@Kurt Koenige I find these kinds of questions generally useless. I'm in some podcasting groups and there's a regular flow of the same few questions, including, "What's the best podcasting mic?" and predictably, everybody who responds says THEIR MIC is the best -- whatever THEY HAVE. "What's the best color?" MY FAVORITE COLOR! "What's the best Mexican food dish?" MY FAVORITE DISH! It's sort of a popularity contest among whomever is there. And in my mind, it's almost totally meaningless. Most podcasters don't know the difference between an omnidirectional and unidirectional / cardioid mic. Most cheap mics are omni's, so naturally when people ask what's the best mic, people with quiet rooms and omni mics will report whatever THEY HAVE is. And what do you think another popular question is? "My [omni] mic picks up all kinds of background noise! What can I do to help with that?" The CORRECT answer is, "Switch to a unidirectional / cardioid mic." But instead, since nobody knows the difference, what you get is a whole bunch of stupid suggestions for sound-proofing your room or setting up a recording booth in your closet. Because, what's predictable is that the most popular mics are omni's and that's what a lot of people inevitably buy, so they figure EVERYBODY has to deal with that background-noise problem. No, just those who followed the herd and blindly bought the most popular mics. I cannot see this pattern being different for anything else. "What's the best dog for an apartment dweller?" "What's the best food processor?" "What kind of ________ should I buy?" You're inevitably asking people to tell you "What did YOU buy?" and they'll HAPPILY tell you! If you ask them "Why?" they'll frequently say, "That's what the most commonly mentioned one was in these other online forums." Well, sure, of course. It's a popularity contest! I guess the Good News is ... you can usually get a LOT of people responding to whatever you ask about. Otherwise, it just tells you what most of the people there bought and find it acceptable for their needs.

@Kurt Koenige I was referring to forums like this where you depend on people to answer, not AI. Of course they can ask AI instead -- which will eventually destroy lots of FB groups. AI also has a tendency to wander all over the place and dump more info than someone can handle (sort of like me, at times). As for whether the AI platforms knows details about you from other chats, that depends on whether you have enabled it to share memory between chats. ChatGPT used to do that, then stopped, then made it optional where you can enable it in your settings. Claude never did it, then snuck it into their settings recently, but it's off by default. This is something relatively few people know about or understand. And this these are changes that have happened just in 2025.