I'm not a lawyer, but I'd say that's a case for implied consent.
Typical example is when you're shopping and you hand the cashier the money that they're asking for, then that counts as an agreement to a contract. You don't have to explicitly say that you'd like to buy the wares for that price.
With the dark mode button, I'd expect the same. You're very likely cool with them storing your preference, specifically for providing you with dark mode (not for tracking et al). So, pressing the button would presumably suffice as consent for that.
So, first they rewarded YouTubers for wasting ever more of your time, making you watch as many ads as possible, and now they're building a tool to sort through that whole crap content?
I feel like a big part of the change was also due to the US mass surveillance, which became broadly known with the Snowden revelations in 2013.
Before 2013, you could genuinely claim that collecting as much data as possible, might be done with good intentions. Afterwards, collecting more data than necessary for a given task turned into a moral failure. Their whole business model, while it should have felt sketchy beforehand, turned evil over night.
And of course, Google employees weren't forced to reflect on that. The spotlight was on the US government. Everyone expected the US government to just stop with that shit, after they got caught. And well, they didn't. Obama even doubled down on it, Trump certainly didn't drain the swamp either and Biden probably wouldn't even think about it anymore, if the EU didn't constantly get its ass sued for exchanging data with US companies.
The more it became apparent that the US government wouldn't go back on that, and as people had ever more critical data of themselves online, the more the public perception of Google fell down a hole, even if as a Google employee you could still be doing the same things you did in 2005.
For me, it's usually for passwords that I have in my muscle memory. I'll typo, instinctively reach for backspace, and continue typing. As soon as I think about what I just wrote, no chance of continuing.
Of course, the password being in muscle memory also means continuing typing, even if it ends up being wrong, is basically just as fast as deleting the password.
Believe me, I really don't care to defend Bethesda. I'm not saying their engine is incredibly good.
I'm mostly saying, I feel like their games would be different and even more AAA-generic, if they built it on top of Unreal or Unity. And I'm giving them mild props for not just buying into the duopoly.
But I'm also just saying that, as a result of building their own engine, Bethesda can't just quickly prototype something. To see what the final game looks/feels like, they have to invest years into engine development.
I feel like it's not impossible for them to be fun, for example the Everspace series does focus on action gameplay, but yeah, tons of titles try to go for realism and showing off the scale correctly, which is neat for space nerds, but quite contrary to actual fun.
I feel like this is emblematic of why many AAA titles are so dull.
I mean, you gotta give Bethesda some props here for developing their own engine. Indies don't do that.
But still, 8 years ago, they had this idea of a Bethesda game in space. Maybe they should have seen it coming that this concept won't work out terribly well, but ultimately someone decided to go ahead with it and then they spent 7 years building a space physics simulation, procedural planet generation and so on.
There was no way, they could have not released this game after realizing the concept doesn't work out terribly well. Or taken a step back and shifted the focus of the game towards space flight. Or taken a step back and deviate from the Bethesda-typical formula for this space theme.
These are options you have, when you've spent a few months prototyping, not after multiple years. They had to roll with the concept and basically try to bruteforce the fun into it.
I guess, it's supposed to be a philosophical question, akin to the Ship of Theseus.
There's this myth that every X years, all cells in your body have been completely replaced. Or another way to come to this discussion is via scifi cloning / teleportation, where your body is constructed anew (and in the case of teleportation, deconstructed at your departure location).
Yeah, it's especially bad, when a library doesn't provide type hints itself. It can be comically difficult to find out what the return type of a function is, because every if-else-branch might have a different return value, so you may need to read the function body in full to figure out what the type might be.
Add to that, that lots of the tooling around type hints isn't as fleshed out / useful as it is in fully typed languages and I can definitely understand why someone might not immediately feel like it's a valuable use of their time.
So, yes, it's generally better than JS, but it doesn't actually make it good/attractive, if you're used to the sanity of backend languages. It very much feels like lipstick on a pig.
I feel like it's a combination of anonymity making you invincible: If the other person attacks you with the infos you've given them, you just close the chat window and continue with your life.
...and anonymity stopping others from helping you: If you open up to someone, there's an implicit expectation that they should try to help you, if they're not an asshole. But many people don't actually want help, because they don't want to be a burden. They just want someone to listen.
So, you either open up to an asshole (which is how many, traditionally mostly male friendships function), or you open up to some trapped behind a glass screen.
Yeah, malware is often distributed via ads. They also track+expose information that could be used for spear phishing, identity theft and so on, if it falls into the wrong hands. So, ad blocking is certainly recommended for security.
Hmm, interesting. Here in Germany, power companies are partially privatized and I always thought, whomever came up with that nonsense took inspiration from the turbo-capitalism in the USA. Apparently not.
Do they need to be profitable, though, in your model? It mostly sounds like a traditional public service, where the government could just tell them to use the money for solar...
If those analytics do not process personal data, then you don't.
At the very least, don't use Google Analytics. To my knowledge, that's currently illegal in the EU in general. See, for example: https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/03/google-analytics-sweden-gdpr-fines/