_underfl0w_

This is an absolutely mind-blowing quote, thanks for sharing.

Easier to do in some places than others.

Public transport is nonexistent in several places here in Texas for example - you have to have a car (or know someone who does) to get to your job in the first place. But commuting puts wear and tear on the car, especially if you can't find work particularly close to where you live.

Local software != map data, necessarily.

One might begin to wonder if there's more than mere correlation between those who adopt socially conservative beliefs and those who seem unable to paint their environment in anything other than such broad strokes...

That is actually incredibly good advice. Sounds obvious on its face, but isn't necessarily obvious in the moment.

That still leaves unanswered questions:

What encoding - ASCII or Unicode? UTF-8, or UTF-16?

What type of filesystem - FAT32, exFAT, ext4?

What physical medium - HDD or SSD?

OP's question goes deeper than just the file format.

Do you have a source to cite for "the approach that the vast majority of purchasers prefer"?

That seems pretty speculative. The market can be manipulated or directed by more than simply consumer choice, e.g. by business incentives of product manufacturers.

`self`, `this`, `$1`, etc. are also fun to sprinkle in there.

The problem is that this wasn't the only way they were gathering this info, and that they misled consumers by allowing them to turn off a setting that supposedly stopped this kind of tracking, while still continuing to track due to a different setting defaulting to "on".

Definitely worse, but also the next logical step given that an ad company has achieved relative browser dominance and has such weight to throw around in defining web standards. Moves like this were inevitable. Writing's been on the wall a while now too.

Please read TFA. It answers this question.

"What about $otherthing?"

Neither is good, but that doesn't necessarily make the topic you're attempting to pivot to relevant in this situation.

Also, Cloudflare (provider of the external service you mention, assuming you're talking about DNS-over-HTTPS) definitely isn't Google. At least not yet.

but it is objectively the best selection system one could possibly devise

Your determination of objectivity seems a little... subjective.

Maybe this was objectively best at the time but at minimum the race part seems to no longer be true.

Can anyone cite a source for this? I don't doubt the legitimacy, but would like to know more about it.

"Expected" != "Acceptable" though, IMHO.

They then hired the guy creating those exploit chains.

While this is correct, surveillance in the physical call center wasn't physically taking place in these people's homes, which IMHO is the critical difference.

Having worked in a call center myself at one point, I'd say the primary difference is the directly-customer-facing nature of that work. When a call comes in (and there are often a large number of simultaneous calls) someone has to be there at their desk to receive it - whereas with yours and my current gigs, the worst that'll happen is some production issue with a reasonable SLA.

"wild beef"

?

You could use grep with vim or nano for quick searches and viewing without even leaving your terminal. Why bother with a GUI at all for that use case?

Their parents can't afford a laptop? They can't afford an Internet connection? The kids don't have a good place to learn in their house? They don't have time?

All of the above, and it's surprising this isn't obvious. It may be hard to notice or internalize if you've never seen it and only know privilege, but possession of all or even some of those things is not a guarantee for everyone. Believe it or not, there are some who don't come home to a computer, caring (or even existent!) parents, stable meals, or free time.

Unless they have a carefully-worded Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.

This is already happening, only it's the credit card company doing the tracking and not to grocery store.

Useful as well to overreaching governments and law enforcement. Certainly not the type of thing you could legally inform your customers of, either.

This comment sounds like something Linus Torvalds would say - completely eviscerating but entirely accurate.

How would you change the date if you can't get around the prompt?

A better option may simply be to fork and add the additional features, not necessarily create a new client.

Oof. I would not want to be the bystander whose house an entire engine fell on, even with a parachute haha

I bought a non-M1 Macbook a decade ago and there were absolutely zero issues wiping it from stock. That was one of the first things I did, and everything performed as expected each time. How did things progress so far backwards in stability?

You might be underestimating the percentage of the population for whom the internet is Facebook. Just like AOL a few decades ago, there are still plenty of uneducated people who genuinely don't know how to navigate the internet on their own. Those people then go on to effectively get their news from Facebook or similar.