It was Apple.

That hasn’t been true for years now

Honestly, I don’t know exactly what google can or can’t track if the app developer doesn’t specifically enable them. I don’t have specific evidence that they’ll even be able to tell if the user was verified or not

What I do know is they have repeatedly shown that they’re happy to hide or lie about what and how they track people, and more broadly about their business as a whole.

Again I cite the drug analogy. Google is in the business of tracking people and harvesting data for ads. It’s like inviting the cartel to the DARE program and expecting everything to go swimmingly.

If they want their age verification app to actually be anonymous, they shouldn’t force people to use a tracking service to use it. The app specifically won’t be functional on degoogled android phones and won’t be offered on desktop computers. Maybe Google can’t spy on anything going on in the app, but even so, they could correlate “used verification app, roblox usage went up” or “used verification app, continued to use Tinder, concluded adult, ignoring ‘do not track’ preference as it doesn’t violate laws about tracking minors”.

It’s true that a minority of users have taken the steps where this inferred information would be particularly helpful to google, but not having the option to opt out is going to get harder and harder, and this service doesn’t provide enough good to give the information cartel that is Google any more information, even inferred, in my opinion.

It can’t be anonymous if you need a google or apple account to use. I’m not concerned about what the government tracks (well, not in this context at least), I’m concerned about who and what they’re working with to do the tracking. If the app verifies me as an adult but I couldn’t use the app without google butting in, google now has yet another data point in a secret ad profile that the government should be putting a stop to, not helping them build up. It’d be like announcing a plan to stop illegal drug usage by partnering with the cartel.

If they wanted a government-sponsored age verification sort of thing, it should’ve been an app whose only job was to type in a code you got from going in person to some government body and verifying in person. Town office, DMV, somewhere like that.

More fundamentally, though, “protecting the children” shouldn’t go anywhere near anything that can be used for identity theft. Showing my ID to the cashier at the cigarette shop is significantly safer than showing it to any business on the internet, because sharing a high-quality picture of something is giving them a copy. The cashier gets to see it, but it never leaves my sight and isn’t recorded in any way except probably some dodgy security camera where you can’t read it anyway.

Tech workers keep the modern planet running.

Do I regret the modern world frequently? Yes. But that’s like blaming the mechanic for a drunk driving accident.

I don’t have proof, naturally, but I got the sense the friends they were losing were friends made on the platform. With the account being lost suddenly, there’s a good chance they didn’t have backup contact info for them.

I do assume things based on performance based on the engine, but that’s more for moments like "new game is coming this fall, using some engine ", before tech specs are out. I find a lot of games that care to announce an engine in any way tend to be the heavier resource hogs, because they’re advertising the high fidelity of something-or-other.

But that’s not really a condemnation on any games. I do often avoid the high resource games, but that’s because I have an older PC, not because of any actual prejudice against an engine itself.

Right? They specifically set out to make sure it wouldn’t be scalped to hell and back after repeated complaints.

They did that, and now the product is real, and market predictions on existing products are much more reliable. The initial production wasn’t sustainable but wasn’t meant to be sustained, either.

ReactOS is windows. Here’s their front page blurb:

“Imagine running your favorite Windows applications and drivers in an open-source environment you can trust. That’s the mission of ReactOS!”

It’s not Linux, specifically. Its not Linux under the hood, it’s written to be windows without microsoft.

Haven’t tried it myself, but its definitely worth a try if you’ve been using Linux that long and its just not for you.

Right, that’s why they suggested the quarry. Entirely safe.

Also, while NPCs do destroy furniture, they now shove chests, so it’s also easier to find these paths manually.

It became unlimited in HG/SS, which made it easier, but also more annoying for me when I had Platinum as my hub, because it meant I needed to catch a bunch of junk to trade over to my SS if I grabbed a Pokémon from the GBA games.

Such is life.

Although there are emulators that support loading the GBA games on DS, so if you want that pal park experience you can have it properly even on emulator.

I remember trying to get my living Dex sent over to gen 4 via the pal park. It was before heartgold and soul silver, so 6 pokemon a day. I’d do things like get middle stage Pokémon ready to evolve by getting them one level away, or holding the stone they need, etc, then as soon as I got them in Platinum, I could evolve them immediately and go get an egg. Called it “compressing” them, because the pal park was such a bottleneck, it was easier to rebreed them. Level 31 bulbasaur, for instance, send it, get it to 32 for a venusaur, get two eggs, hatch them, get one of those bulbasaur to evolve into ivysaur, so then I could store the proper living Dex trio in gen 4. Good times.

Not completely, at least with Skyrim’s rules.

But you could also brew something to do a little bit of healing over some length of time, with fire resistance.

It’s a little more complicated, but it is definitely achievable.

Although if we assume unbound atronachs have always been possible, an old-fashioned Oblivion potion can do the job easy.

They are bound and cannot make decisions in that way.

The proof is in the conjuration master quest.

You can summon dremora, creatures definitely capable of speaking, consenting, etc, via “Conjure Dremora Lord” and they have no dialogue, cannot be ordered, and do not act as a follower in skyrim would, even an unwilling one. But, at conjuration 90, in the College, you can get a spell, “Conjure Unbound Dremora”, which summons a Dremora that is hostile, can speak, and can change its mind if you threaten it with violence. That dremora, once unsummoned, can then willingly (under duress) go get you a sigil stone, and carries it back with him.

Clearly, there’s a distinction here, the unbound version of the spell had no compulsion effect on it. This would be needed since after dismissing the spell, the compulsion ends, so they wouldn’t obey.

Logically, if we can make a “Summon Unbound Dremora”, we could make a “Summon Unbound Flame Atronach”, and that spell would repeatedly summon the same atronach with no compulsion, but the standard version of these spells summons things in a way that prevents consent.

A few years ago, blatant journalistic malpractice was a controversy.

Are people so lazy they can’t even bother to read the headline? Maybe an AI would’ve been useful here to generate its own defense.

I think humanizing them is a fairly trivial thing, in this sort of context.

Yes, it’s true, it didn’t “lie” about health.

But it has the same result as someone lying, it’s another bulletpoint in the list of reasons not to trust AI, even if it pulls from the right sources and presents information generally correctly, it may in fact just not present information it could have presented because the sources it learned from have done so in a way that would get those sources deemed “liars”.

Could write that out every time, I suppose, but people will say their dog is trying to trick them when he goes to the bowl 5 minutes after dinner, or goes to their partner for the same, and everyone understands the dog isn’t actually attempting to deceive them, and just wants more.

Same thing, to me at least. It lied, but in a similar way to how my dog lies, not in the way a human can lie.

No, they’re definitely also expanding.

Not all of them, certainly, but there are a few plans for new factories. Samsung, for instance, is rolling out a new chip factory, if you want something to search.

Simple, dissolve the whole package in one gallon of water, and then the solution is 110 times as potent as it should be.

Round up to 128 because watering it down a little more won’t hurt you, and that simplifies the math. You put one ounce of that gallon of solution into a second gallon of water, and you’re ready to drink. Repeat with a new gallon of tap water mixed with an ounce of your solution as needed.

It usually does, but it doesn’t have to.