Just got registered with a local GP in Ireland¹ and their first email states that all their staff are “formally trained in GDPR procedures and any information you give will be used in the strictest confidence.”
Their email address is @gmail.com
🤦♂️
¹ This, in and of itself, is a bloody miracle these days, apparently, and only happened because it’s a new practice that’s just opening up.
Actually, let me use this as an example of how everything has gone wrong with web development in the last decade or so.
Dan Abramov is a very brilliant guy who is part of the Facebook's React team. He has been the most important name in the team working on React for years. And now, they are pushing for changes in React that would make it consume streams of data that updates the UI before the entire data request is completed, instead of just requesting the data and then 'painting' it once they get the reply for that request.
This is nuts. This is a micro optimization. 95% of the users won't ever notice, and those who do (people using extremely bad connections) would be much better if the site wasn't using React at all. At the same time, I'm sure half of the websites in the World who currently uses react will jump to implement this, making their code way more complex, brittle, sucking their productivity down, and in the long term, being worse for the users. Just for absolutely not even a short-term gain at all in their products.
Then why these kind of things keep happening? Because Facebook is too big. And somehow they ended being the ones in control of the most popular web-app framework used by most of the sites nowadays.
The state of the current Javascript ecosystem is what happens when you get companies with hundreds, thousands of engineers, to build sites that 15 years ago would have been built by 1/10th of that number of people. What you get is a lot of people working on a product that's actually mature already, and whose job end being going after that extra 1%, that last micro optimization that could make your site better in a very narrow set of cases. And they don't care about the complexity, because they are part of an engineering organization with literally thousands of hands to throw at any problem. Setting up your code bundler now takes hundreds of lines of code that need constant maintenance to achieve just a 5% improvement over gzipped plain JavaScript? No big deal, they have 6 people working full time on that. React switching to a different programming paradigm each two versions? Nice, now the 900 devs working in the web version has something to do for a few months.
But then small to medium teams adopt these tools. And suddenly you have a 5, 20, 50 devs team having to do the same work the Facebook web team does. Without any of the problems Facebook has to solve.
What's worse: a big share of the current JavaScript ecosystem exists just to solve problems introduced by the previous iterations. Think about it from a user perspective: does the web work any better, does Netflix, Facebook, twitter, tumblr, etc load faster, perform better than they did ten years ago? On the contrary, most of us have more powerful computers, phones. We have significantly faster internet connections. But sites are, at best, as fast as they used to ten years ago. In most cases they are even slower.
And from the engineer perspective it's not better: web development is significantly harder, more complex, slower nowadays that what it was ten years ago. Things that were trivial are now complex. Things that were complex still are. Product-wise, we are not doing anything more complex than what we were doing in early to mid 10s. But somehow now everything is harder, involves more code, everything is now orders of magnitude more complex. And it's not even making the web a better experience.
We made this mess. We made the web worse for everyone. We made our jobs harder for ourselves. It's so stupid.
We sat down with @JSPartyFM for 2 hours to talk about the history of OWA, the Digital Markets Act, Apple's attempt to kill web apps & the fight for the future of the web! 🎉
The environment in which kids grow up today is hostile to human dev.
By a variety of measures the members of GenZ are suffering from anxiety, depression, self-harm, & related disorders at levels higher than any other gen. for which we've data.
The decline in mental health is just one of many signs - something went awry. Loneliness & friendlessness among American teens b-."
with the banning of #TikTok i have to, yet again, remind all the partisan Democrats:
the mythical WHITE Silent Majority is as real as the weight loss from these pills Betsey Devos told me i could become a millionaire selling them to you
Democrats have been consistently losing the white demo since the 1990s but for the Obama blip.
the base is neither black or white but BROWN: very Latin@ and So. Asian —and south-east Asians are poised to overtake Latinos the next decade... 🧵
all techbro companies are para-military agencies. techbros are one mustache away from Springtime for Hitler; gleefully spying on you & me for the #ACAB state.
Yet another reason why your private messages should be stored on a server you control or e2ee (ideally, both): it's likely the pseudonyms and accounts you use can be linked back to your IRL identity... and sold to anyone willing to pay
There's annoyance caused by people pointing others to #FOSS alternatives for #BigTech#SurveillanceCapitalism services. I get it. It's not always done in most friendly, gentle way.
Neither is most criticism on receiving such advice friendly. It's often aggressive and harsh. There's a tone-deafness there and cultural disrespect.
"Welcome to our house built with 1,000's of volunteer hours. Make yourself at home but please take off your shoes".
"I WON'T DO THAT" and you walk in with muddy boots.
Why does privacy matter in our modern world? 🤔 Let's dive into how our online lives mirror an Orwellian reality, where our every move can be tracked, analyzed, and sold. #PrivacyMatters#OrwellsWorld
The Stasi's surveillance in East Germany once seemed like a dystopian nightmare. Fast forward to today, where our personal data is constantly harvested by tech giants. It's 1984 in 2024. #DigitalSurveillance#SurveillanceCapitalism
Imagine a world where every product you touch, every place you visit, is monitored and logged. This isn't just a future fear—it's happening now, online. #SurveillanceCapitalism
Amazon
AmEx
Apple
AT&T
BlueSky
Comcast
Discord
Discover
Disney
EA
Facebook
Ford
Google
HP
Mastercard
Microsoft
Netflix
Paypal
Spectrum
Stellantis
Tesla
TMobile
Verizon
Visa
Xitter
Yahoo
@arstechnica#Apple should Open Source the code so the community can create privacy-focused car software, as compared to the #surveillancecapitalism crap we get now. @eff - make this happen ;)
#Budget#UKPolitics This article by Gary Stevenson is so good, please read every word of it.
“Whatever Jeremy Hunt says, traders know the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer. And they’re paid millions to bet on it.”
This is what the world is - it is run by a minute elite for a minute elite and the rest of us, the masses, the natural world, we just don’t count. It is a #TragedyOftheNonCommons (will reshare my own piece on this below 1/n)
Take #Google alone. Did you ever do a data takeout? They literally have gigabytes of raw plain-text data on you, collected from all your devices and their sensors. There are 1,000's of data hoarders like that.
What can AI trained on a billion individuals datasets on All About People™ do?
It is weird and discouraging to see how many people choose #Meta#Threads for its looks and reach.
Forgetting that the sole reason this app exists is for a humongous#advertisement moloch to get at even more of their personal data. All to increase their dominance and power and ability to enrich themselves.
Forgetting that this dominance is already at highly problematic proportions, where Meta and also #Google and other #SurveillanceCapitalism have the power to influence society as a whole.
ORG has submitted complaints in the UK and France about LiveRamp, an online advertising and data broking company.
An investigation commissioned by ORG shows the new #adtech system undermines #privacy through invasive profiling.
Thousands of #advertising companies draw detailed profiles of Internet users’ online activities to target them with ads. It's the backbone of #surveillancecapitalism and it's proven to be harmful.
ORG's complaints raise urgent concerns about the LiveRamp #adtech system:
🔴 Personal data processing without a valid legal basis
🔴 Lack of data protections throughout the advertising supply chain
🔴 More intrusive than previous adtech systems, combining online and offline identifiers (such as name, email and phone numbers, home addresses etc) for more privacy-invasive profiling
🔴 LiveRamp operates in the background and lacks transparency
“The Liveramp system is intrusive and lets advertisers link people’s actual address and name with their browsing habits.
These new and dangerous technologies are an attempt to get around changes that limit the use of tracking cookies, and to make online advertising more intrusive, rather than less.
Now is the time to halt these new and dangerous technologies before they get out of hand.”
This action comes at a critical moment, as the #DPDIBill in the UK will make it more difficult to address emerging online threats.
Requirements to seek a resolution with a company like LiveRamp before complaining to the Information Commissioner's Office (the UK's independent data protection regulator) create a significant barrier to promoting regulatory compliance.