patrick.net

Bd6r says

Even more creepy: we talk in a miserably small, obscure language in house with my wife (less than 5 M speakers in whole damned world). So one evening we talked about buying ladders. Next day her facesucker shows ads for ladders. We dont have alexa or other spy devices, so it must be her apple computer or phone spying on us as all my devices are off at all times. Phone is android

My cat's name was Artemis. I mentioned her name one day.

Next day, my kindle was full of ads for the guy who wrote "The Martian" new book, "Artemis".

I buy no science fiction whatsoever and except for an old used trade paperback of Dune, own no sci fi books.

AmericanKulak says

Bd6r says

Even more creepy: we talk in a miserably small, obscure language in house with my wife (less than 5 M speakers in whole damned world). So one evening we talked about buying ladders. Next day her facesucker shows ads for ladders. We dont have alexa or other spy devices, so it must be her apple computer or phone spying on us as all my devices are off at all times. Phone is android

My cat's name was Artemis. I mentioned her name one day.

Next day, my kindle was full of ads for the guy who wrote "The Martian" new book, "Artemis".

I buy no science fiction whatsoever and except for an old used trade paperback of Dune, own no sci fi books.

Yeah, these are spy devices.

I told my business partner's wife that is what Alexa was, and she dismissed me as crazy. I told her and her husband to talk about the new puppy they were about to get (they will never own a dog) and told them to see what happens. Well, they did, and they got adds for puppy chow and so on.

I'm kind of irritated with my business partner, he still thinks I'm "paranoid" even when I put him through exercises like this to show I'm not. I know people that work on this shit, he doesn't, he doesn't know, he doesn't believe me that I know, because I don't share my circles of contacts with him because despite him being an MIT graduate, they'd consider him hopelessly naive and stupid.

I had lunch with him this weekend and I brought up the Ukraine/Russian war and he said "wow, you've been listening to Russian propaganda!". I've known him for 20 years, I've been right about the Iraq War, the Libyan bombing, Afghanistan, but he still doesn't believe me with Syria (he still believes the US went in there to stop a civil war because he paid good money to read The Economist) and I just let it pass. He LEGITIMATELY believes that Europe can do a "green energy revolution" and will have no need for Russian energy, they'll just spend a trillion dollars on this, and the problem will somehow be magically solved, because enough money breaks the laws of fundamental physics and so on.

In 2 years, I'm going to send that email back to him. Hope the war with Ukraine is over by then. If it's not, I might be learning to speak Russian or Mandarin..