Well there’s one obvious answer to all these - the dead awoke and left the graveyard en-masse. I’ve seen that happen in films.

Sweet Emotion - Aerosmith. Get some of those Dazed & Confused vibes.

All the advances in toothcare seems to be around fancier electric brushes or other gadgets, but regardless we’ve never been able to move away from ‘brush for 2 minutes’. I want some fancy device I just bite down on and it zaps my whole mouth clean in 5 seconds.

No, you get automatically issues them. About 1 invite every 2 weeks once you’ve been on there for a few weeks.

Interesting. I might give it a go, thanks.

Yeah I know, but it’s such an ‘all or nothing’ approach. I don’t dislike the idea of boosting. I like to be exposed to other people’s content. I just wish it wasn’t so constant. Kind of feels like people do 1 post of their own and then 10 boosts.

I have both but drifted away from Mastodon. It seems to lack the anarchic wild humour I want. Plus the culture of excessive boosting was too much and just meant my timeline was full of posts from people I don’t follow because they’d been boosted by the people I do follow. I follow folks because I want to hear what they have to say, not what the people they follow have to say.

Also all the servers had too strict rules. Having to post content-warnings if you mention food or other innocuous stuff.

I far prefer Bluesky. It’s a lot more liberal and far more more chill. Plus there’s lots of nonsense that keeps things fun. The feeds are a great way to find new people (you don’t need to beg for followers, just find people you dig and things will grow organically anyway). It takes the good things about Mastodon (decentralisation and open) and the parts of Twitter that were fun (people over brands, weird humour). I hope it keeps growing and opens up to more people, but I don’t mind it taking its time while it stabilises and adds features.

After reading the Jon Ronson book “So you’ve been publicly shamed” where he interviewed a load of people that were outed for both bigger and smaller ‘crimes’, no, I don’t agree with it. Doxxing and other public shaming can have consequences you could not expect.

Plus, what if you get the ID wrong and dox someone innocent? That happens all the time too.

Rocky. Because it’s a Roborock and we’re unimaginative.

How would they know that because you mentioned a thing, that it means you’re then worth targeting a ad for? “I wish i could find my fork”, or “I saw someone eating a Mars Bar” or “My mate Phil just got the new Lego Batmobile” or all sorts of conversations that just mention a product in passing. What, do they have a secret set of phrases that they’re listening out for that is linked to an intent to want to buy it?

It’s just so far-fetched that I’m baffled that people truly believe this is actually happening.

Just because technically something might be possible, doesn’t mean that there’s actually a valid reason for anyone to actually do it. What is actually in it for Google to do this? Their regular, not unethical or illegal advertising processes already work so spectacularly well that they’ve killed off entire advertising industries already.

There’s a big difference between some people at a company unlawfully accessing customer data (which is basically what this is), compared to it being a secret company policy to harvest all that data to use for their other secret business practices.

Security of those microphones is a genuine and legitimate security concern. But that’s a very different situation to the conspiracy theory that ‘Google / Alexa is listening in to everything we say so that they can put an ad in-front of us based on the name of a product that they overheard’,

Ok, heavily fined then.

Regardless, there are multiple reasons why they wouldn’t / aren’t listening in, and maybe 1 reason they would - to target you with ads? Why would they bother? Hell, my Google Home can’t even understand me when I explicitly talk to it to ask it something. Even if they could listen in to everything, they wouldn’t get any accuracy.

People just find it a fun conspiracy theory. But if you sit back and think about it for longer then 10 seconds you realise how ludicrously unlikely it is

Yeah, people who believe that Google is listening in to their conversations just to sell ads really don’t understand a) how pointless that is considering how much they already know about you from the stuff you voluntarily give them, and b) why it’s legally not even something they’d consider. If they were doing it and someone discovered proof then the company would be sued out of business. Why would they risk the damage to their rep and finances just to sell ads, when they can already sell ads accurately based on data they’ve legally acquired

And not to mention the amount of storage and processing power it would take to record everyone’s conversations, 24/7.