Hi, let me tell you about the unholy abomination that is HP Instant Ink.
This is a thing that *sounds* like it might be useful (I know, you know where this is going), where you sign up to an ink subscription service in which your printer notices when its low on ink and orders refills.
My spouse signed up for this (with reservations) when the office supply place that used to be 5 minutes from our house closed. We knew this was going to be not great (overpriced, at least), but is so much worse than we imagined.
One month, we had printed enough stuff that we got a warning from HP that we were OVER OUR PRINTING QUOTA on our OWN DAMN PRINTER. I am pretty sure that this was a thing that happened on some level of Dante's Inferno, right?
Now, after my spouse had to have their credit card re-issued, we are getting warnings that if we do not supply an updated method of payment, OUR printer is going to STOP PRINTING with the INK THAT IS ALREADY IN IT THAT WE ALREADY PAID FOR. Just the sheer chutzpah of this would be impressive if it weren't so evil.
This is what Silicon Valley considers innovation in 2024.
@lowd The grifts go even deeper. I was talking to a colleague recently whose college-age son (and all his friends) had been paying some service $30/month to re-write their assignments so that they supposedly wouldn't get caught by "AI detectors"
Since I've seen a lot of chatter about people switching to #Firefox as Google ramps up the enshitification of #Chrome, let me tell you about a killer feature for people who (a) need multiple accounts on the same websites (eg. devs) or specifically (b) have to use multiple Google accounts.
Firefox has an official addon called Multi Account Containers that lets you trivially set up color coded tabs that have separate sets of cookies. Log into your dev account in one, and your test account in another. Log into your personal #gmail in one and have another tab next to it with your work Gmail. I'm actually not signed in to any Google accounts in most my tabs, I just have containers for the specific tasks I do on Google products.
Research associate professor in the Kahlert School of Computing at the University of Utah. Co-director of the Flux Research Group: https://www.flux.utah.edu. I build research infrastructure: https://cloudlab.us, https://powderwireless.net, https://emulab.net, https://geni.net.