Someone may want to know if you are a Democrat or Republican (for advertising, for gerrymandering, whatever). That person may not be able to ask you a direct question like that though (or may feel that you may lie about the answer to such a question anyway).

As such, they likely carry out occasional surveys asking people who are Democrat or Republicans for their opinions on something else. Once they find something else that can strongly correlate your political affiliation with a specific opinion, they know of a new question they can ask someone. That new question should generally reveal what your political party is most likely and they can then proceed with that “most likely” answer.

So “who cares” is those who cannot directly ask you something. They will ask you something else and use that answer to deduce the information they cannot obtain directly.

Reddit, about yesterday, started to implement a change…

They have the old Reddit interface and then the one that replaced it (“new Reddit”) and the current interface you see on Reddit replaced that. People don’t like the most recent interface iteration but had the option to go to “new Reddit” or “old Reddit” by vising the appropriate links.

Notably, each newer interface seems to be more stressful for the servers to run. Still, likely a decent amount of folks don’t like the newest interface so likely the load balances out.

Yesterday though, they “pulled the lever” and “new Reddit” is no more. (This was announced about a month ago at this link but they only got around to doing it yesterday.) Those people trying to access “new Reddit” are redirected to the latest interface. You have the option to use the oldest Reddit interface or the newest one but not the “new Reddit” one. Since the latest interface seemed to use the most server resources before, it is interesting how Reddit seemed to have their severs overloaded a bit when they made the switchover.

On Reddit, people have been upset in /r/help that this has happened but Reddit will likely continue on with this change anyway. Old Reddit will continue to be supported (at least for now anyway).

ArsTechnica has a bit more detail. I’ll quote the important bit below.

… try to reboot affected machines over and over, which gives affected machines multiple chances to try to grab CrowdStrike’s non-broken update before the bad driver can cause the BSOD.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/07/crowdstrike-fixes-start-at-reboot-up-to-15-times-and-get-more-complex-from-there/

This seems like an interesting application of a “race condition”. They are hoping that the update outraces the program starting up enough to crash…

Though others have said multiple states have laws against changing prices during the business day.

Suddenly it makes a lot more sense why Walmart doesn’t want to be open 24 hours a day…

Notably, Digg updated which also involved a worse interface and didn’t have an “old Reddit” interface you could access. Going to a site that was like the old interface involved leaving Digg and joining Reddit.

That is likely why you can now access older Reddit interfaces. They feel that many people will stay if they can find a way to use the new interface (and they may be right about that). The Digg approach of forcing all to use the new interface was a step over the line for Digg and Reddit likely fears a similar thing could happen to them.

I wonder what’s happening?

In general…

Microsoft is being pushy and has started to enjoy that far too much.

This started with things that could be argued as things that users shouldn’t control (like refusing to patch update… you can’t really refuse anymore).

It then pushed to things that is a little less defensible (you were asked to update from Windows 7 to Windows 10… but they really don’t want you to say no).

Once you are on the newer Windows 10 or 11, features just arrive that you have no say about because Microsoft determined it is better for you (you have AI, now AI on your taskbar, in fact you have an AI key on your taskbar, you will use Microsoft AI… the AI will just sift through your entire computer so that it can jump in front of your face to emphasize that you should use their AI!).

They points all have the same theme. Microsoft knows best, you will do what Microsoft wants, and Microsoft won’t really take no for answer but may let you say “bother me later”… maybe. Once you are really pissed off, your only option is to leave a Microsoft operating system… which Microsoft is pretty sure you can’t figure out on your own (more reasonably, you won’t care to put in the work to learn another way) so Microsoft OS it is! Microsoft is a tad worried that those people are starting to wander off to get Google Chromebooks or just use their Android smartphones… those take less effort and more people are opting for that…

Still, Microsoft is relatively sure that people will just put up with what they are doing. I’m pretty sure they will… until they won’t. Microsoft will be fine so long as they don’t cross the line into the “until they won’t” territory. Once they won’t put up with that nonsense anymore, it is far harder to woo them back to a Microsoft OS in the future.

I guess faster loading could be it? But generally it’s more of a layout problem than a bandwidth one.

There was a website which I allowed ads on to help support them. One day, I went to that site in my browser and my laptop fans spun up at that time. Turns out that ads on that site caused my processor usage to spike near 100%. A reload fixed the issue. Once that same thing happened 2 to 3 more times, I just blocked all ads on that site from then on.

There are times that people can’t throw the resources of an Intel i5 processor towards rendering the advertisements on one website. I would think that is more common these days with Chromebooks running the modern equivalent of a Celeron processor. Phones also don’t have much processing power to give and will warm up and drain batteries all towards the all important goal of “render those advertisements”.

I think people tend to allow advertising until it becomes a major problem that needs resolved (such as if the site is bogging down your computer or if the advertising makes the site unable to be read easily). Since those people would then need to fix the issue and hopefully fix it for good, it is easy and efficient to just block out all advertising forever.