How online ads actually work.

Very simplified TLDR: you visit a news site. They load an ad network and tell it "put ads here, here and here".

The ad network now tells 300 companies (seriously, look at the details of some cookie consent dialogs) that you visited that news site so they can bid for the right to shove an ad in your face.

One of them goes "I know this guy, they're an easy mark for scams according to my tracking, I'll pay you 0.3 cents to shove this ad in their face". Someone else yells "I know this guy, he looked at toasters last week, I want to pay 0.2 cents to show him toaster ads just in case he hasn't bought one yet."

The others bid less, so that scam ad gets shoved in your face.

That's extremely simplified of course. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_bidding has a bit more of an explanation.

As usual, it's not a shortage of talent, it's a shortage of talent willing to be exploited.

The article explicitly explains that they "needed" to hire 25 foreign workers to deal with the shortage... after they made 50 local workers quit by cutting pay.

Absolutely not. They have way more money than they can sensibly spend, keep begging for more as if they could barely keep the lights on (they could probably easily keep the core mission going with about 10% of the money they're getting), and then expand their spending to match the donations they collected.

They then created an endowment (i.e. a pile of wealth that generates enough interest to sustain them indefinitely), using both additional donations and some of the money given to Wikimedia (which reduces the apparent amount of money they spend and is not listed as money Wikipedia/Wikimedia has, as it is accounted for separately). The $100M endowment was planned to take 10 years to build, got completed in 2021, five years before schedule. Wikimedia also has a separate cash hoard of almost a quarter billion dollars.

It's actually all in their article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#Finances

I still don't understand why he committed suicide-by-Putin.

Did he really have more influence as a martyr in prison than a free man in exile?

Y2038 is my "retirement plan".

(Y2K, i.e. the "year 2000 problem", affected two digit date formats. Nothing bad happened, but consensus nowadays is that that wasn't because the issue was overblown, it's because the issue was recognized and seriously addressed. Lots of already retired or soon retiring programmers came back to fix stuff in ancient software and made bank. In 2038, another very common date format will break. I'd say it's much more common than 2 digit dates, but 2 digit dates may have been more common in 1985. It's going to require a massive remediation effort and I hope AI-assisted static analysis will be viable enough to help us by then.)

How many holes does a donut have?

Now make the donut higher. A lot higher. Now you have a donut-tunnel. Now make the walls thinner. Now shrink it. Now you have a straw.

One hole.

My guesses, in this order:

1. Confirmation bias
2. Carbon monoxide or mental health issues on your side (I'm being serious, don't rule it out).
3. Some low tech way (you're speaking very loudly, you somehow managed to broadcast to their Bluetooth speaker)

With a strong likelihood of it being 1, slightly less 2, unlikely 3 or anything else.

The baked in garbage is a result of you using shitty sources, possibly because there are few good sources available and thus you find more of the shitty ones.

Usually while the movie is not released digitally, only low quality copies are available. Many sites/groups don't bother with those because few people want to watch that.

I'd just wait for the release. You'll instantly find stuff that's not just clean, but also in a decent quality.

Oof. "Subtly" threatening allies that the refugees they accepted (usually with very generous arrangements to make it easier to get in) might become a threat unless Ukraine receives continuing support doesn't sound like a smart move.

Dealing with it.

Weather gets hotter, more people get A/C. Disasters get more frequent, more people get fucked by disasters.

Areas become less habitable, some people die, some people deal, some people flee. Migration gets more pressing? Borders get closed with increasingly violent measures.

We just had inflation make life 10% more expensive in many countries. Life went on. That's about the impact of climate change people in "rich" western countries can expect from climate change, except it will happen more slowly.

As much as climate doomers would hope for collapse, climate change is a slow moving disaster. Humans are adaptable, especially when there is time to adapt. Even the more pessimistic among the realistic/scientific predictions are on the "life will get X% worse" side, not "doom, we all die, no food no water" side.

I'm not gonna risk my computer by turning off my ad blocker, but I wonder if that article comes with exactly the kind of chumbox ads that they're rightfully criticizing.

Forbes is just a blogging platform where "contributors" can post their clickbait. Forbes adds their reputation and the ads and then splits the profit with the "contributor"...

For anyone wondering: still significantly above the pre-war price

This brings the continent closer to the traditional patterns seen before the pandemic when prices, sustained by Russia's abundant and cheap deliveries, used to reliably range between €15 and €25 MWh.

Germany: "we have nothing new to say about Taurus deliveries since our last 'nope'."

Crimean bridge: explodes

Came here to make this (half)joke.

Sadly, it's not just a joke, it's also the only way to actually do this.

owner wouldn't even put the electric on for viewing because she didn't want to pay £1 a day standing charge

I bet the real reason is that turning on the power would reveal more trouble.

Einfache Lösung: 10% der Parkplätze in XL-Parkplätze umwandeln und eine Größe definieren ab wann das Auto nur noch dort parken darf. Größe steht im Fahrzeugschein also weiß man ob ein Auto "normal" oder XL ist.

Wetten das hilft Autos unter dieser Grenze zu halten? Wer so doof ist und danach immer noch ein XL Auto kauft kann sich halt die Abschleppkosten und Strafzettel leisten.

Tell that to the custom binary serialization formats that all the applications are using.

Edit: and the long-calcified protocols that embed it.

Sometimes they also came up with literal malware as DRM.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal

Sounds like the Russian population isn't feeling the consequences of the war enough...