Forums and websites have always used content to market things (think DAU or visitors to sell more expensive banner ads at the top of a post).

I agree that forum hosts were (mostly) random people that wanted to do something for their community, but monetization didn't kill the friendly Internet, consolidation did.

I find the exact same thing. I always use an alias when signing up for some stupid parking app or new healthcare system that I can't avoid and I've surprisingly never seen the aliases being re-used by anybody but them.

I was expecting at least a data breach, but it's been clean for the past 10 yrs or so.

It's possible data brokers are just good at stripping whatever is behind the "+" though.

I feel like you're trying to fight an uphill battle. I find it's always easiest to learn in a way that motivates or invigorates me.

For example, I wanted to play games with my friends so I got into hosting a Minecraft server. It was hell at first to learn all the individual pieces, but I was motivated and it led me down the path of learning networking, basic server client architecture, and performance monitoring. That kind of spiralled out into making my own plugin, too. Despite the fact that I never ran a server with more than 5 active players or finished my plugin, it sent me down a path learning tons of new stuff because it was fun for me.

I transitioned into webapp development later on by trying to make an idea I had come to life. This was well before I had even heard the word "startup" and I had no business sense, but I wanted to make something and was very motivated to hack my way through it. I didn't finish that either, but I still use those skills I learned today.

Seems like it could be converted to a vending machine pretty easily if you could add your own OS

Already has security, waterproofing, payment processing stuff, and a screen to choose your item.

And they're making things worse as we use less and less paper at the same time..... Geniuses

I don't know anything about how it works, but I assumed it was absorbed by the skin on your head not the actual hair.

I still doubt that putting vitamin whatever on your head everyday will actually make a difference

In this rare case, I would totally suggest you read the article. It has the perfect amount of humor mixed with shocking facts (revealed via email evidence from the Google antitrust case) and it wraps it all up in a way that's easy to understand.

Can't wait to get my $1.53 check in the mail 3 years from now!

And they only put groceries in the back seat because the truck bed is "too dirty"

There's no way the model has access to that information, though.

Google's important product must have proper scoped secret management, not just environment variables or similar.

Well, that's not supposed to happen

Oof, how did it end up going?