Most recycling isn’t currently profitable without some kind of subsidy or legislation pushing it (exceptions: some metals, paper, maybe glass). If dealing with the increasing mountains of dead electronics made money, it would be getting done on a much larger scale than individual junk-pickers in the developing world scavenging in dumps. In addition to reducing the volume of waste being created, we need to provide a market for the recycled material that pays enough to push financing of new plants to do recycling at scale (and make sure that the recycling doesn’t create negative externalities of its own).

I gave up commenting on bad websites about a quarter-century ago. Most of them are bad one way or the other.

The reason I phrased it that way is that it struck me as the sort of feature that might have gotten removed from one or more popular browsers in the name of “simplification”. The right-click functionality still exists in the browser I daily-drive (Pale Moon, a Firefox fork that retains a lot of features its parent has jettisoned, so I couldn’t be sure this wasn’t one of them).

Right-clicking the back button used to get you a list of the previous several pages you could select from to bypass this.

I don’t think that’s Spanish. Nahuatl, which is an indigenous language spoken in Mexico, does use x- to transcribe the sound commonly written as sh- in English, so that’s probably a Nahuatl place-name.

In the case of Xitter, though, the reference is generally to Mandarin Chinese, which uses x- to transcribe one of the two or three distinct sounds in that language that all sound like sh- to Anglophones.

I think the most common advice is, “if you live in an area where this edible mushroom and this impossible-to-tell-apart poisonous lookalike both grow, don’t pick either of them.”

They are not revealing user names on the site.

You mean, “They are not currently revealing user names on the site.” This may easily be the first temperature increment in a frog-boiling process.

(Cynical? Yes, but the world keeps reinforcing that attitude.)

If nothing else works, use a CSS-rewriting extension to set the cookie banner to display:none. Has to be done per-site, unfortunately.

Okay, so people have less disposable income than they did a few years ago, and less need for indoor entertainment devices than they did during the pandemic. Is it really surprising that fewer purchases are being made? (Plus, did they include “digital signage” and monitors with HDMI inputs when they were compiling the statistics?)

Calling a cat a dog won’t make her start jumping into ponds to fetch sticks for you. And calling a glorified autocomplete “intelligence” (artificial or otherwise) doesn’t make it smart.

Problem is, words have meanings. Well, they do to actual humans, anyway. And associating the word “intelligence” with these stochastic parrots will encourage nontechnical people to believe LLMs actually are intelligent. That’s dangerous—potentially life-threatening. Downplaying the technology is an attempt to prevent this mindset from taking hold. It’s about as effective as bailing the ocean with a teaspoon, yes, but some of us see even that as better than doing nothing.

Some people found the primitive ELIZA chatbot from 1966 convincing, but I don’t think anyone would claim it was true AI. Turing Test notwithstanding, I don’t think “convincing people who want to be convinced” should be the minimum test for artificial intelligence. It’s just a categorization glitch.