What the heck is this? My Mac isn’t enrolled in MDM, and the one profile I have installed (Xfinity WiFi) doesn’t have auto-renewal. I hit Cancel, of course. #macOS
So a friend of mine has their elderly mom’s iCloud account on a family plan. Mom takes a ton of photos and videos and stores them in iCloud Photo Library. Friend recently discovered that a sibling downgraded the family data tier, and it went down below the nearly 1TB of media that Mom has in iCPL. Friend then re-ups the data plan after weeks of iCPL not syncing, and now Mom can’t see her older media despite the higher data plan.
Is Mom’s old media gone? How long does Apple retain old media in iCPL before it deletes items above the data cap? How does it determine which photos or videos get deleted?
@leemorgan Yep they are on it. Unfortunately it sounds like it’s been almost 60 days since the plan lapsed so Mom’s data may be lost. Hopefully it’s still retained somewhere and an escalation could retrieve it.
Very interesting framing by #California state senator Dave Cortese and assemblyman Ash Karla on the recent highway offramp closures around #SanJose during #CincoDeMayo. They claim that Caltrans’ action was “racist targeting” and “blatantly unconstitutional”.
I disagree, of course: the closures were prudent as they prevented predictable #sideshows and #takeovers from occurring during a Friday night celebration.
But maybe I’m missing something here. I know racist anti-cruising laws were only recently repealed, but I think this closure allowed more cruising, not less. I would appreciate it if someone from #sfba could help me learn why this action can be perceived as racially motivated.
“Two State Lawmakers Question Cinco de Mayo Weekend Off-Ramp Closures in San Jose”
If you dabble in #AI and #LLM at all, please read this leaked analysis by a Google researcher.
It would indeed be wonderful if near-future, incremental AI training can be done cheaply and in open-source form, outside of the corporate IP regime. I think this may lead to the widespread use of smaller, special-purpose, open-sourced models which will indeed democratize the benefits of the technology.
The dark side is unfortunately the obfuscation of source material, and the outright theft of human creativity which will be laundered through the retraining process; we will be building open-sourced models atop stolen works.
@drahardja 'theft of creativity' it's an interesting concept isn't it? i can't help but wonder, in a world free from greed and rapacious capitalistic impulses, a world where creativity isn't a indirect means of survival... would this instead seem like a beautiful and natural proliferation of ingenuity and creativity, not as something that can or needs to be owned, but as an artistic truth with a life all its own? we went down a dark path, but it's never too late to start over.
@neotoy Well that’s a whole other complex discussion isn’t it? 😆
I think the fundamental problem is one of expectations. Creativity takes energy, and one must invest it with some expectation of what benefits one might reap in the future. Violate that expectation, and creators justifiably get angry.
In a world where IP rights don’t exist, people create products expecting it to be immediately remixed and reused, often without credit (e.g. a popular meme), and the world goes on. In our world, however, capitalists take free stuff (e.g. Cinderella the public domain story) and turn it into profitable private IP (e.g. Cinderella the Disney cartoon), leading to a tragedy of the commons.
I’m OK with AI and ML remixing existing works if a. there were no IP expectations held by creators, and b. there are no privileged (i.e. well-capitalized) players who will disproportionately privatize the profits. Until that world exists, I think “theft” is the right word for it.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that Republicans would continue to believe that Jan 6 was “not an insurrection” despite the Proud Boys being convicted of literal sedition; that the PB couldn’t be a white supremacist group because its chairman was brown-skinned; that Jan 6 wasn’t that bad because “what about BLM rioting, huh?”; and numerous other bad-faith nonsense…but it’s still a shock when it shows up in your friend’s timeline on Facebook, written by someone who is otherwise a decent and wonderful human being.
The atrocities committed by Republicans are so outlandish, so appalling, so cartoon-like in its malice, that GOP voters are simply unable to process what they are witnessing. It’s unbelievable to them that their party is trying to violently overturn democracy, literally genocide-style kill a group of people, and turn women into subservient baby-factories, that they’d rather believe all the bad news is just…false, and that their party is no worse than the opposition.
> when it shows up in your friend’s timeline on Facebook, written by someone who is otherwise a decent and wonderful human being.
as
> explicitly supporting one of their party's bigoted values.
But I acknowledge that people can post ignorant support for their party without being explicitly bigoted. I do however blame them for their role (and mine) in perpetuating the evils of the world.
@heathborders 100% yes. And I have been complicit in perpetuating patriarchy, racial oppression (especially when I used to live in countries where I belonged to a politically and/or economically dominant race), and who knows what else. But I wasn’t trying to do it—that was just “my culture”.
Over time, I was educated out of some of those toxic behaviors, but back then, I was just a decent guy who supported terrible systems.
I feel like a lot of conservatives fall into that group today, and they are desperately clinging on to hope that their group isn’t actually awful, by repeating more and more unhinged talking points. They are being suckered and harmed by their party just as much as anyone; they just haven’t felt the pain personally yet.
Let’s face it: #Bluesky will be popular. Because as far as I can tell, it looks and works almost exactly like Twitter, and Twitter was immensely popular.
Does that mean the doom of the #Fediverse? Of course not. At 10 million users, the Fediverse has reached critical mass. Just like (I’m gonna say it…) Linux on the desktop has reached critical mass even though Windows and macOS dominate popular use.
The parallels between the #mastodon and desktop Linux is almost too painfully obvious: both are opinionated, nerd-focused tech products that express deeply-held ideologies…and hence unfriendly and unwelcoming to huge swaths of non-technical humanity who simply want to use the product.
@drahardja If the fediverse can ultimately change from a copy to a fully new idea/identity I thinks could change.
People didn’t migrate to Facebook from MySpace, they didn’t migrate to TikTok. They started using something new and got bored of the old. Twitter simply imploded instead of trying to stay relevant and failing.
The good thing with the fediverse is that the barrier to entry to get something new out there is lower.
@drahardja tried to search for a breaking news story. Nothing. That seems like a pretty significant use case that the protocol, servers, and apps need to support (unless we just want Google to mine it all and provide the function).
Is there a term for that thing that bigots do where they say some outlandishly bigoted statement, but when someone calls them out, they (or one of their fellow bigots) reply by saying something like “dude, can’t you tell that was obviously a joke?” or something?
I’ve seen this play out many times on FB, where a man would say some deeply misogynistic thing and flocks of other men would respond to all the criticism with “that was obviously a joke” to cover them.