Google Maps already provides the user with the option to avoid motorways and tolls. Perhaps Google Maps should also allow the user to avoid wars?
Source: Please Don’t Kill Me, Google Maps
Nah, the big goog says “fuck you”. If you have to die to make some asshole VP look good on the term sheet, you’ll fucken die.
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 directionsWhere 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.
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.
In the space of a month:
I’m fucken tired.
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.
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.
Rather than see specificity and device limitations as an inconvenient hurdle to omnipresence, TikTok embeds itself within them—taking advantage of the fact that mobile technology limits how people engage with content and leaning into these constraints (e.g. the user only sees one video at a time and can only proceed linearly to the next video by swiping). This narrow focus enables a “flow state” to open up between the platform and spectator, as attention is entirely channeled to the content at hand.
Source: TikTok’s Greatest Asset Isn’t Its Algorithm—It’s Your Phone | WIRED
We’ve experienced this. Tiktok is extremely good at showing you things that will make your mind reach this “flow state” and then you’re just adrift in the current of swipes from one video to another, punctuated with brief stops to write a comment.
This can last for hours upon hours. We currently make it a point to check tiktok once or twice a day for fifteen, twenty minutes at a time. Catch up with the people we follow, check what drama is going on, what went viral, and then quit out of it.
Disabling notifications helps tremendously with this, as tiktok is a very pushy application when it comes to demanding your attention.
Writing documentation is different from writing code.
Source: Markdown, Asciidoc, or reStructuredText – a tale of docs-as-code – Dewan’s Blog
I’m currently using commonmark in vim to write my own personal documentation for things and keep running into that small issue of having to embed HTML if I want to do anything “complicated”. I’m also trying out keeping it in git… although this might be a bit of overkill.
All in all a great article on what things you need to consider if you need to implement documentation for an entire organization and you want that documentation versioned and actionable.
Yeah, git sucks, but there are other version control systems out there. Gotta mix and match.
When some proposed forming their own self-funded water provider, other residents revolted, saying the idea would foist an expensive, freedom-stealing new arm of government on them. The idea collapsed. Other solutions, like allowing a larger water utility to serve the area, could be years off.
Source: Skipped Showers, Paper Plates: An Arizona Suburb’s Water Is Cut Off – The New York Times
Well, those people are free to lose everything cos they decided to willingly entertain the notion they could live without running water. And in their pride everyone else loses.
If the drought in the Southwest continues for a couple more years we will enter water knife territory.