But that individual ad impression that someone paid for that I did not click (or blocked) does not know that.

I am not so sure about this part. Google and Facebook have contracts with credit card companies, payment terminals, big chain retail stores, etc. to connect purchases made at retail stores to digital identities of the buyers. Of course, a lot of the details of these contracts are carefully kept private. The physical purchase instead of online purchase is not enough these days to stop the tracking.

Agree with you on everything you say.

I am nevering changing my 10 year old 1080p “dumb” TV because I don’t want anything that is remotely smart. I’m happy connecting either Chromecast or some other streaming stick to it.

My hope is that as these “smart” TVs start running full fledge android OS, we might get a group of developers like the original Cyanogen folks who would develop ROMs that can be flashed on top of all the crapware that TV companies install. I would happily give up hardware warranty to get away from shitty bloatware.

YES! Duh-uh.

Damn, so no country is building a secret nuclear reactor under Antarctica? That would have been cool.

Absolutely brilliant!

Maybe a tad bit too late.

I believe there are improvements on Mastodon that can be made to update trends faster, to create trends from words that aren’t explicitly preceded by # symbol, etc.

But anyways Twitter trends had become absolutely garbage in last 4-5 years, it was always some marketing team of celebrity making useless things trend, or some K-pop group, etc. Twitter trends stopped being relevant long back. Twitter Topics picked up the slack for a while before their algos started filling up topics with promotions and ads.

I am happy to let things develop slowly on Mastodon. As someone from Computer Science academia, there are plenty of privacy preserving algorithms that have been developed which could power things like trends or topics, etc. on Mastodon without resorting to endless data surveillance. But it will take time for those things to percolate into the platform. Slow but steady is the way to go!