I think we need to collectively understand that freedom and privacy have a cost. That $200 phone is subsidized with the spyware baked into it and the expected income of future repairs and upgrades, ad sales, etc. a $2k phone made with modular parts and software based on open source has a much higher up-front cost, won’t be quite as sleek, will require some technical understanding, but a much lower maintenance cost.

Game consoles, phones, computers, cars and even refrigerators. If some company now considers the product a loss-leader, we should collectively shun it.

It’s a hard sell, though, when everything is super expensive and things like phones and cars are pretty much requirements for living in some places.

Please and Thank You.

I want better for us, and I’m fighting for it, but I have very limited personal power to enact change.

The way “we” looked at those “third-world” countries when I was a child feels like how everyone should be looking at us. Our squalor is not that of unclean water (but that is still true in places) or of systemic violence by the government (but that is still true in places) or of lack of reliable food (but that is still true in places). We have cellphones and internet, cars and roads, and air-conditioning, so we should be happy.

Our squalor is in the apathy and even antipathy a bulk of our fellow citizens have towards others.

The fix is education and awareness, but the means of enacting it have been hijacked. How do I reach someone on the west coast to be kind when I can’t touch them from the east coast?

There was a post recently, and I’ll link it if I can find it again, about Kevin and his truck, and how helping others builds community. Very wholesome. Community has been lost here outside of the uber-wealthy (they all know each other), or the “poor” who need it to survive. The “middle class” has lost the plot.

“Home row?”

Whatever, wasd and mouse is my home row.

For a decade or two now, it’s been pretty much assumed that everyone has an internet-connected, camera-equipped, browser-capable device in their pocket. Restaurants, banks, hospitals, employers and even government offices use QR codes and websites to get you to their menus, forms or services.

If ID is being tied to my mobile spy device, then I need my mobile spy device to be a right and not a luxury. $40-50 for a few years of validity, internet access provided at no cost, even if slow. I can have my luxury phone be where I’m ‘anonymous’, but I want the government to subsidize the mobile spy device if it’s a mandatory expense. Even cheap phones cost a lot of money.

To be clear, I don’t want ID tied to my phone, but it’s gotten harder to exist without one, so it should be something we have access to with minimal friction.

Add food, water and shelter to that list, but you can’t ask for them without a web browser.

I was certainly not defending her. She is, as you say, egregious in part because when she was called out she refused to reflect. I was more talking in the general sense. The world sucks right now, but we are quick to attack people on their views without granting them opportunity to change.

I call this out because of the trend of ‘leopards-eating-faces’ kind of jokes. When the leopards eat your face, you might notice they were not friendly to begin with and the rest of civilization can welcome you back instead of mocking you; or they can mock you and you will feel isolated and defensive and the other bigots will welcome and validate you instead.

I want to caution about reading -isms into authors works. People often don’t really know their own stereotyping unless it’s pointed out (you, dear reader, probably have some problematic world views that no one has noticed or mentioned…). The fallout afterwards is where the problems exist, when someone doubles down on their viewpoints after being informed of them.

Rowling has clearly done that and is dismissed because of it. I will avoid things that give her a platform, and the original art itself is tainted due to her continued stances; but, back to the general case, just because art might be racist or antisemitic, etc., at the time of creation, if the artist can be convinced that their views are wrong, we should celebrate that – just with footnotes and context.

I used to be corporate IT. I’m quite glad I’m not that anymore, since this comment made me realize that there is a reckoning coming when the next hardware refresh happens and all the RAM is used by AI, but the bloated and unoptimized software we are forced to use still expects it.

Those CEOs who pushed for AI everywhere might take notice when they can’t source new laptops without spending a ton more. Theya culpa.

To be fair, the unfortunate worker class will probably just end up with a machine with 4GB and apps that expect 32, so the drones will feel the pain and the executives will not…

Afaik, yes. But. It doesn’t take effect until late this year. The synthetic THC industry is pretty damn big, though, and I’m holding out hope that we get some lobbying that supports things actual people want for once, and that turns into a bill making it legal instead of a loophole in an annual farm bill.

Call your senators and reps.

While you’re not exactly wrong, there are multiple types of cameras.

The ones at the convenience store or watching the street in front of a business are probably CCTV, and the store only has so much history stored and, most importantly, it’s only accessible with a warrant.

Speed trap cameras are maybe isolated and only deliver data to the police… I’m not aware of how they work and they predate the ‘hardware as a service’ model we have to live with today.

Flock and similar kinds of cameras, though, are a service that your local government or businesses subscribe to. They are tracking vehicles (maybe people/faces, who knows, black box) and other metadata across the country, collating that data centrally, are not accountable to tax payers, have no ToS for the people they are tracking and thus no way to request or delete your data, the data at rest is not subject to many government regulations the way data on a government server would be, and accessing that data doesn’t require a warrant. While theoretically that data is “owned” by the local jurisdiction or business, there appear to be no safeguards preventing the federal government from querying it all at once, or any hacker with a stolen credential.

Notably, Flock’s privacy policy doesn’t include the actual humans and cars it is monitoring, only the ‘administrator, customers, and team creators’ that access the data. Police privacy is maintained, but not yours.

This “infrastructure hardware” is owned by the corporations, not your government. We have corporations acting as government intelligence agencies and if that doesn’t frighten you, it should: They aren’t beholden to the same laws and restrictions that come with that scope and scale.

Use a FOIA request to find out if a given camera is owned by your city/state. If not, show up at your townhall and demand it be accountable as if it were.

I wasn’t trying to be antagonistic, just defending “gross” foods. I absolutely agree that one should know what they are doing before inflicting it on others… but if cooking for yourself or others who are in on the adventure, there’s no harm (except maybe nausea) in trying things without knowing what they are.

I’d be unsure how to prepare it in a way that my American palate would enjoy it, but fermented fish as Asian ‘fish sauce’ is mighty tasty when used correctly, so it’d be worth a shot. My google search (I was pretty sure it was similar to lutefisk, but wasn’t sure how) had an AI overview question of ‘is it illegal to open surströmming indoors?’, which I thought was funny.

So many things taste great after a fermentation that we don’t always notice the process: cheese, sourdough, beer/wine/liquor, kimchi, (some kinds of) pickles, etc, including meats such as salami and chorizo. Why not a fish?

I may be misreading things, but if you’re going to pick on a regional specialty… pick on durian :P I’m assuming it’s like coriander, in that some find it pleasant and others disgusting based on their genetics. I’m in the latter category for durian. Foods for me are like pokemon: Gotta try 'em all.

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Some only once.

I think that adage used to work… however nowadays, with corporate greed enshittifying everything, I think it’s safe to presume malice by default, at least when the actor is a company. Your neighbor probably didn’t mean to do that thing that made you mad.

They no longer get the ‘benefit of the doubt’ after years of evidence that they will attempt to squeeze every penny out of their customers.

Hell, I don’t submit help requests without a confident understanding of what’s wrong.

Hi Amazon. My cart, ID xyz123, failed to check out. Your browser javascript seems to be throwing an error on line 173 of “null is not an object”. I think this is because the variable is overwritten in line 124, but only when the number of items AND the total cart price are prime.

Generally, by the time I have my full support request, I have either solved my problem or solved theirs.

I agree that this is a problem.

“Responsible disclosure” is a thing where an organization is given time to fix their code and deploy before the vulnerability is made public. Failing to fix the issue in a reasonable time, especially a timeline that your org has publicly agreed to, will cause reputational harm and is thus an incentive to write good code that is free of vulns and to remediate ones when they are identified.

This breaks down when the “organization” in question is just a few people with some free time who made something so fundamentally awesome that the world depends on it and have never been compensated for their incredible contributions to everyone.

“Responsible disclosure” in this case needs a bit of a redesign when the org is volunteer work instead of a company making profit. There’s no real reputational harm to ffmpeg, since users don’t necessarily know they use it, but the broader community recognizes the risk, and the maintainers feel obligated to fix issues. Additionally, a publicly disclosed vulnerability puts tons of innocent users at risk.

I don’t dislike AI-based code analysis. It can theoretically prevent zero-days when someone malicious else finds an issue first, but running AI tools against that xkcd-tiny-block and expecting that the maintainers have the ability to fit into a billion-dollar-company’s timeline is unreasonable. Google et al. should keep risks or vulnerabilities private when disclosing them to FOSS maintainers instead of holding them to the same standard as a corporation by posting issues to a git repo.

A RCE or similar critical issue in ffmpeg would be a real issue with widespread impact, given how broadly it is used. That suggests that it should be broadly supported. The social contract with LGPL, GPL, and FOSS in general is that code is released ‘as is, with no warranty’. Want to fix a problem, go for it! Only calling out problem just makes you a dick: Google, Amazon, Microsoft, 100’s of others.

As many have already stated: If a grossly profitable business depends on a “tiny” piece of code they aren’t paying for, they have two options: pay for the code (fund maintenance) or make their own. I’d also support a few headlines like “New Google Chrome vulnerability will let hackers steal you children and house!” or “watching this youtube video will set your computer on fire!”

^^ This is my take. Behave like an adult.

99% of the time, I don’t have anywhere to be in a hurry, so I let others (who may or may not need to) go first.

I often travel with kids at this time in my life, but we just chill in our row until things get calm. Then we can grab stuff from overhead if needed, even if it’s behind us.

On the occasions where I’ve needed to rush to make a connecting flight, I just say it out loud and get some buy-in from those around me, or it’s already obvious and the whole cabin is probably aware. In those cases, getting non-pressured people to give you priority tends to work if you just ask.

I can imagine a class of passenger who is super dependent on timing – but those people have already failed. PSA: When traveling, assume that you will not depart or arrive at the exact time on your ticket. Give yourself an hour or two to absorb delays and then you can just be chill.

Real talk. Ubisoft in general have made some great games. Their current business model is to pump out repeats of things that worked, and so earn our scorn for them ‘as of right now’.

Who played AC 1 and didn’t want more. That we’re now up to AC 76 doesn’t diminish that they made something fun before they beat it to death.

Even their primary accomplishment of making every open-world game follow their formula of ‘1000 sidequests, item hunts and mini-puzzles’ doesn’t detract from the fact that those were really fun the first few times.

I wish the best to all the ex-Ubisoft developers. Go make cool shit without the $business oversight$. In an ideal world, the publisher should be there to cover the gaps when a new concept falls flat, not to force developers to keep doing the same profitable thing and otherwise stifle innovation.

In defense of gluten-free-bread producers… the thing that makes bread good is gluten. it’s the glue that holds all the bread together, hence the name.

Gluten-free bread is just individual carbohydrates that are close enough together to be called a dough, but don’t actually like each other and will peace out given the smallest chance.

I’m sure there is some chemical or product that will stick these things together enough to be bread-like, and also not trigger side effects for gluten-sensitive folks, but it probably causes cancer or something worse.

Side note: my wife likes UDI’s ancient grain gluten free bread, which is stored frozen. It makes the fucking best croutons you’ve ever had: let it warm up, spread to go ‘stale’ and then chop, season and toast. heavenly. The croutons “melt”, likely the lack of gluten, but still have a crunch before they get wet in your mouth.

My problem with threads like this is that I only have 24 hours a day, and I’ve accumulated a critical mass of content creators to the point where I cannot keep up.

Which of these awesome people do I ignore?! What information do I leave behind!? How am I supposed to get anything useful done with my life?!?

Also, check out Chris Boden if you want to see something cool!