I don’t want to treat phone numbers as an ID, but for some reason my customers will give their phone number to me online far more willingly than they’ll cough up their email address, which is baffling only until you realize:

• Most people are technologically incompetent and are intimidated by the avalanche of crap they get in their email, and
• They never answer their phones anyway, so who cares?

I actually offer the option, because I don’t give a rat’s ass how people ignore me when I try to contact them. But when they place an order I at least need to be able to prove that I tried.

That’s not the point. When you respond to reviews like this the goal is to point out to everyone else who might be reading it that the reviewer is in fact a nut, and therefore their opinion should be discarded out of hand.

Probably. I have no experience with the Google Play Store end of things, but we’ve gotten non-reviews written by crackpots removed from our Google Business profile by just pointing out to Google that they were either off topic or from someone who we could not identify in any of our records as being a person who actually did business with us.

For example, there was one guy who went around copy-pasting the same one star rant to seemingly every retail business in the city whining about mask requirements during COVID, which didn’t have jack monkey squat do to with us and was in fact a state government mandate that we did not control. As a public business we have to comply with the law. Google took that one down when we reported it, although I still see examples of the same screed from the same guy attached to other businesses who apparently didn’t have the wherewithal to complain.

I imagine “app that serves third party content the author doesn’t control and reviewer is complaining about the content not the app” is a situation that is very well understood at Google. Whether or not you can make them give a shit is a different question…

Eh. I’m sure they’ll continue to pay enough influencers to gush about their products all the time to keep sales running strong well into the foreseeable future.

Remember that a significant population of people deliberately buy Apple products, among other firmly closed, enshittified, and user-hostile products/systems. The majority of consumers are sadly not educated enough to care and their money is still indeed green.

The company pays for it. Not my dime. The expense doesn’t seem onerous and is just to name one example probably a small fraction of what we spend on pens in a year.

And we get everything of that ilk from one vendor with one bill. It’s all managed in one place. The renewals all happen at the same time. They like that.

Edit: It’s hilarious y’all are acting like you’re salty with me like this is my decision. I do what my boss tells me to do. Certainly there are better options for a lot of our business practices but at the end of the day if my recommendations are shot down it’s not my call. I hold the passwords and the keys, I do not hold the purse strings.

Yes.

I just had to log in and check. We pay $49.99 per year for our SSL cert. (Edit: Certs. We actually have two domains.) Do they do surge pricing or something…?

I feel like I must be the only person on Earth who has successfully used Godaddy for anything and not had a problem…

So, just like how pretty much every other drone manufacturers drones already work. Somehow people only give DJI shit over this and develop a curious blind spot about everybody else.

It is trivially easy for anyone with thumbs to kit-build a drone with no regulatory compliance whatsoever, in nearly any size, with absurd range and capabilities, for just a few hundred dollars. Despite that state of affairs having been the case for years, this has mysteriously failed to cause the Earth to fall out of its orbit into the sun.

Boy howdy, I sure can’t wait for 99.9% of all manufacturers on Earth to completely ignore this as well, and keep selling devices and cables that are completely unlabeled.

The Turing Test as it is popularly conceptualized is really more of a test of human intelligence (or stupidity, more likely) rather than that of the machine.

If you put a big enough idiot in front of the screen, Dr. Sbaitso could conceivably “pass.” Well, maybe if you muted it, anyway.

It could be worse…

…They could have made it in the Duke engine.

Well, kids, I can’t believe the Department of Special Corrections actually let us out to attend this one.

It’s got a mouse drift bug that seems like a side effect of the camera pan effect that’s happening in the main menu, and the secret area added in 1.2 is missing. One of the methods for accessing secret #1 is missing, too, probably because the column with the switch on it has been replaced with an art piece, and interacting with it shows you details about the art rather than triggering the door.

All in all a solid 6/10. Still better than the 32X version of Doom.

Sure, but on the flip side I’m fine either way. Watching either a megacorporation or an out of touch nanny-state government get fucked is just about equivalent in my books. We could use a lot more of both, and I don’t even live in Australia.

Meta, for instance, wants to cease operations anywhere on the planet? Insert Willy Wonka meme here: No, stop, don’t… Bye…

And, Pornhub can probably play the waiting game in those states as well. Enough people in those places will probably get pissed off enough eventually to pressure their legislators into walking those laws back. It might just take a year or two. I imagine everyone involved already knows, but the idiots who wrote the laws need to wait for the headlines to cool off a bit before they can backpedal, in order to save face.

I imagine Facebook or someone of similar size could do the same in Aus. All they have to do is refuse to serve anything to Aussie IP addresses except a message that says, “Sorry, we can’t serve your country anymore because of a law passed by [legislator.] Remember, this is all his fault.”

Politicians infamously do not give a flying fuck about the opinions of minors, but if they piss everyone else off too the people responsible will either be out on their ears next election or buried under an avalanche of nasty letters from their 40-and-up constituency.

Australian legislators probably don’t even know that Lemmy exists.

Well, I know how that would go if I were a globe-spanning social media giant. Given that the entirety of the Australian market is roughly the size of New York state (~26 vs ~20 million people), I would say, “Nah mate, we just won’t do business in Oz anymore. Bye.”

Vanishingly few business make a “New York only” version of their product because it’s simply not worth it. Australia already suffers under this problem for a great deal of physical products. Ask any computer nerd about that, when trying to source parts and often video game titles as well. Shipping things to the Antipodes and/or dealing with Antipodean regulations is expensive, for an objectively low number of potential sales.

It would not surprise me to learn if it follows that Australia generates roughly 1.7% of the revenue for Facebook or whoever as, say, India. So in other words, bupkis.

It’s still not entirely clear how the Australian government thinks they’re actually going to enforce this.

Plenty of web services already require you to state your age to use them and I believe a large majority of users just coincidentally happen to be born on January 1st, 1900 as a result.

If they’re expecting these tech companies to be gathering and storing peoples’ government ID’s, or something, somebody needs to carefully explain to them using small words why this is a monumentally stupid idea. Does something need to be done about social media addiction and the rampant sketchy behavior of the tech giants? Yes, probably. Is a blanket ban ever the actual solution to anything? No, very rarely.

It’s just apparently all anyone can come up with when they’ve got government-brain.

Yeah, so this could definitely just be an app. And then it would only be like 50% as stupid.

1920 x 1200 display inside a cylinder

So it’s a phone screen hooked up to a chatbot, bolted to one of those little gadget display turntables, with a servo on it. Got it. I’ll bet you it’s even running on Android behind the scenes.

INB4 some weeb makes an open source version of this.

This sounds like the Circuit City paradigm, which is to fire all your expensive experienced workers and try to fill their roles with fresh-faced grads or, more likely, H1B people from India at the absolute minimum pay scale.

And we saw how that worked for Circuit City.