Easy, replace all price tags with qr codes that you scan with your phone. Then they can make the price whatever they want for whomever they want individually. More realistically they will use an categorization AI to put people into rulesets which set their prices.

Here is a great video to illustrate and educate: https://m.youtube.com/shorts/acpd3UXQdmw

And an article to back it up: https://www.fool.com/investing/2026/03/05/walmart-rolls-out-digital-pricing-could-the-ai-fue/

This IS potentially new as some of the plans involve using facial tracking from security cameras to identify customers and analyze them for their net worth so they can set prices to specific customers, rather than setting prices to specific situations. Also, anything that makes price gouging easier and easier to cover up is bad.

The point on this is the cars are broadcasting the numbers. Imagine your license plate including a loud speaker that shouted it’s number while the car was running. Tracking via plate requires line of sight. Tracking it in an automated way requires a good high speed camera, text analysis computer vision to log the vehicles, and storage for all of the images. In contrast, this signal is a repeating unencrypted broadcast. I could build a Raspberry Nano device that I can sit next to an intersection and capture the numbers of every vehicle that drives by. It is also just presumably storing the number and time, so years of tracking data could be managed with a gig or two of storage.

This is absolutely a threat, and I am surprised it is not actively exploited by companies like Walmart to track every vehicle which drives by their stores and enters their parking lots. Hell, Amazon has enough vehicles out driving around that they could pretty effectively generate profiles for every vehicle in a town just by equipping their trucks with scanners and compiling the data into a behavior analysis system. Every car which drives past is read and stored. It is truly worrying.

Use Jellyfin. I have been running it since the middle of last year and it has been amazing and stable. Have fun.

Yo ho ho. If purchase is not ownership, then piracy is not theft.

The ONLY way this is even remotely OK is if the OS is set to 18+ all other age verification laws are satisfied and I don’t have to provide even more intrusive information to random companies.

And in other breaking news: the sky is blue, tree pretty, and fire hot.

In other news: fire is hot, water makes things wet, and things that taste good make us happy.

Can confirm, both true and stupid.

I feel it is less responsibilities and more the societal awareness that comes with them that tends to make the change. When you start paying bills you start dealing directly with greedy corporations, landleeches, and greedy employers, all of whom view you as a commodity rather than a human being.

Life being pay to play, as it has been for a couple hundred years, is where I feel the “downward trend of society” feelings come from.

If you have not seen it, you should watch the movie Wag the Dog, and check the release date on it after doing so. Phenomenal movie about government spin doctors.

Any chance for people playing things like Factorio? Maybe Rift Breaker?

Yeah, the new pipeline is based HEAVILY on object inheritance and method/property calls so there is a paper trail for ALL of it. Also using Abstract Base Classes so future developers are forced to adhere to the architecture. It has to be in Python, but I am also trying to use the type hinting as much as humanly possible to force things into something resembling a typed codebase.

I literally told my boss that I was just going to rebuild the entire pipeline from the ground up when I took over the codebase. The legacy code is a massive pile of patchwork spaghetti that takes days just to track down where things are happening because someone, in their infinite wisdom, decided to just pass a dictionary around and add/remove shit from it so there is no actual way to find where or when anything is done.

I have seen like 2 movies where the hacker just ran a script and danced around the room until the progress bar got to the top, then he hit a couple inputs and ran another script and went back to dancing. It was so surreal to see something so much closer to real than the feverish hammering in a keyboard.

DropboxAPI was a standalone cloud storage that Dropbox seems to have repurposed, because of course they did.

Yeah, I managed to get it by saving it from Libre as a docx.

This one looks cool. I have essentially settled on Cryptpad, but I like the look of this one too.

Indeed. I agree with everything you said here.

Most of my quandary stems from patants at this point I guess. Copyright reform advocates are plentiful, but patant reform is much more rarely mentioned and IMHO is a bigger issue for progress and development of society. The anticompetitive practice of purchasing patants so you can bury them gets deep under my skin. There are so many things that have been invented, problems that have been solved, potential progress that has had the first steps made, that was squelched because some person/company with more money than civic duty realized that it would negatively affect their revenue stream. And instead of developing the idea and incorporating it to make their own products better, they just hide if in a vault somewhere.

That all said, I cannot describe how happy I was when I heard of some rogue patant whore activists out there coming up with ideas for enshittification and patanting them so corpos cannot use those specific methods to enshittify our world more. I wish I had been able to patant the SaaS architecture when I graduated HS in 2003. Maybe the world would be a much better place.

Your response is well written and entirely misses the mark. Also, there are 100% free alternatives with all most all of the same features as Google Docs that have been suggested here. I am so confused by how far off the mark you are from both my OP and the general content of the responses here.