I can believe that. I used to work in broadcast TV operations/engineering and remember a boss at the time lamenting about how the FCC board was composed entirely of telco people, so it was no surprise that they were taking all our spectrum and giving it to the telcos. I can only imagine if you put them directly in charge of the media company.

Should be torrenting “Blank Space” by Taylor Swift

I was notified about 3 or 4 breaches just last year, some from companies I’d never even heard of but had my info.

It’s kind of crazy to me how many of these Blogger sites still exist although they’re inactive

Were the clowns mostly AT&T or Warner? Or pretty even between both?

Discovery has been a clown show for years now, and Warner must have been an even bigger one to get bought by Discovery.

I’ve had my account since Portal was released, so that’s around 20 years ago? Frankly I’d be shocked if I’ve spent even $1k and over 20 years? That doesn’t sound too bad. Almost everything I’ve bought has been on sale, or fairly inexpensive to begin with.

The decision by CFPB to cancel the rule comes days after the Financial Technology Association, an industry lobby group representing non-bank fintech companies, wrote to Vought in his capacity as the White House’s budget director. The lobby group asked the administration to withdraw the CFPB’s rule, claiming it would be “harmful to financial institutions’ efforts to detect and prevent fraud.”

Sure. The only way to detect and prevent fraud is to make it easy for the fraud to happen in the first place.

Sorry for the slow reply; just remembered to ask her. For bookkeeping you don’t need anything. It could be valuable to get a certification in QuickBooks, but not required. It just seems to be the most common software.

If you’re okay with writing a little HTML and just don’t want to deal with writing/designing the CSS, I recently found out about HTML5 UP, which has a bunch of Creative Commons Attribution 3.0-licensed templates. It’s fairly straightforward to modify the content if you understand the HTML, and then you can host it for free as a static page at any number of places like GitHub Pages or Cloudflare Pages.

If you don’t want to have the CC-By attribution on the webpage, the designer also offers a service called Pixelarity with the same templates and more for a $19/quarter non-renewing subscription. You can continue using the templates even after the subscription expires and can keep making new sites with any template you already downloaded, you just don’t get any updates or tech support when the subscription expires. Upload to one of those free static hosts and it’s dramatically cheaper than Ghost or WordPress, and probably less work than a static site generator for something that’s not changing often.

Back in the days when cable/satellite was new and they were bringing you unedited movies from the theater, before they even were released on VHS often. Of course there weren’t thousands of viewers using this as a way to increase their VHS collection for one low monthly fee by recording the channel…

The buy-now-pay-later company had previously shredded its marketing contracts in 2023, followed by its customer service team in 2024, which it proudly began replacing with AI agents.

A few months after freezing new hires, Klarna bragged that it saved $10 million on marketing costs by outsourcing tasks like translation, art production, and data analysis to generative AI. It likewise claimed that its automated customer service agents could do the work of “700 full-time agents.”

As Siemiatkowski told Bloomberg, “cost unfortunately seems to have been a too predominant evaluation factor when organizing this, what you end up having is lower quality.”

Also, just want to recognize this gem:

Though executives in every industry, from news media to fast food, seem to think AI is ready for the hot seat — an attitude that’s more grounded in investor relations than an honest assessment of the tech — there are growing signs that robot chickens are coming home to roost.

This is wild; I’ve used Luden’s my whole life, not for coughs but sore throats. The active ingredient nowadays is fruit pectin; basically it’s a cherry candy but sucking on the candy helps temporarily relieve the sore throat. Very curious they don’t mention the previous opioid formulation on their Wikipedia page!

Have you considered accounting/bookkeeping? My wife has done it before and it’s not necessarily the most exciting work but typically pays pretty decent. She says it can be interesting trying to track down what is preventing the books from balancing.

I was kind of surprised to see one of those still running for 26 years until I reached that part of the letter, although in my experience those old LaserJets were pretty robust compared to the more consumer-oriented devices of that era, let alone today’s models which mainly exist to lock buyers into ink subscriptions.

Mapquest was revolutionary for offering free driving directions where previously that cost money and was usually only worth paying for on major road trips. Google took that and supercharged it by offering free directions on your phone, joining a growing list of products where they took something that used to cost money and offering it for “free” in exchange for all your information.

I had a very similar experience, except I wasn’t hungover and at the time still lived with my parents/siblings, so I was stopped when I got downstairs and saw them getting ready for dinner. It was a time of year when the light was pretty similar at 6 AM or PM, which made it more confusing.

Maybe the kind of people/organizations who do karma farming on Reddit haven’t figured out that’s meaningless here

!bellobearofficial@lemmy.world if your client doesn’t recognize community names in titles

If I hear an “AI” voiceover I have the same reaction. Definitely won’t be buying anything from Dr. Squatch.