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silveradeptA useful thing to start, a thing that may be familiar for us in all kinds of contexts, and a thing to be careful of in our communities: Contempt culture. If we buy our way into acceptance in a community with the currency of contempt, then we do a fair amount of excluding others from getting into the community because they don't want to use contempt as a currency, or because they're the targets of our contempt and they don't see us as safe.
As we are in the season of preparation for December festivals, a small point about how the advent calendar, which originated in religious tradition to get worshipers in the right frame of mind for the story of the miracle of Christ's birth has instead become a commercialized countdown calendar with small treats leading up to a big one on the 25th of December. Given how many people celebrate December 25th in this manner, though, it makes a perverse sort of sense.
Hard living and the complications of viral encephalitis caught up to Shane MacGowan, most famously of the Pogues, who merged much of the traditions of Irish music with as much punk as it would hold (which is a lot.)
The first woman appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States, Sandra Day O'Connor, died at 93 from complications of dementia. That we can still count how many women Justices there have been on one hand says a lot about progress and equality. We do have to say that she was appointed by Ronald Reagan as part of a campaign promise and that she was involved in the Bush v. Gore decision in 2000 (and all of the fallout and damage to the reputation of the Court as at least nominally nonpolitical).
Norman Lear, responsible for much of the ability of situation comedies to have biting commentary on current events, died at 101 years of age. You could likely say that we get Homer Simpson because we had Archie Bunker, and for that, we have to thank Norman Lear.
There is, in fact, a bridge too far even for some Republicans, as serial fabulist and campaign finance violator George Santos was expelled from the House of Representatives, following a damning report from the House Ethics committee detailing the many unethical actions Santos took while a Congresscritter as well as the ones he took leading up to his election as one. On top of the multiple federal indictments for wire fraud, money laundering, and other crimes. At which point we have to also point out that this was the third time that the House has tried to expel George Santos. And even with all of this material arrayed against him, 114 members of the House, including the entire Republican leadership, still voted to keep him in office and power.
The Attorney General of the State of Texas is trying to sue Pfizer with debunked claims that the vaccinations Pfizer developed used a relative reduction risk, rather than an absolute reduction risk, and therefore because they failed to stop the pandemic cold, Pfizer lied about the effectiveness of the vaccination. While also, y'know, grumbling about having had to get vaccinated in the first place. The Ars article points out why you would use relative risk rather than absolute risk, and other such useful things, but the fact that this is Ken Paxton, someone who is desperately hoping that people don't remember that he's been impeached for multiple scandals and his platform is essentially "I should personally get to control all of you in the country and make you do what I want," that already means our assumptions should be "whose ass is he trying to kiss / what grift is he trying to run here?"
sqbr with the help of some formal math symbols, noodles on how many things that we are getting to understand as spectra rather than binaries are still being described in terms that suggest points on a line, rather than planes, shapes, and coordinates in n-dimensional spaces.
siderea on the need to think of social media as first and foremost defining a society and then making decisions about tooling and features in relation to whether that moves the platform in the direction of creating the desired society or not. The example given about the difference between the two groups of LiveJournal is instructive, as well as some thought about how the federated nature of Fediverse instances allows for greater control over society construction, but that it could do more by tapping into people who do that research on societies for a living and generally formalizing more their societal goals and decisions, so they can more effectively test them and develop tools for bringing them into existence. With the understanding that as a platform scales, the problems it is being asked to solve often diverge wildly, such that one solution for one group exacerbates a problem for another. See (the series on Golden Opportunities for the Fediverse, starting with the idea that blocklists are clubs, not scalpels, and yet are still an extremely effective safety tool for navigating the Fediverse.)
On a similar matter of things at scale, care for others at scale, which includes things like making sure that you can't make the benefits of something local and spread the costs of it to somewhere else, especially when it comes to the energy that humans use as part of their daily lives. Or somehow finding a way to replicate some of the successes of cooperative stores and companies, as are present in Finland, that manage to both be successful as capitalist entities while preserving cooperative values and getting along with both suppliers and unionized workforces.
An advertised three year cruise around the world has not manifested on time, and depending on who you talk to, it's either postponed or its canceled because even the most basic element, finding a ship, has not been possible. Which had a lot of people putting down significant amounts of money for this cruise idea. Despite having put more than half a million dollars into something that hasn't appeared, and supposedly with refunds available, one of the prospective passengers is insisting that the best thing to do is always look on the bright side of life. We note the supposed liberation is the familiar one of the person who has enough wealth to live in the hotel room, and therefore the things that would bog them down are instead shuffled off to other people to do, their possessions to use, and so forth. And this person is still going on a cruise and feels like they'll still be able to continue their unfettered lifestyle afterward. How nice it is to be a person who can simply unmoor themselves and not have to worry about what might happen.
The chair of the Florida Republican Party is being investigated for sexual battery by a woman who claims to have been in a long-term sexual relationship with him and his wife. Which would not otherwise be remarkable, except the wife is also the founder of Moms for Liberty, and therefore we have two people who have presumably been on quite a bit about specific sexual proprieties and in trying to get things removed from works turning out to have (as best as we can tell, the current allegations notwithstanding) a consensual sexual triad. There are also allegations that the GOP chair filmed some of their sexual encounters. The thing that needs the focus is the investigation. The thing that will likely get the focus (and a lot of well-deserved mockery for the hypocrisy) is the triad. There's nothing inherently wrong with the triad. The hypocrisy of demanding that sexualities you don't like be removed everywhere while you yourself are practicing something outside of heterosexual marriage is worthy of mockery. Where I fear it's going to end up is "durr hurr, the Moms for Liberty wife was in a threesome with her husband and another woman. Guess that's Liberty for you." without the necessary context or explanation so that you know to target the hypocrisy and the potential investigation of bad behavior without making commentary about whether or not their sexual practices are morally good or bad.
Duke University Libraries have decided to stop using the Basecamp platform, based on the statements and actions of the company and how much they revel in racially insensitive jokes, mischaracterizations of protest efforts, and in making fun of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion efforts as ineffective and reveling in the idea that those most assisted by and most promoting DEI were likely those most strongly affected by pandemic layoffs and thus out of work. They also point out that the library world is often about making choices between bad actors and situations and they are not doing this because they are moral paragons, but because they don't want to put their money toward places that make those kinds of statements and run that counter to the library's efforts.
Isreal bombed and destroyed the main public library of Gaza and central archives of Gaza, which continues to paint the campaign that Israel says it is engaging in as expanding well beyond what it supposedly says it is doing into indiscriminate destruction and an objective of killing as many Palestinians as it can, rather than supposedly only trying to destroy the people that attacked Israelis. (And yet, diplomacy often involves having to try and convince someone to stop doing what they're doing in private while professing your support for them publicly.)
Biking safety tips that are about accepting the fact that you are a biker and behaving accordingly so that you can safely and comfortably arrive to your destination.
Someone who crashed their plane for clicks and to promote a sponsor is getting six months in federal prison for the stunt and for impeding the investigation that followed the reporting of the crash.
In technology, Unity continues to shed some of the acquisitions it made with IPO money, laying off their Weta FX division.
LLMs can be convinced to give up parts of their training corpus, unredacted, through what seems to be fairly unsophisticated attack methods, like asking it to repeat a word ad infinitum. Which again highlights that many of these LLMs being offered gained their corpuses without regard to licensing, agreement, or offering someone the ability to opt out of having their information used in this way. And also highlights that complex systems like LLMs still pale in comparison to the amount of deviousness a particularly engaged human can get up to.
Bruce Schneier on the problems that humans have with trusting things that aren't human, and the need to ensure that the humans who build non-humans are properly regulated, and the need for all of us to have a public model of a non-human to build upon for ourselves. It could be summed up as "corporations are not people, are never people, and neither they nor their products should ever be allowed to act in ways that suggest they are." Which would be a fantastic thing to have happen, honestly. And, remember, the tech will never love you back, no matter how much love you pour into it. It's incapable of doing so. (And the tech that's controlled by corporations wants you to love it so it can exploit you.)
For actually useful and intentional uses of models being trained, computers trained to pick out minute differences in carbon that might indicate where ink was may have successfully decoded a word in scans of ancient scrolls that were overwhelmed by the pyroclastic flow at Herculaneum when Vesuvius erupted in 79 C.E.. That model may be able to then decode more words, with prizes available to those who can decode more of the texts that have been scanned and then the scans made available to those who wish to digitally unroll the scrolls and examine their supposed contents.
A college student tracked how much his college invaded his privacy, tracked his movements, and let the data they were collecting be exploited by the companies the college had contracted with to provide various pieces of technology and learning systems, and the conclusion drawn is that someone who wants to get a college education and degree has to allow themselves to be tracked and surveiled in staggering amounts. Coursework, exams, being on campus, using campus study spaces, all of those things are tracked and fed into databases that can be used to draw wrong conclusions, but also that can be used for additional surveillance and for advertising and commercial purposes. And if there are data breaches, like whta happened to the University of Michigan, than all of that data could be spilled out and used for nefarious purposes. (It's also only a matter of time before these systems that have been tried and perfected on college are then imported into workplaces where the corporate bosses believe they can violate worker privacy at will and suffer no consequences for it other than being able to fire the worker that complained about their privacy being violated.)
It is still true that most students have their Internet access filtered inappropriately, because of the demands of CIPA and the fact that the places that are most likely providing or developing filtering software are the kinds of people who want to ingrain their prejudices against specific people, like queer people, as deeply as possible and to prevent the accessing of useful information about them. Yes, it's also true that filters generally fall to the determined only after a little bit of thinking, research, and experimentation, but it places one more burden on people to have to circumvent blocks in their way, rather than the people they are being considered acceptable information for students to access.
Senator Ron Wyden points out that data that passes through someone else's server can be requested of the company or entity whose server it is, and thus governments can spy on people through that data, which in this case, includes push notifications. The Senator wants to raise the spectre of foreign governments demanding and receiving this data, but as the article points out, the U.S. government likely does the same thing, and therefore we would hope that rather than demand simply transparency, the Senator also demand that people not be subjected to such invasions of their privacy, with the reminder that being secure in one's possessions and papers includes digital objects and things intended only for the recipient.
Public buildings may need to start sweeping their unused spaces for hidden computing devices, as a secret cryptocurrency mining operation was operating out of a Polish court, in the crawl spaces beneath the flooring, stealing a significant amount of electricity from the court to power itself. Which is another point against the supposed viability and usefulness of cryptocurrency. We knew they ate large amounts of resources for diminishing returns, but if someone decides the very best way to opreate their mining rig is to make someone else pay the costs of doing so, that should be an admission that things have gone very, very wrong.
Proving yet more that his acquisition of the social media platform was a vanity project rather than an attempt to make money, Elon Musk told advertisers that want him to clean up the hate speech on his platform before they'll come back to "go fuck [themselves.]" Even as he acknowledges that advertisers leaving the platform will likely drive it into the ground and make it stop being viable. He doesn't really care about it as a business, he just wants to use it as his personal platform and gather enough sycophants.
Poor implementation of protocols (or not enabling them) made it possible for researchers to sign into computers through the biometric systems despite not having authorization. Sometimes you can design something well, and then when someone else looks at it, they implement it in bad ways, or they choose not to implement it at all, and that makes vulnerabilities.
Streaming services are looking to combine their offerings into bundled subscriptions, in the hope that customers might stay subscribed to them, rather than renewing a subscription when there's desired content and then cancelling it when they're done with viewing that content. I feel like this is one of those situations where we're very slowly watching the reinvention of pay TV subscription bundles, just that eventually our cable providers will also provide us with streaming service subscriptions as well. Perhaps not day-one kinds of subscriptions, but whichever service figures out that the correct answer is to negotiate it out so that someone can use one login and access the content offerings from all the premium subscription services, even if on delay or embargo (you know, like Netflix used to be), they're going to win. Even better if they can offer some kind of ability for someone to actually own purchases, rather than having to trust that, say, a new licensing agreement won't completely wipe out any content you have from a particular company, regardless of whether you "bought" it or only subscribe to it. (As it turned out, they did get the shows preserved and not deleted.) It was a mistake to let software get away with the "you've only bought a license to use this." (And, as we remind others, the reason there's subscriptions rather than widespread piracy is because sometimes we like throwing money at things to make them continue, but there's always a varying likelihood that if we want to preserve things, we'll pirate them and keep circulating the tapes rather than trust any corporation to keep an archive and make it available to us to buy and own.)
Plex rolled out an opt-out feature that shares what you've been watching with other people, and now are Surprised Pikachu that their users are yelling at them for violating their privacy. Especially because many people like Plex as a self-hosted media server rather than a commercial alternative, and thought that might keep their data more safely in their own control. Plex, of course, says "we made a pop-up to walk you through the new feature, so maybe you just clicked through it without paying attention?" (which is what they want, of course, because data is valuable, and they want to be able to share and sell it from people who TL:DR on new "features" they don't ever intend on using and don't remember that most new "features" are set to be on and need to be turned off, instead of the other way around. Shame on Plex for doing this, and hopefully all the people who have had their media viewing habits sprayed to all the other people they might interact with aren't too hurt by this action.
Surprising many and assisting the SHAPE experiment, the propulsion module for the lunar rover that India landed on the moon pulled a U-turn, came back to the planet, and re-settled itself into a high Earth orbit. After the engineers determined there was enough propellant still in the tank to do a return journey, they gave it the green light, both to help the experiment and to get a test run on what might happen on a lunar mission to collect samples and return them back to Earth. Props to the engineers for a successful return and re-orbiting.
Last for tonight, A complaint that CMSes and blog engines and the reverse chronological setup destroyed a significant part of the early, subject-organized World Wide Web. It elides some of the difficulties that are always involved in running your own site and updating your pages, it refuses to acknowledge that most people are not going to engage with the technical ept needed to do just that and will seek simpler solutions with sensible decisions made for them (thus, Geocities and LiveJournal and Movable Type and the like) because the thing they are interested in is not the technical aspects, but the social ones, and it believes that blogs simply killed off the collection of pages aspects of website, when reality suggests that blogs were added on to such things rather than replacing them wholesale. (At least until you get to Wordpress, which starts really integrating static pages and blogs in ways that don't always work. Websites of static pages can be made with Wordpress, and so can blogs, and there are very few places that I can think of that do both well with the platform.)
(Materials viaadrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
As we are in the season of preparation for December festivals, a small point about how the advent calendar, which originated in religious tradition to get worshipers in the right frame of mind for the story of the miracle of Christ's birth has instead become a commercialized countdown calendar with small treats leading up to a big one on the 25th of December. Given how many people celebrate December 25th in this manner, though, it makes a perverse sort of sense.
Hard living and the complications of viral encephalitis caught up to Shane MacGowan, most famously of the Pogues, who merged much of the traditions of Irish music with as much punk as it would hold (which is a lot.)
The first woman appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States, Sandra Day O'Connor, died at 93 from complications of dementia. That we can still count how many women Justices there have been on one hand says a lot about progress and equality. We do have to say that she was appointed by Ronald Reagan as part of a campaign promise and that she was involved in the Bush v. Gore decision in 2000 (and all of the fallout and damage to the reputation of the Court as at least nominally nonpolitical).
Norman Lear, responsible for much of the ability of situation comedies to have biting commentary on current events, died at 101 years of age. You could likely say that we get Homer Simpson because we had Archie Bunker, and for that, we have to thank Norman Lear.
There is, in fact, a bridge too far even for some Republicans, as serial fabulist and campaign finance violator George Santos was expelled from the House of Representatives, following a damning report from the House Ethics committee detailing the many unethical actions Santos took while a Congresscritter as well as the ones he took leading up to his election as one. On top of the multiple federal indictments for wire fraud, money laundering, and other crimes. At which point we have to also point out that this was the third time that the House has tried to expel George Santos. And even with all of this material arrayed against him, 114 members of the House, including the entire Republican leadership, still voted to keep him in office and power.
The Attorney General of the State of Texas is trying to sue Pfizer with debunked claims that the vaccinations Pfizer developed used a relative reduction risk, rather than an absolute reduction risk, and therefore because they failed to stop the pandemic cold, Pfizer lied about the effectiveness of the vaccination. While also, y'know, grumbling about having had to get vaccinated in the first place. The Ars article points out why you would use relative risk rather than absolute risk, and other such useful things, but the fact that this is Ken Paxton, someone who is desperately hoping that people don't remember that he's been impeached for multiple scandals and his platform is essentially "I should personally get to control all of you in the country and make you do what I want," that already means our assumptions should be "whose ass is he trying to kiss / what grift is he trying to run here?"
sqbr with the help of some formal math symbols, noodles on how many things that we are getting to understand as spectra rather than binaries are still being described in terms that suggest points on a line, rather than planes, shapes, and coordinates in n-dimensional spaces.siderea on the need to think of social media as first and foremost defining a society and then making decisions about tooling and features in relation to whether that moves the platform in the direction of creating the desired society or not. The example given about the difference between the two groups of LiveJournal is instructive, as well as some thought about how the federated nature of Fediverse instances allows for greater control over society construction, but that it could do more by tapping into people who do that research on societies for a living and generally formalizing more their societal goals and decisions, so they can more effectively test them and develop tools for bringing them into existence. With the understanding that as a platform scales, the problems it is being asked to solve often diverge wildly, such that one solution for one group exacerbates a problem for another. See (the series on Golden Opportunities for the Fediverse, starting with the idea that blocklists are clubs, not scalpels, and yet are still an extremely effective safety tool for navigating the Fediverse.)On a similar matter of things at scale, care for others at scale, which includes things like making sure that you can't make the benefits of something local and spread the costs of it to somewhere else, especially when it comes to the energy that humans use as part of their daily lives. Or somehow finding a way to replicate some of the successes of cooperative stores and companies, as are present in Finland, that manage to both be successful as capitalist entities while preserving cooperative values and getting along with both suppliers and unionized workforces.
An advertised three year cruise around the world has not manifested on time, and depending on who you talk to, it's either postponed or its canceled because even the most basic element, finding a ship, has not been possible. Which had a lot of people putting down significant amounts of money for this cruise idea. Despite having put more than half a million dollars into something that hasn't appeared, and supposedly with refunds available, one of the prospective passengers is insisting that the best thing to do is always look on the bright side of life. We note the supposed liberation is the familiar one of the person who has enough wealth to live in the hotel room, and therefore the things that would bog them down are instead shuffled off to other people to do, their possessions to use, and so forth. And this person is still going on a cruise and feels like they'll still be able to continue their unfettered lifestyle afterward. How nice it is to be a person who can simply unmoor themselves and not have to worry about what might happen.
The chair of the Florida Republican Party is being investigated for sexual battery by a woman who claims to have been in a long-term sexual relationship with him and his wife. Which would not otherwise be remarkable, except the wife is also the founder of Moms for Liberty, and therefore we have two people who have presumably been on quite a bit about specific sexual proprieties and in trying to get things removed from works turning out to have (as best as we can tell, the current allegations notwithstanding) a consensual sexual triad. There are also allegations that the GOP chair filmed some of their sexual encounters. The thing that needs the focus is the investigation. The thing that will likely get the focus (and a lot of well-deserved mockery for the hypocrisy) is the triad. There's nothing inherently wrong with the triad. The hypocrisy of demanding that sexualities you don't like be removed everywhere while you yourself are practicing something outside of heterosexual marriage is worthy of mockery. Where I fear it's going to end up is "durr hurr, the Moms for Liberty wife was in a threesome with her husband and another woman. Guess that's Liberty for you." without the necessary context or explanation so that you know to target the hypocrisy and the potential investigation of bad behavior without making commentary about whether or not their sexual practices are morally good or bad.
Duke University Libraries have decided to stop using the Basecamp platform, based on the statements and actions of the company and how much they revel in racially insensitive jokes, mischaracterizations of protest efforts, and in making fun of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion efforts as ineffective and reveling in the idea that those most assisted by and most promoting DEI were likely those most strongly affected by pandemic layoffs and thus out of work. They also point out that the library world is often about making choices between bad actors and situations and they are not doing this because they are moral paragons, but because they don't want to put their money toward places that make those kinds of statements and run that counter to the library's efforts.
Isreal bombed and destroyed the main public library of Gaza and central archives of Gaza, which continues to paint the campaign that Israel says it is engaging in as expanding well beyond what it supposedly says it is doing into indiscriminate destruction and an objective of killing as many Palestinians as it can, rather than supposedly only trying to destroy the people that attacked Israelis. (And yet, diplomacy often involves having to try and convince someone to stop doing what they're doing in private while professing your support for them publicly.)
Biking safety tips that are about accepting the fact that you are a biker and behaving accordingly so that you can safely and comfortably arrive to your destination.
Someone who crashed their plane for clicks and to promote a sponsor is getting six months in federal prison for the stunt and for impeding the investigation that followed the reporting of the crash.
In technology, Unity continues to shed some of the acquisitions it made with IPO money, laying off their Weta FX division.
LLMs can be convinced to give up parts of their training corpus, unredacted, through what seems to be fairly unsophisticated attack methods, like asking it to repeat a word ad infinitum. Which again highlights that many of these LLMs being offered gained their corpuses without regard to licensing, agreement, or offering someone the ability to opt out of having their information used in this way. And also highlights that complex systems like LLMs still pale in comparison to the amount of deviousness a particularly engaged human can get up to.
Bruce Schneier on the problems that humans have with trusting things that aren't human, and the need to ensure that the humans who build non-humans are properly regulated, and the need for all of us to have a public model of a non-human to build upon for ourselves. It could be summed up as "corporations are not people, are never people, and neither they nor their products should ever be allowed to act in ways that suggest they are." Which would be a fantastic thing to have happen, honestly. And, remember, the tech will never love you back, no matter how much love you pour into it. It's incapable of doing so. (And the tech that's controlled by corporations wants you to love it so it can exploit you.)
For actually useful and intentional uses of models being trained, computers trained to pick out minute differences in carbon that might indicate where ink was may have successfully decoded a word in scans of ancient scrolls that were overwhelmed by the pyroclastic flow at Herculaneum when Vesuvius erupted in 79 C.E.. That model may be able to then decode more words, with prizes available to those who can decode more of the texts that have been scanned and then the scans made available to those who wish to digitally unroll the scrolls and examine their supposed contents.
A college student tracked how much his college invaded his privacy, tracked his movements, and let the data they were collecting be exploited by the companies the college had contracted with to provide various pieces of technology and learning systems, and the conclusion drawn is that someone who wants to get a college education and degree has to allow themselves to be tracked and surveiled in staggering amounts. Coursework, exams, being on campus, using campus study spaces, all of those things are tracked and fed into databases that can be used to draw wrong conclusions, but also that can be used for additional surveillance and for advertising and commercial purposes. And if there are data breaches, like whta happened to the University of Michigan, than all of that data could be spilled out and used for nefarious purposes. (It's also only a matter of time before these systems that have been tried and perfected on college are then imported into workplaces where the corporate bosses believe they can violate worker privacy at will and suffer no consequences for it other than being able to fire the worker that complained about their privacy being violated.)
It is still true that most students have their Internet access filtered inappropriately, because of the demands of CIPA and the fact that the places that are most likely providing or developing filtering software are the kinds of people who want to ingrain their prejudices against specific people, like queer people, as deeply as possible and to prevent the accessing of useful information about them. Yes, it's also true that filters generally fall to the determined only after a little bit of thinking, research, and experimentation, but it places one more burden on people to have to circumvent blocks in their way, rather than the people they are being considered acceptable information for students to access.
Senator Ron Wyden points out that data that passes through someone else's server can be requested of the company or entity whose server it is, and thus governments can spy on people through that data, which in this case, includes push notifications. The Senator wants to raise the spectre of foreign governments demanding and receiving this data, but as the article points out, the U.S. government likely does the same thing, and therefore we would hope that rather than demand simply transparency, the Senator also demand that people not be subjected to such invasions of their privacy, with the reminder that being secure in one's possessions and papers includes digital objects and things intended only for the recipient.
Public buildings may need to start sweeping their unused spaces for hidden computing devices, as a secret cryptocurrency mining operation was operating out of a Polish court, in the crawl spaces beneath the flooring, stealing a significant amount of electricity from the court to power itself. Which is another point against the supposed viability and usefulness of cryptocurrency. We knew they ate large amounts of resources for diminishing returns, but if someone decides the very best way to opreate their mining rig is to make someone else pay the costs of doing so, that should be an admission that things have gone very, very wrong.
Proving yet more that his acquisition of the social media platform was a vanity project rather than an attempt to make money, Elon Musk told advertisers that want him to clean up the hate speech on his platform before they'll come back to "go fuck [themselves.]" Even as he acknowledges that advertisers leaving the platform will likely drive it into the ground and make it stop being viable. He doesn't really care about it as a business, he just wants to use it as his personal platform and gather enough sycophants.
Poor implementation of protocols (or not enabling them) made it possible for researchers to sign into computers through the biometric systems despite not having authorization. Sometimes you can design something well, and then when someone else looks at it, they implement it in bad ways, or they choose not to implement it at all, and that makes vulnerabilities.
Streaming services are looking to combine their offerings into bundled subscriptions, in the hope that customers might stay subscribed to them, rather than renewing a subscription when there's desired content and then cancelling it when they're done with viewing that content. I feel like this is one of those situations where we're very slowly watching the reinvention of pay TV subscription bundles, just that eventually our cable providers will also provide us with streaming service subscriptions as well. Perhaps not day-one kinds of subscriptions, but whichever service figures out that the correct answer is to negotiate it out so that someone can use one login and access the content offerings from all the premium subscription services, even if on delay or embargo (you know, like Netflix used to be), they're going to win. Even better if they can offer some kind of ability for someone to actually own purchases, rather than having to trust that, say, a new licensing agreement won't completely wipe out any content you have from a particular company, regardless of whether you "bought" it or only subscribe to it. (As it turned out, they did get the shows preserved and not deleted.) It was a mistake to let software get away with the "you've only bought a license to use this." (And, as we remind others, the reason there's subscriptions rather than widespread piracy is because sometimes we like throwing money at things to make them continue, but there's always a varying likelihood that if we want to preserve things, we'll pirate them and keep circulating the tapes rather than trust any corporation to keep an archive and make it available to us to buy and own.)
Plex rolled out an opt-out feature that shares what you've been watching with other people, and now are Surprised Pikachu that their users are yelling at them for violating their privacy. Especially because many people like Plex as a self-hosted media server rather than a commercial alternative, and thought that might keep their data more safely in their own control. Plex, of course, says "we made a pop-up to walk you through the new feature, so maybe you just clicked through it without paying attention?" (which is what they want, of course, because data is valuable, and they want to be able to share and sell it from people who TL:DR on new "features" they don't ever intend on using and don't remember that most new "features" are set to be on and need to be turned off, instead of the other way around. Shame on Plex for doing this, and hopefully all the people who have had their media viewing habits sprayed to all the other people they might interact with aren't too hurt by this action.
Surprising many and assisting the SHAPE experiment, the propulsion module for the lunar rover that India landed on the moon pulled a U-turn, came back to the planet, and re-settled itself into a high Earth orbit. After the engineers determined there was enough propellant still in the tank to do a return journey, they gave it the green light, both to help the experiment and to get a test run on what might happen on a lunar mission to collect samples and return them back to Earth. Props to the engineers for a successful return and re-orbiting.
Last for tonight, A complaint that CMSes and blog engines and the reverse chronological setup destroyed a significant part of the early, subject-organized World Wide Web. It elides some of the difficulties that are always involved in running your own site and updating your pages, it refuses to acknowledge that most people are not going to engage with the technical ept needed to do just that and will seek simpler solutions with sensible decisions made for them (thus, Geocities and LiveJournal and Movable Type and the like) because the thing they are interested in is not the technical aspects, but the social ones, and it believes that blogs simply killed off the collection of pages aspects of website, when reality suggests that blogs were added on to such things rather than replacing them wholesale. (At least until you get to Wordpress, which starts really integrating static pages and blogs in ways that don't always work. Websites of static pages can be made with Wordpress, and so can blogs, and there are very few places that I can think of that do both well with the platform.)
(Materials via
adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
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Date: 2023-12-20 09:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-12-21 03:55 am (UTC)