So let me get this straight. They are not exposing it to consumers. Everyone is being explicit that it is NOT exposed to CONSUMERS. Doesn’t that leave it open to being exposed to non-consumer entities? Things like Meta internally and government entities are non-consumer entities. I believe other businesses could be construed as non-consumer entities as well. So they could easily NEVER expose this to the end users and still make bank selling the data to brokers, government agencies, or private surveillance companies like Palentier or Flock.

Cool cool cool… Good to know.

Let’s start with law congressional pensions and 3rd party law enforcement contracts, yeah?

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.

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.

This quote reminds me of the owner of this one TTRPG and card shop in my area. If you try to talk to him about literally anything he sells he will straight tell you he does not care about anything he sells. All the nerdy shit under one roof and his ass is there because nerds will pay through the nose for it.

Needless to say I shop at the store where the owner participates on FNM every week and runs D&D campaigns.

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.

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

You mentioned the areas being countries. This leads me to believe that they are concave figures, correct? If you are unfamiliar, a concave figure is something that has a space that doubles back into the interior of the shape. So an o is convex, and a c is concave, as an example. Convex shapes are much simpler to find the area of. You can use a Riemann Sum as others have suggested. I would probably just pick a point inside the shape and do a bunch of triangles around with the point as an apex and the bases as two points on the edge of the surface, then sum up the areas of each triangle. You could even probably use a triangulation algorithm built into the engine to do this. (I am unfamiliar with the specifics of the Godot engine).

For concave shapes it becomes a little more complex. It has been mentioned that you can draw a bounding box around the shape, so that would allow you to calculate it using a numerical method. Take random samples inside the bounding box and count up the number that are inside the shape and divide by the total number of samples. The value you get will be the % of the area of the bounding rectangle that the shape takes up, so just multiply the easy area by the % and you will get an answer that is close enough. It may take a bit to get the sample count right, but it will get there. Try to make sure the samples are as uniform as possible. You could even scatter the sample points then relax them for a couple iterations before counting to increase accuracy without increasing samples.

I have a real issue here too. Though mine more centers around the purchase of IP to bury it because it would be competition. How many amazing creations that would benefit humanity and make all of our lives more livable are buried in archives at these big corpos?

This is what I would like to see fixed, in the most aggressive way possible. I want a clock on the ownership to bring a product to market based on the purchased patant and if that clock runs out, ownership reverts back to the creator.

I kinda hope they also weight reviews based in hours in the game. If ten people with 1000 hours I’m a fame recommend and 1000 people with <10 hours don’t recommend, I really hope the score is better than 50%.

I don’t seem to have this problem as much. That said, I didn’t on Reddit either. Maybe it is because my feeds are mostly science, weird maps, and things discovered on lemmy.nsfw.

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.