This is wild. I mean, it isn't surprising conceptually, but like...I got my first ever Amazon recall notice about this, and it is for something I surely bought between 2016 and 2018. Thing's just sitting in my basement wishing it was getting charged and used. I guess I'll need to run it to the dump.
I mean, the ad services plugged into every website have already cross referenced each other and know who you are even if you use a service like DDG that supposedly doesn't track. Incidentally, Kagi supposedly doesn't track either, (which they'd better not since you're paying them), so while it doesn't mitigate the above issue of your being traceable by pure virtue of browsing the web, it certainly isn't "tying your porn results to credit cards and search results."
Late to the party, but I'd like to bitch, too.
I've used Reddit with one account or another for like 14 years, and I admit that I was a part of the account deletion exodus when they went scorched earth on 3rd party apps, and that I further created a new account because, you know...it's the Internet's town square and there is a lot of information you can only get there (although, ironically, and a little delightfully perhaps, now the AI LLMs have inhaled it all so perhaps its monopoly on useful information has come to an end), so I made a new account that was recently 2 years old.
I mostly just did what I do on Lemmy...graze. Scroll. Copy memes over to my friends' Discord server. I was in some communities that are niche enough not to exist (yet) on Lemmy. It was just, you know, casual Redditing.
Then last week, someone posted in a subreddit for liberal gun owners, a photo of a whole pile of guns. I didn't recognize them. Didn't care about them. But he seemed proud, and I was in a mood, and I just felt like engaging, and maybe gassing up the OP a little, and so I said something along the lines of, "You have too many guns. You should give one of them to me. Help a comrade out."
I was immediately banned from that subreddit for solicitation of purchase of firearms, which is fucking insane. Nothing in my comment, if read with an ounce of grace and human capacity to think, indicated that I was seriously trying to buy firearms from this guy. And, okay, so I'm banned from that sub now. Whatever, I didn't really do anything or contribute there anyway. I go shooting a couple times a year and I just liked getting recommendations on left-wing-friendly firearms YouTube channels and stuff.
Only I woke up two days ago to find that, actually, my entire Reddit account was banned, for the same reason as I was banned from that sub of course. I was offered an appeal as is the typical process, and I know you're supposed to kiss their asses, but I said essentially this: "I find it completely impossible to believe that a human being read my comment and genuinely believed I was trying to solicit the purchase of firearms. I was using overly-enthusiastic language to illustrate envy of OP's collection."
They got back to me today to confirm that, yes, in fact, a human did read my comment and yes, in fact, I was still banned, for life, including any attempt I may ever make to create a new account, which will then be banned for ban evasion which is hilarious.
It's Reddit. It's like being banned from Walmart. Yes it's kinda the worst place on earth, but when you need groceries or hard items, you know that you'll always have access from anywhere you happen to be, because Walmart is so prolific. Even if Walmart sucks shit, getting banned from Walmart would suck. So that's part of my frustration. But the other thing is just the black-and-white injustice of it all. No slap on the wrist. No customer service (hah! you're the product, not the customer, of course) to complain to or have a discussion with. Just "you broke a rule you didn't know existed by doing something you never imagined could be construed as rule-breaking, and you are now banned, without argument, for the rest of your life, from the most ubiquitously useful megaforum on the Internet."
Fuck Spez.
About 15 years ago I did some meme prompt to hit the Random button on Wikipedia, and on Flickr, and also to find a random string of text...somewhere, I can't remember...and that would be 'your band name, your album title, and your album's cover art'. I honestly fucking loved the result. Nobody take it, 'cause I might still start this band someday.
I'm only a casual coder (although I hope to get better in the coming years), but this is how I feel in the office when someone farts a half formed, semiliterate speech to text little dingleberry into ChatGPT, and then sends as a professional email the full bodied thing it whips up based on it. I've got a colleague who used to be in "LD" classes when they were young and they've come a long way to being a near 30-year business professional in this department, and they have always struggled with reading and writing and so tools like Grammarly and now ChatGPT help this person take a fully-formed email and give it the once-over before sending, and I don't judge that and that isn't what I'm describing; what I mean is my boss (for example), who can't string more than five written words together, or read a sentence any longer, and certainly isn't interested in learning how to, who now uses ChatGPT to send page-long emails or "cook up" long and supposedly philosophical LinkedIn posts about leadership.
I cannot conceive of how a person does that, and sends it with a straight face, totally shameless. Why should I even bother to respond to something like that? Who am I responding to? It certainly isn't the supposed author. My college program mentor was doing the same thing near the end of my degree program and it was so fucking obvious. He went from never responding to me to suddenly sending these long and enthusiastic emails that recited back to me every point I had made as though they were all worth reiterating (they weren't), the way one might show one was actively listening (which itself only adds to the irony). And it is such a deep insult to receive one of these emails because it says at once that you both 1) don't respect me enough to put your own thoughts in writing for me, or to have enough thoughts to write down to begin with and 2) that you think I'm a complete fucking idiot who either won't notice your ruse, or am also a vapid creature, too vapid to care because "aren't we all just doing it this way now?"
The philosophical argument against vibe coding seems pretty self evident although the most compelling "argument" I've seen against it, I saw on Lemmy, maybe a repost from BlueSky where someone pointed out that it's the tech bros trying to take this one last manual tool from the hands and minds of users and turn it into a subscription for which our skills (like writing and composition) will inevitably atrophy to the point we cannot do it without the subscription service anymore. Pure evil.