At least the highway will have no traffic out to the big box store and back

/ local / , ,

Filling so much empty ground-floor space may require cities to rethink what brings people downtown. It may force officials to change how they regulate buildings, and property owners to shift how they profit from them.

Source: The Ground-Floor Window Into What’s Ailing Downtowns – The New York Times

“May”? The NYT are just hedging hard on this. Cities will have to rethink how downtowns function, officials will have to change how buildings are regulated, property owners will have to shift how they profit from them, businesses will have to adapt to a different customer base.

Case in point, this article in the Minneapolis St. Paul Journal(disable your javascript to read)

Fhima and other community members who make their living downtown see firsthand how the absence of thousands of Target (NYSE:TGT) workers at the retailer’s Nicollet Mall headquarters impacts the city’s overall vibrancy. From shops and restaurants to public transportation and property values, downtown Minneapolis is struggling without a strong, consistent daytime population there to support it.

At the end of the article they actually have a section titled “What Target can do about”. Newsflash: they en’t doing shit. They just held their third auction to clear own office equipment. Even if they wanted to bring everyone back they don’t even have the furniture to put those people in.

Cities at large could make an effort to populate downtowns with small businesses, small/medium size landbastards, and change zoning to allow for living in skyscrapers. But that takes political capital no one wants to spend.

A lot of people would love to live downtown. Hell, a lot of people already do, but if they want basic necessities they need to get them delivered, or worse, drive out to the suburbs to get them.

Anyway here’s wonderwall

/ local /

In the past three months:

  • Moved to a new apartment. It sucks easily the worst dwelling I’ve had of the past ten years.
  • Changed jobs. I am now at helpdeskJerb
  • Almost got completely fucked over by someone. In their story I’m the villain. I’ll let it be.
  • Got into a fight when someone tried to steal my bike. My nose still hurts three weeks later.
  • Fell in with bluesky. It’s nice, but gods the fucken developers are being fucken idiots.

I’ll try to blog more often.

Smartly helping you break the law

/ rucksack / , , ,

Straight from the horse’s mouth:

Insert smart chips & building blocks in your Google Doc
Insert smart chips in your Google Doc to include information about:

Other users with Gmail or Workspace email addresses
Other Google Docs, Sheets, or Slides files
Dates or Google Calendar events
Places and map directions

Where there’s a smart chip in your document, you and other users can hover or click on a chip to get more information.

If you are dealing with confidential information you should stop using Google Sheets immediately.

  • There is no way to disable them.
  • Google will insist on forwarding or sharing the resource with people within the organization even if do not need access to it.
  • The changes are not reversible via Undo functionality. You have to revert to a previous version of the file (File -> Version History -> See Version History). Good luck to you if you’ve been working on the file for hours/days and google shits all over your file.
  • What happens when google kills the feature because no one is using it? The original data that was kept in those cells is gone.

This is particularly important if you’re dealing with FERPA or HIPAA data. Switch to excel, which is what you should’ve done from the beginning.

Enduro

/ rucksack /

In the space of a month:

  • Found a new full-time job at helpdeskJerb.
  • Adjusted my schedule at bartendJerb.
  • Moved addresses.
  • Potentially finished my time working at sysadminJerb.

I’m fucken tired.

Some on twitter have bragged about having sex with their fitbits on

/ from outside / , , ,

For instance, Google kneecapped the Fitbit Versa 4 and Sense 2 by removing features like Google Assistant and third-party apps like Spotify and Starbucks. As a result, any longtime Fitbit user would be “upgrading” to products with fewer smart features than their predecessors — unless they chose to buy a Pixel Watch instead. And the decision to remove legacy Fitbit social features without offering an alternative threatens to chip away at one of Fitbit’s greatest strengths: its community.

Source: What is going on with Fitbit? – The Verge

A repeat of what Yahoo did to Flickr

And that was the problem. At the time, the Web was rapidly becoming more social, and Flickr was at the forefront of that movement. It was all about groups and comments and identifying people as contacts, friends or family. To Yahoo, it was just a fucking database.

All they’re trying to do is figure out how to make money off it. Fuck the people that came up with the devices, fuck the community built on those devices. To googke, fitbit is just a fucking database of lots of some of the most intimate and personal data they have: Their bodies themselves.

Abusers face the wall

/ from outside / , ,

Sexual harassment as a rule is terrible. The #MeToo campaign on social media was heartbreaking, as I watched nearly all the women I knew bravely lay out their stories, or simply admit that it had happened to them. But when sexual harassment and assault happens in the military, it’s incredibly disturbing. See, in the military, we all joined up to serve in an organization where implicit trust in those around us is key for survival. Trust is built through continued training and operations as well as day-to-day interaction. In the Army, we have seven key values, and most support the growth of trust amongst fellow Soldiers; especially integrity.

Source: I Didn’t Know – The Angry Staff Officer

Makes you wonder how many female-presenting soldiers did the ethical and heroic thing and let an Abuser eat an enemy bullet.