Those Amazon Dash buttons were high-key a great deal, because you could easily hack them to be a generic customizable IoT/home network button, and Amazon was practically giving them out for free.

How I Hacked Amazon’s $5 WiFi Button to track Baby Data - https://edwardbenson.com/2015/08/how-i-hacked-amazons-dash-button-to-track-baby-data

That’s the neat part, you can’t, because the companies that run ad networks (e.g. Google and Meta) intentionally make the consumer behaviours market as opaque as possible. As the market maker, they have an economic incentive to withold information from their customers, because any mistakes from market participants due to information assymetries directly translate to profit surplus for the market maker.

We have long since moved on from simple pay per click/view pricing models to pay per “impression,” the definition of which is not clear even to the companies that purchase the ads.

And in a somewhat ironic twist, one of the motivations for such extensive surveillance is the desire to quantify such ROIs. Statistics and analytics such as click through and conversion rates all require tracking user behaviour across vast networks.

Immich users flag Google sites as dangerous

“I could’ve done physics” is the billionaire equivalent of “could have gone pro.”

https://youtu.be/GmJI6qIqURA

General positive effects of pedestrianisation still seem to hold even after COVID.

This later study for Osaka is also co authored by Yuki Yoshimura, one of the authors of study using Spanish data.

Quantifying tactical urbanism: Economic impact of short-term pedestrianization on retail establishments - ScienceDirect - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264275125001039

‪Yuji Yoshimura‬ - ‪Google Scholar‬ - https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=RBHJzi4AAAAJ

Not sure of your specific needs, but I feel that self hosting (i.e. setting up a proper server) is unnecessary. Just pick a local first program and use it with syncthing.

The usual trio (which may be overkill) are Obsidian (admittedly not open source), Trillium, and logseq.

FYI logiops is smaller, and simpler daemon for Logitech devices. In my experience, it has more features and is less prone to breakage. Downside is no GUI, and everything is done via (a fairly simple imo) config file

Logiops

https://github.com/PixlOne/logiops

Solaar Vs Logiops

https://github.com/pwr-Solaar/Solaar/issues/1604

It’s just surveillance capitalism as usual. The basis of free markets only works when all parties have agency and no information assymetries exist. AI chatbots with friendly, conversational tones elicit people to reveal way more personal data than they usually would, and make them more trusting of an algorithm that seems to know them perfectly.

This personal data is then refined and processed to not only profile and identify, but to directly modify the behaviour of users, so that they purchase or do things they wouldn’t otherwise. Every notification, nudge, and inconvenient default setting is the result of billions of A/B tests proven to provide big tech maximum profit.

For some sobering statistics, over 60% of the US has Amazon Prime, the vast majority of which do not even bother to price compare. With Amazon preferencing its own Amazon Basics above competitors at higher prices, this is pure profit.

Always has been.

Silicon Valley’s New Religion: Peter Thiel’s Tech Apocalypse - https://www.thenerdreich.com/peter-thiel-religion-apocalypse-dreams/

The system prompt guardrail is so jank that people run competitions and games to to beat them every time a new LLM comes out. Usually you see people beating guardrails hours within release.

Other keywords to search include prompt injection.

Gandalf | Lakera – Test your AI hacking skills - https://gandalf.lakera.ai/adventure-8

It should be the opposite. Saliva enzymes, stomach acid, and bile takes care of most pathogens, whereas anal lining is basically a direct route to your bloodstream.

This is why anal is considered the riskiest option for sex or drugs.

When one piece fans have hyped up the villains for Water Seven but saying u are excited to see CP9 is way too sus 💀