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Blight upon you, Google, for fucking this up

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So we took the upgrade onto Android 12 for my phone. It’s just nice, much has already been said about it so not going to repeat any of that. We do have one bone to pick and it is that the youtube app is now permanently installed onto the phone and it ignores any of the preferences you had set in Android 11. It just so happens we have NewPipe as my preferred app cos Reasons. Here’s my workaround for that.

Disable youtube app

  1. Go to Settings → Apps → See All Apps.
  2. Scroll to YouTube, tap it.
  3. Tap disable. Android will put up a warning to scare you.
    YouTube App Info on Android 12
  4. Tap Disable app.

Re-enable newpipe permissions and links

  1. Tap back out to All Apps.
  2. Scroll to NewPipe.
  3. Tap Open by default.
  4. Enable Open supported links.
  5. In the list of Links to open in this app, enable the ones you want. We got lazy so we just enabled everything.
    NewPipe supported links
  6. Exit out to your home screen.

There, you can now enjoy youtube videos in Android 12 without youtube trying to ram any of its paid options down your throat every other video.

Fuck Jacob Frey too

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After settling in, we spotted a small crowd of people circled around the boy mayor himself, Jacob Frey. Immediately, we felt like this event highlighted everything wrong in this damn city. After producers of the exhibit and folks at NAZ spoke, Jacob Frey got up to give one of the most Jacob Frey speeches I’ve ever heard—and as folks around me applauded while he got on stage, I booed.

Source: I Went to a VIP Immersive Van Gogh Exhibit and Now I’m Pissed – Racket

We kinda wanted to go to that exhibit but we couldn’t put a finger on it. This article points right at what we couldn’t see.

Savathûn wills it

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Sava

“Around the time of [Season of Arrivals] we sat down as a narrative team and had a conversation about the types of stories that we wanted to tell and how we wanted to tell them, and we saw ways to improve,” explains Julia Nardin, senior narrative lead on Destiny 2. “One of those was really leaning into the serialized nature of Destiny’s story and ensuring that we were telling a cohesive, serialized story across multiple seasons and expansions where all the threads connect to each other.”

Source: How Bungie made Savathun Destiny 2’s best villain yet and turned seasons into gripping TV shows | GamesRadar+

This is what the old sci-fi serials have evolved into. You used to read them (either in words, or in graphics), then they became audio, then video.

And now you get to live them.

Microsoft is just using Linux to make the moat around Windows deeper

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I’ve also slowly become convinced of something else. Elegant though they may be, grand, over-arching theories of human-computer interactions are just not very useful. The devil is in the details, and accounting for the quirky details of quirky real-life processes often just results in quirky interfaces. Thing is, if you don’t understand the real life process (IC design, neurosurgery procedures, operation scheduling, whatever), you look at the GUIs and you think they’re overcomplicated and intimidating, and you want to make them simpler. If you do understand the process, they actually make a lot of sense, and the simpler interfaces are actually hard to use, because they make you work harder to get all the details right.

Source: Perhaps WSL2 Should be a Wake-up Call | Lobsters

As someone who has railed elsewhere about the evils of point of sale systems created by people who have never, in their little sad developer lives, worked in food service, I feel this comment in my bones. For people who know what they want to accomplish, a complicated interface will let you your job once you learn it, and it will let you do magic once you master it.

People bitch about Windows— including myself. But we’re still using it. I personally keep thinking of switching back to Linux but I find myself dreading the inevitable UI churn of GNOME and KDE; it is one of the reasons why I prefer XFCE. But even it suffers from churn under it in the form of libraries and modules that are tossed aside and rewritten in an inane race towards “modernity”.

As for WSL, the classic Borg assimilation quote comes to mind.*

We are the Borg. Existence, as you know it, is over. We will add your biological and technological distinctivensess to our own. Resistance is futile.

War is about Money. Simple as that.

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The little-publicized helicopter scandal was one of many investigated by John Sopko, who, as the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction, has served as the Cassandra of the Afghan war. Since Congress created his office in 2012 he has been diligently relating details of the colossal waste associated with the war in handsome full-color annual reports, but with little effect. ‘It was a disaster ready to happen, and it happened,’ he told me a few years into the job. ‘We wasted a lot of money. It wasn’t that people were stupid, and it wasn’t that people didn’t care; it’s just the system almost guarantees failure.’

Source: How the US military got rich from Afghanistan – The Spectator World

Next up, the price of heroin will go up internationally until the Taliban gets all its ducks in a row. Then the world will be flooded with opium and its price will crash. The entire time other drugs will take its place, including fentanyl.

That’s just on the drug front. There’s also arms sales to training camps that are yet to be established.

I hadn’t thought about this, at all.

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On the experience of working with two totally different teams: one novicepractising trunk-based development, the other very experienced being used by GitFlow.

Source: ThinkingLabs:: Thierry de Pauw – On the Evilness of Feature Branching – A Tale of Two Teams

For the longest time I’ve been bashing my head against git cos that’s what everyone uses. I hadn’t realized that not using branches is also a valid development strategy.

Maybe I should just switch to subversion for my personal projects; it seems to align better with how our mind works and as most of them are not software development but rather systems management, having feature branches just isn’t that useful.

Either the system works as expected, or it doesn’t.

Your car is to be used against you

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Upstream also tracks the cyberattack sources between so-called white-hat and black-hat attackers. White-hat hackers do not have malicious intent. They are mostly researchers that hack into systems for security validation or vulnerability assessments. White-hat researchers are often employed and/or rewarded by the hacked company for finding vulnerabilities. Black-hat hackers are attacking systems for personal gain or malicious reasons. In 2020 black-hat hackers accounted for 54.6% of total cyberattacks compared to 49.3% of all attacks from 2010 to 2020.

Source: Now Your Car is a Cybersecurity Risk, Too | EE Times

How long until an state actor is able to remotely control a vehicle to make it reach a location of its choosing to be able to discreetly deal with someone who’s being a pain in the ass to them?

How long until some cartel gains the same capability?

How long after that until your block’s domestic abuser also gets it?

DoS attacks on your car could leave you stranded hundreds of miles from help, and then you have to go back and get the vehicle— if it hasn’t been bricked, in which case you now have to pay for towing services. Pretty sure insurance companies will not want to pay for that.

Burrito with wage theft, retaliation, and extra employer abuse

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Chipotle won’t follow labor laws unless workers force them to do so. There’s no excuse for believing Chipotle’s denials on this subject (the company called the city’s complaint a “dramatic overreach” from which Chipotle vows to “vigorously defend itself”). The complaint lists 599,693 violations — in one city, in a two-year period. That’s an enormous number. Chipotle’s slogan might be “food with integrity,” but its business model is about dishonesty, disrespect, and downright endangerment of workers.

Source: Chipotle Is a Criminal Enterprise Built on Exploitation

Don’t forget when Chipotle voluntarily joined the e-verify program so they could then fire all of their undocumented workers and not pay them the wages they worked for, nor make valid any benefits they accrued.

Vacas flacas

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La sequía que azota México es un fenómeno recurrente que con cada visita deja una estela de emergencias y daños. El 84% del territorio sufre sequía en diferentes intensidades, agravada por la falta de lluvias de los últimos meses, según se desprende del Monitor, el organismo de Conagua que la vigila. Pese a que estaba previsto y la evolución histórica del clima en el país lo contemplaba, la sequía sorprendió a Ermenegildo Martínez, un pescador de Veracruz que ha visto como en los últimos ocho meses la laguna donde pescaba se ha secado. “Medía 13 metros de profundidad y ahora apenas le quedan 10 centímetros, en menos de una semana la habremos perdido del todo”, describe. A 1.300 kilómetros de allí, en Sinaloa, el agricultor Gumaro López se contagia del pesar del pescador. Al igual que Martínez tendrá pérdidas en su producción y alerta de que subirán los precios. Ya pasó en 2011 y 1996, los otros dos episodios de sequía extrema que golpearon a México y de los que, ha quedado claro, no se ha aprendido lo suficiente.

Source: La sequía que abrasa México, una tragedia predecible y devastadora | EL PAÍS México

Every Mexican president ignores the lessons learned by their predecessors. This drought will likely drive migration north, which is already a flash point due to the pandemic.

The Water Wars might start much sooner than anyone thought and that is worrying.

S P E E D

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The core interaction of your product – Your product exists to save people time or help them solve a problem. Introducing friction or delay during the most important flow of your product will drive people crazy. Notion has developed a reputation for being a sluggish product:

Source: Speed is the killer feature – bdickason.com

I wanted to love Notion. I did! It’s everything you’d want in a note-taking app. But it’s fucken slow, which made me hate it.

This is why I stick with vim and wiki.vim— This just made me realize I haven’t updated that series of blog posts.

Fucken’a

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MMDAS PURAS MMDAS

The fucken site broke and I had no idea why.

Nginx seemed to be okay. PHP seemed to be okay. MariaDB had nothing to do with any of this. But anything PHP-based was throwing a fit and just didn’t work at all and of course logging in PHP is hit-or-miss.

After banging my head for two fucken nights I just backed everything up and nuked the server. Switched fron nginx back to Apache, downgraded to PHP 7.3 and kept MariaDB.

I’m just going to keep stuff on Debian Stable for the time being.

Update 2021-03-02_03-28

I’M STILL DEALING WITH THIS.

Rust: move fast and break people’s wallets

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Rewrite-it-in-Rust has become a moral imperative. Well, here’s a moral argument: throwing away serviceable computers every couple of years to upgrade is a privilege that not all of your users have, contributes to climate change, and fills up landfills. As far as security is concerned, some matters demand leaving the norm: old hardware is the only kind that can avoid proprietary firmware blobs, Intel ME or AMD PSP, and UEFI. Novel hardware which addresses issues like microcode and open hardware, like POWER9 and RISC-V, are also suffering under Rust’s mainstream-or-bust regime. Anyone left behind is forced to use the legacy C codebase you’ve abandoned, which is much worse for their security than the hypothetical bugs you’re trying to save them from.

Source: Drew DeVault’s blog

As someone who almost exclusively uses older hardware I am extremely annoyed by developers and system administrators who tell me I need to switch out my hardware every 3 to 5 years for the sake of convenience. It’s a very entitled position to take and it got me annoyed enough to go on a little twitter rant about it. If your old hardware works it should be used for as long as possible. You don’t need a server with an AMD Epyc CPU with 1 TB RAM and multipe SSDs with ZFS to… run a simple WordPress blog like this one.

I certainly don’t have the money to develop software in Rust-recommended hardware, which can also double as gaming hardware with the addition of a nice GPU.

How about a memory safe language that can run on “old” or “slow” hardware of the sort that is most often used outside of the US and Europe? If you were to listen to these people they’ll tell you it can’t be done.

Always has been the same lie

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No one I’ve talked to in Texas has mentioned the government. They know better than to expect anything from it. Anyone who has lived in Texas for any period of time and experienced any kind of dire need knows that the government is not going to help you. It’s controlled by men who care more about their pockets than their people. It’s one thing to come to terms with that level of neglect when it’s being enacted in the service of denying people individual rights to decisions over their body, or ensuring that everyone can carry a gun at all times. But it’s something else to see the consequences of the government’s callousness borne out in the crashing of a power grid. Even libertarians think that the government should make sure the roads are safe and that people can heat their homes.

Source: It’s Always The Same Lie | Defector

And that’s why it’s usually people high up in Texas government that are the first to pipe up about seceding. For the same reason Texas gave up this bit of land:

Map of Texas pointing to the no-mans-land that became the Oklahoma Panhandle

That bit of land is north of the Missouri Compromise line. Texas gave up this land because it wanted slavery more and secession would certainly give them a way to bring it back.

They won’t call it that outright. They’ll call it something nicer than “indentured servitude” though.

Venture Capital is a plague

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Allowing masses of underpaid workers to be exploited in order to provide widespread convenience was always a depraved bargain, built on a rickety ethical and economic foundation.

Source: Instacart Is a Parasite and a Sham | The New Republic

This industry is ripe for some entity to come out with a co-op model where drivers are not only the employees making the delivery, but also owner shareholders in the company. No one will get rich quickly but they’d earn substantially more than poverty wages.

The “uber but for x” economic model is reliant on destroying everything around it so VC can get rich. Hopefully we won’t need 50 years to gig economy doesn’t work, just like trickle-down economics.

Fuck venture capital, really

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It’s almost poetic that the debate over .ORG reached a climax just as COVID-19 was becoming a worldwide crisis. Emergencies like this one are when the world most relies on nonprofits and NGOs; therefore, they’re also pressure tests for the sector. The crisis demonstrated that the NGO community doesn’t need fancy “products and services” from a domain registry: it needs simple, reliable, boring service. Those same members of Congress who’d scrutinized the .ORG sale wrote a more pointed letter to ICANN in March (PDF), plainly noting that there was no way that Ethos Capital could make a profit on its investment without making major changes at the expense of .ORG users.

Source: How We Saved .ORG: 2020 in Review | Electronic Frontier Foundation

Domain ownership should be a boring enterprise now that the age where you could get rich just by selling domains is past. You can do price speculation but that is another thing entirely.

Pushing on “products and services” is how we ended up with GoDaddy, which time and time again has proved to be a shitty company to do business with and to work for.

We don’t need any companies like GoDaddy running .ORG, much less venture capital.

Why would I take LinkedIn seriously anyway?

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Every platform has its royalty. On Instagram it’s influencers, foodies, and photographers. Twitter belongs to the founders, journalists, celebrities, and comedians. On LinkedIn, it’s hiring managers, recruiters, and business owners who hold power on the platform and have the ear of the people. The depravity of a platform where HR Managers are the rockstars speaks for itself.

Source: LinkedIn’s Alternate Universe – Divinations

My job listings on LinkedIn:

  • Get yelled at by customers
  • Drink coffee
  • ?????
  • Get yelled at by the boss
  • Boredom

This is a social network for HR and godinez types.

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