a straight face? This just plain fails the sniff test - Are they establishing a scapegoat for an already-failing project? Honoring some contractual landmine EZDubs managed to sneak in? Straight-up insurance fraud?

If this is exactly what it looks like at face value, excuse me while I go short Cisco stock.

...Nothing on them but cranky bastards contributing to climate change while moving between ticky-tacky, 40+ hours of indentured servitude, and temples to Mammon.

I largely agree with most of Klee's points, but there's a serious bias issue with his conclusion: "The internet" is just the road we use to get somewhere. Where we go is up to us most of the time. And in this case, the "old internet" is still mostly there - Case in point, I still have a crappy static personal website up that hasn't been updated since the 1990s.

Problem is, nobody wants to read my ramblings from 30 years ago any more than they did 30 years ago. People want FAANGs, even while they may openly resent those same platforms. Sure, Amazon is evil... But the alternative is leaving the house and going to a store, eew! NetFlix kills everything good after two seasons, but two seasons on-demand beats a 30-second stick-figure animation that takes six weeks per "episode" and depends on the unpaid hobbyist creator not getting bored with the project. TikTok is measurably destroying the attention spans of our youth, but we can't risk missing the next big "hold my beer and watch this" moment.

The problem isn't "the internet". The problem is us as a collective whole. When there's demand for trash, sanitation engineers flip to supply side.

The primary reason companies advertise with Google is to drive search results to their site.

If AI summaries become good enough that nobody needs to click the links anymore - What are advertisers paying for? "Brand recognition" only takes things so far, at some point they need real customers to drop in and throw money at them or they won't have anything to advertise.

My company ships data dumps like this to multiple vendors on a monthly (sometimes weekly) basis.

My side of that equation takes security very seriously. The recipients... Well... When someone offers to send you credentials out-of-channel, the right response is never "Just email it, this isn't a shared account" followed by getting cranky at being told that ain't happening.

Google "Dark pools". Currently they account for slightly over half of all US transaction volume. Yes, they're still regulated; no, we do not have visibility inside them.

I can already, completely above-board, sell someone a block of DRS'd IBM shares for crypto if I want to. Let's all be clear this isn't about denominating stocks in Bitcoin.

Rather, this is effectively about recording stock transactions on a blockchain. Nothing more and nothing less than swapping a distributed transaction log for a traditional ledger.

The implication is clear, the SEC is at least considering the idea of creating shares as a token cryptocurrency. In this case, the tokens are backed by real shares. That's not a technical requirement, though, and a future company might someday skip the major exchanges entirely to list only as a token. To be clear, there's nothing sacred about the exchanges and their "house rules"; there's nothing inherently wrong with using a blockchain vs a ledger; and to reiterate, this has nothing to do with "buying stocks with Bitcoin".

On that last point, I consider OKXICE's decision to accept payment in some nondescript "stablecoins" as extremely unfortunate. Not because I'm a cryptophobe, but because it muddies the waters as to the viability of the core concept of tokenized equity itself - Though that's a bit of a tautology, given stocks are already "tokenized equity". Whether we denominate them in USD or BTC or cowrie shells is an entirely separate issue.

How dare the people who create your revenue streams demand reasonable working conditions?

Of course employers are welcome to set the terms under which they'll give us money. And similarly, we're free to set the terms under which we'll accept their money. That's how it works.

Personally, I love companies announcing draconian new RTO policies - There aren't many better indicators their stock price is going to spike short-term then tank a few quarters later. But that has nothing to do with working for those companies. On that front, it's just a hard "no", to the point I'm seriously considering becoming a professional "interview troll" once I retire!

I hate ads more than the average bear, but I have to admit, I have no idea where people are seeing these either. Are "ads" someone intentionally loads and watches really ads, or are they merely short-form content?

That said, if these are everywhere and the very fact I'm using FF with uBlock Origin is the exact reason I haven't seen these... That is the sort of viral advertising most companies dream of.