I normally have GPS and Bluetooth disabled, so my position would have to be guessed based on cell towers. We were not even on the same WLAN (because the WLAN was down in the vacation home, much to our dissatisfaction).

While I can’t rule out somebody in our group stealthily googling the tablets, phones while playing is generally frowned upon.

So yeah, being on the same cell tower as someone I know who might have searched for it might be the only other explanation.

The adventure itself didn’t have anything to do with the tablets, that was just our group doing strange stuff, like always.

No, I am not a AI fanboy. I just compared bad to worse.

Of course users get something from their smartphones, but not from the spyware on it. The spyware is not an integral function of a smartphone.

Just think about the scale of the surveillance: every smartphone user is being monitored 24/7 in hope to find something to sell them.

If you hate AI because it wastes so much energy, think about the cost for the this: Energy, water, battery life, bandwidth, … And in contrast to AI the ‘users’ don’t get anything in return.

Okay, so here is my story:

I was on holiday with my friends and we were playing a TTRPG. In the RPG our group needed charol tablets. I have never in my life googled or needed something like that.

After the session, I opened up Amazon to buy something I forget to pack and voilà: Amazon suggested me to buy charol tablets.

My smartphone must have listened in and given that data to Amazon.

No Alexa or similar products were in the vacation home.

Same in Germany: The center right CDU tries to get voters from the far right AFD. Never worked, but they keep on trying.

The German government is deathly afraid of anything that could be constructed as anti-semitic. Probably also bought, but that’s just a guess. Pathetic, and I say that as a German.

I think part of it is also that a random stranger in a star wars shirt can be anyone. A random stranger in a star trek shirt is a nerd, and therefore more likely to be a cool dude.

Schon klar, alles Essig mit deiner Gurke. Aber da das ne Tastatur ist, wäre nicht ein ‘S’ genug gewesen?

I have a similar theory about star trek. In one scene there was a blurry picture and to sharpen it Ricker said: “Computer implement recursive Algorithm”. That is equivalent to “Computer do something”. So now my theory is that there is an intelligent ship with a genius AI that carries around humans that have regressed to toddler intelligence because the AI does everything for them.

The ship is basically human daycare with lots of blinking buttons and moving pictures to keep the humans occupied while the ship does the actual (and probably boring) science.

Starfleet Academy is basically teaching them technobabble and looking great in a uniform while the AIs do the real work.

The Evil Ampire gets bought by an evil empire. Huh.

He didn’t use an IDE, but I don’t remember what he tried. He also wasn’t a fan of googling stuff. Use the man pages and nothing else.

Here is my story:

There were console outputs after nearly every line. I asked about them: “Oh, I couldn’t get the debugger to work, so I print everything to the console”

This was everywhere. The whole program was like this. On a standard Linux machine. It wasn’t even remote debugging or something. Just a local C++ program.

The filenames where written in 8+3. Again, on a modern Linux machine. His answer? “You never know where we’ll port this software to”

Onto computers that were outdated decades ago? To embedded systems? Of course he had no answer for this except “just in case…”

I could tell you more, that software was the stuff for nightmares.

It’s not that expensive if you use them as slave labor and ignore their human rights… Well, still expensive for the tax payers, but who cares for those peasants? /s

And how did no one think about a fallback in case of a outage? I bet some of the tech people thought about it and management said: “No, we don’t want the consumers to have a functioning unit without internet access. We need the data!”.

Btw. same with the new Windows 11 setup. There’s no technical reason for a computer without internet access to deny the installation.

Oh, I met someone once who spoke really slow and made long pauses to when he spoke.

Great guy, but I started finishing his sentences out of desperation.

Uplifting News: US media resists Gleichschaltung, for now.

… I don’t think don’t think that news is really uplifting.

I mean I get it: that they resist is good.

It’s just that they have to resist against something like that is so much worse.

Ah, I simply avoid that problem by being neither cute nor hot - and therefore single.

You know you have to get a cat named Anton now, right?

Probably creates by a group of middle-aged men who never touched a console.

People with no idea about the product who simply looked at the target demographics and thought:

"What do teenage boys like? Sex.

Let’s go with that since research is hard."