Sometimes you just have a few things - Late September 02024

[silveradept]

Let us begin with Sumana Harihareswara on the need to have both detailed changelogs of changes in your software, and also release notes that provide higher-level and more human-friendly summaries of the changes between releases of the software. I feel like this could also be applied to many other things that go through revisions in such a way that people feel confident about the changes. I don't see it very often, for examples, in Terms of Service revisions, which tend to have vague things about what's actually changing in their human-friendly summaries, and then expect you to understand dense legal language to see the detailed material. Which mostly leaves consumers in the position of shrugging and saying "they've probably just made it possible to take my firstborn child, but I still need to use their products." This is not ideal, as they say, and it runs into trouble when you actually do have a dispute or need to exercise rights with regard to a service or company and find out that you have, in fact, signed away your first born child to the company and also agreed to binding arbitration where your first born child will be the only one allowed to speak on your behalf until they are old enough that they might be able to make a cogent argument.

The thought of having everything organized promises the possibility of being happier, but there's a lot more to being happy than being tidy. And for some people and their neurotype, a thing that is out of sight becomes a thing that is out of mind, and unless those storage containers are extremely well labeled and their systems rigorously adhered-to, things will probably get worse instead of better by putting them in containers and storing them in places.

Major League Baseball has entered the playoff section of the year, and the team that I am a partisan for made it in with a spectacular run in the later part of the season to catch a qualifier with two more games to have been played. Which they promptly lost to a team that had a record number of losses for the year (and whose record was the worst of all time when my team clinched their postseason spot.) They then proceeded to win their first two playoff games, giving them the opportunity to go best-of-five with their division leaders in the next round. Which is exciting, at the very least, to see more baseball being played, but there's also the fact that most major sports leagues in the United States, even if their laborers are represented by a union, are still owned and controlled mostly by billionaires. While some of those owners might be considered better than others, there are also those who deliberately pursue the profit over the possibility of a good team and then threaten or follow-through on taking the team elsewhere when they don't get to feed at the public trough for as much as they want for new stadia or additional perks for themselves, the ones that deliberately drive away their fans with price increases and sub-par product so they can manufacture the conditions to move, and who have ripped a team away from the community around it in search of those greater profits and benefits. Even with the "better" owners, there's still always the understanding that the sports team is a business and should be profitable, and those owners are more than happy to try and soak as much wealth up for themselves. The kind of people who would say making four million dollars less in profit than last year as "losing" four million dollars that year. Some sports leagues forbid private ownership, or have several competitive teams owned by the cities they play in, and it's often a better experience for both the partisans and the city to reap and reinvest the profits in the community. The NFL is sufficiently afraid of the idea of public ownership that they've forbidden any other club other than the Green Bay Packers from operating in such a manner, because the Packer backers have proven that you can get the cheeseheads to put up their own cheese and make a competitive and profitable team. I feel like many cities and their partisans would very much want the opportunity to wrest their team away from the billionaire owners and have a say, even if it is only a small one, in the running of their sports team through funding it. And in leagues where teams sometimes end up being owned by "the league," having public ownership as an option would certainly make them attractive to places looking to reap those profits.

Of course, I'm the kind of person that thinks that perhaps the lowest-ranked team in any given league's divisions should be offered up to their city to see if the public can run it better than the owner can. Something to potentially convince those billionaires that those profits they make are better put to use improving the team and the players, rather than just being part of their own obscene wealth. But I'm also the kind of person that thinks a billionaire is a policy failure, and an entity whose wealth has already reached an excess point and can be safely redistributed until they are underneath the cap.

Pete Rose, a man who might have made it back to baseball from the scandal of his gambling on games (what with how much all sports are flogging betting on them now) but for the other scandal involving an underage girl, is dead at 83 years of age.

Kris Kristofferson, songwriter, eventual artist and actor, joins the talent writers of the afterlife at 88 years of age.

J.D. Vance and Tim Walz had a debate, one perhaps notable for its ability to actually talk about substantive issues, but that also provided plenty of meme fodder, given that J.D. Vance did an awful lot of evasion, side-eyeing, and outright lying (and then complaining about being corrected on his lies, because he thought the rules he had agreed to would give him the ability to lie with impunity.)

Pennsylvania State University removed all copies of a student-run newspaper, The Daily Collegain, from distribution points on the university campus without notifying the newspaper that it was doing so. Penn State alleges that the Collegian violated advertising rules of the campus in having poster advertisements for Kamala Harris's campaign and for get out the vote efforts on their newspaper racks, advertising the Collegian had to acquire after the University slashed their funding at the beginning of the school year. This act of censorship makes us wonder whether Penn State wanted to censor specifically the advertisements for Harris/Walz, or whether there was some other element in the paper or its coverage that Penn State sought revenge for by removing all the newsstands and papers from the university campus. Especially because despite claiming 9 of the newsstands were in violation of the guidelines, Penn State removed all of the Collegian's newsstands and papers from the campus.

The problem with accumulating wealth is that often times wealth allows you to accumulate bad behavior, too. Which makes Sean Combs have a bad year so far in terms of run-ins with the law, to the point where New York City wants its key to the city back. The thing itself was recommended to me by azurelunatic, who was more interested in the last paragraph talking about New York City Mayor Eric Adams and his several federal indictments for conspiracy, wire fraud, and bribery, for the headline produced by the New York Post describing the actions.

Staying on the issue of wealthy people behaving badly, although in this case, it's actual Consequences, Rudolph Guliani, known in his political career for 'a noun, a verb, and 9/11,' because he couldn't be any better as a mayor, and who then turned to the job of propping up the baseless claims of election fraud that Donald Trump wanted advanced and appealed and talked about, has been disbarred from the practice of law in Washington, D.C., because the man has been supporting and lending his supposed credibility to provable falsehoods and frivolities in the courts, and New York State disbarred him for it. The other list of charges and judgments against him also makes an excellent case that he should not be allowed to practice any kind of law anywhere at all.

Elsewhere, The Republican candidate for governor in the state of North Carolina is now known as someone who frequented a forum called Nude Africa, which might not be an issue by itself, except for the part where he also called himself a "black NAZI" and advocated for the return of slavery for black people. There's also potential hypocrisy about being against trans people now, but having referred to himself as a "perv" for enjoying transgender porn. The candidate has denied that the usernames associated with the comments are his, but the article goes to some pains to make sure we recognize the connections between them, considering it is a username that the candidate has used elsewhere on the Internet, and there were personal details associated with those usernames as well that point to the candidate.

Some entities are using fake law firms stuffed with fake images to send fake DMCA requests to sites with the demand that those sites provide links to the supposed owner of the image that is supposedly infringing. If you would like an example of what such things look like, as well as all the ways that you should savage whatever poor fool sends such nonsense to you, synecdochic received such a thing and spends significant time pointing out all the flaws and reasons to believe such threats are unserious and will not e followed up on. And, with some salt in mind, some language to return with once you have established that there's no way the supposedly infringing image is owned by the people claiming to own it.

Police officers in Los Angeles determined, by the electricity flow being higher than surrounding areas, that a medical diagnostics facility was secretly really a cannabis cultivation area, obtained a search warrant, and then found out that Magnetic Resonance Imaging devices do, in fact, react to metal things like guns by pulling them to themselves and holding tight. There was a safety demonstration video about MRIs that I was linked to some time ago that demonstrated the power of the magnetic field when the device is on, and so I'm sure that such a piece as a modern firearm would have been pulled out of an officer's possession without too much effort at all. To get the gun back, they activated the emergency shutdown of the MRI, which potentially damaged it further. The police officers are very lucky that the firearm taken was not then discharged in some way. However, given how this appears to have been compounded foolishness, I would hope that the officers involved in this raid are not allowed to be practicing police officers in Los Angeles or anywhere else.

The inherent difficulties of getting an accurate maternal mortality rate from the past, and the further difficulties that come from trying to estimate the general state of health from the maternal mortality rate.

The last coal-fired power generation facility in Britain has stopped, which is encouraging, suggesting that the transition away from carbon-based power generation is going to work for at least that area.

Buiding bridges so that bison can get bigger spaces to roam, trying to recapture the capybara that got out when a mower was let in her gate (and then succeeding at the recapture).

In technology, using the web interfaces and APIs for Internet-connected cars to gain control of Internet-connected features of those cars, which certainly makes me want to have a smart car with an app all the more. (And also annoys me about how so many things that should not be given Internet access are given Internet access.)

Mr. Zuckerberg, cursed be his name, and all his companies, has said he and other entities working on LLMs should be allowed to violate copyrights and suck up all the data they want, because they believe most people's material isn't worth paying for. Which is to say they believe that most people won't demand payment or demand they not use their material for LLM training, and therefore because there's not a widespread revolt, they can call it "fair use" under U.S. law. And companies like Mr. Zuckerberg's have now put into their Terms of Service for social media sites saying that they can use whatever you post to train their models. And, presumably, whatever else they want to do with it, without compensating you for any of it, since they believe they're providing something more valuable to you by giving you the platform to post on.

LinkedIn has decided your data is feed for their training models, and will continue to harvest it until you opt out, and the opt out is not retroactive, so congratulations, everyone who used LinkedIn what it was something other than slop, your data is now being used for someone else's purposes.

Some students, recognizing what they were looking at, placed code into the smart glasses produced in collaboration with Zuckerberg's Folly that allowed them to run model-trained image searches of people on the Internet, and then, once they had names associated with the pictures, then trawled open databases to gather as much personally identifying information about the people they had identified in the pictures. The software is a proof of concept about how easy it will be to use smart glasses and such code to identify people in places where they would prefer not to be identified, or to harass them, or to advertise to them, or anything else that could be done by cops, advertisers, and stalkers to identify people and then do their best to collate, cross-identify, and otherwise violate their expectations of privacy basically everywhere someone else could be with a pair of glasses.

The Falcon 9 rocket that put more space station residents went up successfully, and came down, but it did not come down in the intended landing zone, prompting an internal investigation by SpaceX to try and figure out why the rocket stage went off-course during the re-entry. Feels almost a little like things that Elon has his hands in are starting to fall apart, even when he's not actively trying to destroy them.

Speaking of things falling apart a bit, a leak in the International Space Station is starting to raise bigger concerns for the NASA side than the Roscosmos side.

The National of Standards and Technology in the United States has released a new version of its guidelines that demand the cessation of many common but unhelpful password rules, such as the requirements for certain variations of characters (one number, one symbol, one uppercase and one lowercase number, for example), requirements to frequently rotate passwords, and removing password hints, security questions and "knowledge-based authentication" from password systems. The NIST guidelines are not universally binding, but they do make a strong case for removing such barriers from any entity that is not required to follow the NIST guideline.

Last for tonight, a Captain Awkward letter that approaches a situation from the perspective of "what do you need to make a possible social situation enjoyable for you" rather than the letter-writer's frame of "How do I avoid ruining my friendships because I'm neurospicy and my friends want to put me in situations I know will be stressful?" There's a lot of resonance in there about trying to unlearn the part of your brain that has been socialized to believe that because you are the consistent issue in all of the stressful things that have happened, you are the problem and inflict yourself on others. The part that's been quoted most at me so far from the people who have linked the letter is this:

Neurotypical folks and/or people who mostly conceive ADHD in terms of how much people with the disorder annoy and disrupt others (which unfortunately includes most of the people responsible for diagnosing it and treating it when I was a kid) tend to see problems like the ones I just described as opportunities for people with ADHD to shore up our skills and internal processes until we can better guarantee that we’ll perform to others’ standards. “Just take deep breaths and focus!” “Just lay out all your cooking materials ahead of time and take your time to do each step one-by-one!” “Just don’t let other people get to you so much!” “Come on, it’s easy, you got this!”

(Pro-tip: If you ever want to clock whether a given piece of advice about social skills or whatever translates to “mask better so that no one will be able to tell you aren’t neurotypical,” putting the word “just” in front of something you already know doesn’t work for you is a pretty reliable indicator. “Just be yourself!” “Just make a to-do list and check things off one-by-one as you go!” Cool, why don’t I “just” learn to levitate while we’re at it. It’s not that the advice never works for anyone, it just doesn’t work within your specific context. But if you actually point that out, you’re being “difficult,” because it’s easier for them to comprehend a world where you don’t get it than it is to imagine one where what works for them doesn’t work for everyone.)

and that's an entire mood by itself, including echoes of my first supervisor, the one that I can now recognize had no actual solutions for the neurodivergent worker that had just been hired other than "mask harder, be neurotypical" and who I did my best to try and build systems in place that would help me do just that so I would stop getting in trouble for being neurodivergent (and then try harder when those systems inevitably had hiccups, failures, and situations they weren't actually designed to handle.) But I also want to highlight a later piece, because I think that's equally as important a thing to consider as "how much of what is being expected of you is 'don't you dare let that mask slip for a moment.' "

But when I read something like this:

To complicate it further, one of the friends likely coming along is the one I’m least close with in this group, and who tends to have the least patience for my neurodivergent shenanigans.

…I gotta wonder about the company. Is this “AITA if I inflict my chaotic self on these poor innocent bystanders” or is this “This so-called friend makes my shoulders go up around my ears, and I don’t trust the others to have my back or be anything but fake-nice about it?” You know these people, so you tell me.

Especially with the earlier admission that the most likely way that these people relate to each other is through Minnesota Nice (or other Midwestern Nice) that doesn't actually talk about things that are upsetting, except in indirect ways that expect someone who is already going to be bad at picking up cues to pick up cues. It sounds like the letter-writer also needs direct communicators, which will be awkward for people who have been socialized that all needs and discomforts are to be communicated in as oblique and face-saving manners as possible, but makes things work so much better for everyone when you can actually state a need and have something happen about it. (It's also possible that the friend group is engaging in a Geek Social fallacy or two and really needs to make some decisions about whether or not they want to keep putting people who are incompatible with each other together on social events.)

I'm glad the letter-writer is getting this good advice, and it's out there for others to have as well, hopefully at a younger age where it can do more long-term good. Because I certainly could have used it much earlier in my life, when I was coming into myself as an independent adult and running face-first into difficulties that I hadn't had to deal with before. Where I might have been doing the job that was advertised on paper, but getting evaluated on all the things that are not explicitly put into the job description because they assume everyone has the capacity to remember something told to them after six other things that required concentration to handle. Because, as the Captain notes:

Pushing yourself past your limits out of fear of disappointing or inconveniencing others won’t make anything that you struggle with easier. Internalized ableism and living in fear of other people’s judgment can actually hurt you.

(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.)

Comments

[tuzemi]

LinkedIn has decided your data is feed for their training models, and will continue to harvest it until you opt out, and the opt out is not retroactive, so congratulations, everyone who used LinkedIn what it was something other than slop, your data is now being used for someone else's purposes.

Thank you for the reminder. I just turned that off.

I also went through the demographics data and declared myself cis, because ain't no way I'm going to be honest about that anymore with Microsoft. ☹️

[azurelunatic]

I got the keys to the city thing via norabombay, as it happens!

[silveradept]

My workplace is a Teams shop as well, so Microsoft already knows, and continues to non-consensually link my Teams identity to my LinkedIn with no way of opting out.

[silveradept]

Very useful.

[thewayne]

Yeah. Sixteen hours of drug training. That officer needs to go back for a lot more, as does the judge who issued the warrant! I remember a story from years ago about an off-duty cop going for an MRI who kept his gun on him, went into the room, and the machine sucked that gun right out of his holster. And even though the safety was on, the gun discharged. Fortunately no one was injured.

I've been planning on writing about the Ray-Ban doxxing, interesting and frightening stuff.

[silveradept]

Certainly not an example of the finest and best, the whole process.

The doxxing glasses are one of the things we always knew was possible with the advent of the Internet, but were at the least trying to ensure stayed difficult to do. With the hunger for data to serve ads, though, it's now much easier to connect pictures to people and from there, people to their data. And banning using smart devices for this of any other similar purpose would mostly just push the code out of visibility. I also wouldn't be surprised if code like that were pushed to glasses in an update so that the patent company can do thous kind of doxing for ad purposes.

[thewayne]

It was kind of inevitable that the confluence of tech would find the doxing result in something like the sunglasses, and you just know that certain TLAs are eager to implement their own for clandestine snaps and crowd snooping in areas where they don't have cameras.  I'm curious if the anti-surveillance work done a few years ago is effective against it: Dazzler paint camo, IR white LEDs, etc.

[silveradept]

That would be worth figuring out. Of course, the best thing to do would be to poison the image searcher somehow, or constantly broadcast a signal that prevents the glasses from taking pictures, or some other jam, but I'm sure the law enforcement versions of these glasses will be hardened against known attacks.