Well, the author in the article is in the US, posting about behavior they experience in the US, so it really isn't that surprising.

ah, .co.uk, the TLD long favored by lawyers blogging in the US, indeed.

But, OP was not in a public space.

The the author of the article wasn't in a public area, but in a private area at a private event, perhaps model release forms are a really good idea for participants.

It isn't you. None of those answers are correct. Sociology studies societies and cultures; collective behaviors at different scales within different niches, etc. It's an LLM hallucinating again.

At the time PayPal rolled out, the single feature that made it popular in the USA is that it provided eBay sellers an easy/cheap way to receive credit card payments from buyers. That is all. Any person could set up a PayPal and instantly start receiving credit card payments without setting up a vendor account with a credit card company (which was not trivial at that time).

Right. But that was only relevant because US customers wanted to pay by credit card (because of some combination of credit cards being good and other payment methods being bad in the US). Which was not the case in most of Europe.

You're missing the part where the robot was created by us.

You're being downvoted for a bad read of the material. Any comparisons to God are intentional and deliberate - but mostly serve to knock God down a peg or two by grounding it in something plausible instead of the faith based miracles and straight up fantasy style magic from the Bible.

Futurama has a great episode where Bender meets God (who has merged with a computer) that tackles similar themes.

If you find this to be a harsh reaction, maybe consider how the wording of your initial comment is an effective provocation to anyone who doesn't share your belief system.

Kobo is generally excellent. Usually if there's a hardware problem, it's visible out of the box, and you can exchange it immediately. Then, you're good for years, usually. The recently available color e-ink screens come with a couple of caveats (no matter what brand reader they are in). The background color is more gray when compared to previous black and white/grayscale e-ink screens (some compare the experience to reading a color newspaper). The second caveat is that at this time, color content renders at a lower dpi than black and white content does on a color/Kaleido e-ink screen.

Thanks! I do not really care about colour screens, but the ability to take notes and write/draw on a monochrome one (with a pressure-sensitive stylus, too) is very enticing.

It did increase for a while, and then when Chromebooks came out, schools started using those instead of real computers, because it saved a ton of money. So, the students have only been taught to use Google Docs/Sheets/etc. for years now, and no actual computer literacy. Some can write code, but can't find their own homework file. It's crazy, but we stopped teaching them this stuff, so most don't know it.

I wouldn’t be so quick to blame it on Chromebooks. Had they not been developed, or even if schools had never went all in on devices, the future would surely look different but I doubt it would significantly change the average persons’s interest in learning anything about how computers work. Perhaps, for a time, they would be forced to retain awareness of the concept of a file, but eventually someone would realize that most of them really don’t want to, and will happily pay for a sealed black box.

Again, I would compare it to electricity. There’s all sorts of possible futures from its invention, but in each one, I think the pattern would be the same – an initial rise in understanding and awareness as people learn about the new thing, and cope with early limitations, followed by a decline back to near zero as it becomes infrastructure.

To be clear, this saddens me too. I’m not saying this is good necessarily, only that I think it’s inevitable. When I was younger, I was so certain that computers would change the world, and that this change would involve more people discovering the beauty that I had discovered within the machine. Several decades on, I believe that I was mistaken. There is still beauty in there for those who are interested, but most are not, and never will be. It’s just a tool, it’s just infrastructure, that either works or doesn’t.

During that 10 years, inflation happened. Covid supply chain issues happened. Now, tariff uncertainty is happening. At the same time, the screen resolution of these devices has increased, the refresh rates have gotten faster, etc. Yes, even a "plain black and white" e-ink screen has slowly had tech improvements. So really, the price staying the same or going up a little is pretty expected. Most also have more other features now than 10 years ago.

Not just antibiotics to consider along this line of thought. We historically had a higher load of parasites. Far more of the population had some amount of parasites more of the time. Things like sewer systems/sanitation/clean drinking water/bathing and personal hygiene/wearing shoes/not having piles of animal feces all over the streets. That all changed the amount of exposure to parasites for the common person. We know it affected our immune systems (overall rates of allergies increased). We do not know how it affected our brains. Makes intuitive sense that it must apply to bacteria as well. Before foods were pasteurized (and before refrigeration), for example, we were exposed to more dietary sources for bacteria, both beneficial and non-beneficial.