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

2023/02/26 / 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

2023/02/18 / 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.

Tiktok may be the first electronic drug

2023/01/29 / local / , , , ,

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.

WordPress is **not** a documentation system though

2023/01/29 / local / , , ,

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.

These people aren’t ready for what’s coming

2023/01/19 / local / , , , ,

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.

We can be predators. We have to.

2023/01/16 / local / , , ,

I have some thoughts about the hockey-stick rise of “AI” (more like advanced machine learning) , it’s current iterations are bullshittiers (from On Bullshit by Harry Frankfurt

His book On Bullshit addresses his concern and makes a distinction between “bullshitters” and liars. He concludes that bullshitters are more insidious: they are more of a threat against the truth than are liars.

Whatever happens with AI— it’s a bullshitter. It doesn’t, it can’t, care about what is true or false. Whomever uses it also does not care, and they will use it to expand their underdeveloped thoughts and ideas to have it talk about nothing at all, in an effort to confuse and control; to influence you to buy some random widget you don’t need.

Combine the output of AI writing tools with software to paraphrase and re-edit and everyone will have a really hard time telling what was written entirely by humans and what was fabricated from nothingness.

In time, media created with the assistance of AI will probably become the apex predator of your time and attention on the internet, where to attract attention is to attract predators:

Is our universe an empty forest or a dark one? If it’s a dark forest, then only Earth is foolish enough to ping the heavens and announce its presence. The rest of the universe already knows the real reason why the forest stays dark. It’s only a matter of time before the Earth learns as well.

This is also what the internet is becoming: a dark forest.

While it’s markedly safe to hide, it also means you give up your potential for change on the larger Internet, letting those predators bend the environment to their will permanently.

We’d do well to remember that on the Internet nobody cares you’re a dog.

HOWTO: WRITE BETTER DOCUMENTATION

2023/01/12 / local / , ,

So, call to action: if you are writing any kind of documentation, before explaining how to fix the problem, teach the user how to diagnose it.

Source: Why Linux Troubleshooting Advice Sucks

I’ve been writing documentation for myself for years, and been using Linux for 20 years and I still struggle with the basics cos most documentation for Linux fucken sucks.

  • Teach the user how to diagnose the issue so they can confirm the solution you have is indeed for their issue.
  • Explain why this is happening.
  • Provide the solution. Could be a bash one-liner they can copy-paste. Could be a script (explain how to run it). Could be a patch (explain how to apply it). Don’t just say “this is an exercise left to the reader.”

And no, “reading the source” doesn’t help. Neither does “read the man pages”; the only man page worth anything is the one for nmap.

If you’re one of those people that say that you can go fuck yourself, hard, in the ass, no lube.

It’s gentrification by any other name

2023/01/12 / local / , , , , , ,

Not every sector has benefited the same from the influx of digital nomads. Sarai Balderrama, the co-founder of Agencia de Arte, a digital platform that promotes up-and-coming Mexican artists to international clients, told Rest of World, “For over a year, I’ve been trying to tap into that market but they don’t seem interested in staying. You usually buy art when you start calling a place home.”

Source: Digital nomads now come first for Mexico City’s gig workers – Rest of World

The resident population of Mexico City has been screaming at these people to willingly integrate with the fabric of the city instead of just insulating themselves from it. Already thousands have been priced out by these digital nomads.

When Latin American people go to the US or Europe to work, Americans usually scream at them to integrate, and the vast majority of them do, even if they don’t speak the language. They pay taxes, they pay their bills, they spend discretionary income if they have any left after wiring money home.

But Americans and Europeans are not willing to return the favor.