memfree

Agreed. Further, I doubt any of the OP’s examples are tracking. lui=english just means to have the page use english (not spanish, chinese, etc.), cat=web means not shopping, news or anything like that – just a web search, and while I;m not sure about device, I THINK that refers to whether the result should be formatted for phone, desktop, or such.

I blame the defunding of reliable curators. The good gets lost in the torrent of mediocre content. This isn’t just music, but videos, news, art, and so on. Most anything that both craftsmen and amateurs can produce is now easily accessible to everyone everywhere. In addition to the old method of producing albums where the band had to go to some location and work on it as a regular job, and with the label sending in extra musicians, equipment, professionals and such, there used to be trusted critics.

Historically, we had a short list of vetted reviewers who could point us towards the best stuff without the need to wade through the rest. Even if it turned out that your aesthetics did not match that of a given critic, you could probably see why such critics held their opinions and could quickly locate a critic whose tastes did align with yours. Now we have a billion fake review sites run by the companies and/or families of those being reviewed. They are not trustworthy. A person is left to try everything on their own and we often run out of time looking for ‘good’ and settle on ‘good enough’.

I used to visit communities like you did, then I took an arrow in the knee.

But no, seriously, if you don’t like the how people are talking, don’t bother going there. I don’t know people who use Steam’s community hubs for actual community. I see them getting used for info/joke sharing about their given games, but not for social bonding. Personally, I like the guides. Sometimes I search the discussions for a piece of information on an issue that I’m hoping someone else has already encountered and worked around. That’s about it.

That said, I generally don’t mind that people make memes. If it makes them happy, then good for them! If other people get a chuckle, that’s even better. For me – and like my opening line – any amusement quickly turns to eye rolls as the same things get repeated over and over and were never very funny from the start.

If you trust this source, it turns out that it is pretty easy to see your camera feed even if your camera is off: https://techxplore.com/news/2024-02-camera-hackers-spy-cameras-walls.html

I read about it on lemmy, too. I guess I – or one of us – should have cross posted it here from its .world source: https://lemmy.world/post/12081766

Edit to add excerpts:

Results vary on how far away someone would have to be in order to eavesdrop on these different devices. For some, a peeping Tom would have to be less than 1 foot away; for others, they could be as far away as 16 feet.

For consumers, Fu says a plastic lens cover might not be guaranteed to protect you—infrared signals can still get through them––but it is a good first step to battling this kind of cyberthreat.

I’m interested in Growbot. :-)