Today on my usual Monday evening national network radio tech segment, I'll be discussing how so many innocent users get locked out of their #Google accounts, often losing all of their email and other data in the process -- due to Google's abysmal account recovery systems, their lack of genuine user support beyond decrepit and largely useless "help forums", and how Google over the years has steadfastly refused to even consider meaningful suggestions to improve the situation.
@lauren Don't forget how it too me more than three years to get paid on an AdSense account that was screwed up when Google crunched its contact database. The problem was resolved only when a saintly Google person walked the hallways on our behalf.
@karlauerbach @lauren Haven't seen a penny out of AdSense in years. Long ago it was making me money. Today, my traffic is much higher and not a penny. Hahaha.
There are very smart people running Google these days.
@karlauerbach @lauren Hahahaha. I wish I had time for such antics. I don't even have time for my main hobby of ham radio. These days I'm writing software for LoRa projects and having fun. (In addition to my job as a chef.)
@shuttersparks @lauren I know how you feel. I've got a product that runs just fine - until Intel abandoned any pretense of tested backwards compatibility of its processors, GPUs, and NICs.
For instance I am finding the N100/N305 Intel processors unable to reliably run the xz decompression on large files. I get random failures. Intel i5s have no trouble. (I've tried this with data read from local storage types and over the net - same problems.)
So I'm playing whack-a-mole trying to keep running code running.
I've spent the last week wrestling with Freebsd 14.2 (beta) which seems to have problems on some processors (those N100/N305) on the UFS file systems that Freebsd has used forever. Only ZFS seems to work.
And I get Intel DA520 based nics burn 100% cpu for 20+ minutes as they try to figure out whether there is an SFP+ module installed.
@karlauerbach @lauren And I thought I had problems. Haha. Glad I'm not you.
My recent head scratcher was a batch of inexpensive 74HC595 chips from a no-name manufacturer in China. What could go wrong? Well, the chips are faulty -- all of them. Plug in chips from Mouser / TI and all works fine. Thanks a lot. Oh, and fuck you very much. I love wasting my time.
@shuttersparks @lauren I have an ancient chromebook that I use for reading news and stuff. I never log in to Google or to the websites.
So I get the most bottom-feeders of ads - gold sellers, cool-your-house-with ice cubes from your refrigerator, motorcycles for people who can't walk, etc.
I often click on those ads, even going to far as to build up a shopping card (which I abandon) in hopes of generating click revenue to the news site that I am reading.