a) yes

b) what I find really concerning is that they may have already figured out how to change people’s behaviour: what they think is funny, what they think is appropriate to say/do, where they want to travel to (if at all), how they feel about certain celebrities they like or dislike, what is believable or not believable, how they feel about certain politicians, who to vote for. Some people are probably more easy to sway on certain topics than others are. It’s not a stretch to guess that they probably already know various paths to make individuals into something they currently are not.

as if they don’t have enough already.

I wonder what else it can get wrong for only the cost of a few glaciers.

reminder that Quake and Quake 2 regularly go on sale for about 5 bucks

They tried but it kept creating clones of PacMan instead

You say pervasive, and I say permissive [soft-shoe dance]

yeah I agree. I do my best to avoid hearing these words when they come from loathsome people. Parroting them, even in jest, still means those ideas are being amplified.

Get back to me when they spell Billion with a T

On another forum, I was complaining about how Microsoft was planning to remove WordPad from Win11. I was advised that installing OpenOffice or LibreOffice was an appropriate replacement. I replied that WordPad was only 3 megs large, as opposed to the recommended replacements, which are decidedly larger.

I guess not everybody appreciates tight code, but I surely do. Things like this are amazingly impressive.