ojala

KiwiNikki, 2 days ago to random

This is not a good look, Canterbury. Mask up.
#MaskUp #COVID19 #CovidNZ

mhoye, 3 days ago to random

As always, domestic abuse is the flagship infosec threat model, the one where the victim has the least resources, the least recourse, where they're closest to immediate physical harm.

That this industry has failed at and mostly abandoned the idea of even pretending to try dealing with a threat model that's difficult and unprofitable and mostly hurts women is not news, but this new Windows Recall feature is next-level professional negligence.

guygaechter, 3 days ago to Signal German

If you only read one article this year, it has to be THIS by @Mer__edith, the president of #signal :

"AI is a marketing term, not a technical term of art. [...]
This is also why it’s imperative that we recognize mass surveillance – and ultimately the surveillance business model – as the root of the large-scale tech we’re currently calling “AI”."

https://www.helmut-schmidt.de/aktuelles/detail/die-rede-der-zukunftspreistraegerin

#privacy #surveillance #ai #bigtech

via

phil_stevens, 4 days ago to NewZealand

When cutting costs and eugenics come in one tidy little package.

#nzpol

https://theconversation.com/flu-vaccines-are-no-longer-free-for-all-under-12s-in-nz-children-living-in-poverty-and-at-higher-risk-will-bear-the-brunt-228095

allsumnull, 15 days ago to random

Devo to find out Steve Albini died.

WTAF.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/steve-albini-dead-obit-1235017169/

#RIPSteve

MikeMahoney218, 17 days ago to random

Blog post about our new preprint: what do the new FIA allometrics mean for existing model-based forest carbon accounting projects?

https://www.mm218.dev/posts/2024-05-08-nsvb/

chaotin, 22 days ago to random German

Battery sizes explained 🔋

ChrisMayLA6, 22 days ago to ai

Tom Gauld on the AI (investment) bubble

#AI #investment

javi, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago) to random

offf, this story about how Google made google search into a pile of seagull shit hits me hard:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

Around the time of this story, I was living through a similar situation in my work life (on a much smaller scope, of course, WordPress.com first, Tumblr later).

Back in 2019, working on WordPress, I started finding myself, almost weekly, arguing against people who wanted to take the product we were working at and made it worse if that mean they could squeeze 0.1% more revenue from it

The 0.1% figure is not even a random number: I remember this speciffic A/B test on WordPress.com that was declared a success and shipped to 100% of the users because it increased the free-to-paid conversion by 0.1%. Soon after it was released, I found out that as a side effect, it increased the churn of free users by 20 something %,so I called for an urgent rollback and removal of the change. So I was promptly explained that we didn't care about free-users churn, because finance had calculated the average long-term value of the free users to be something like $2 per year, and the increase in conversion was bigger than what we could get from them.

Everything became about growth hacking. Everything became thinly-veiled dark patterns. In our private dev slack channels, we joked that since it was impossible to make it smaller or less conspicuous, the next thing the growth team was going to ask us to do was to make the 'free plan' button flee away from the mouse pointer when the user tried to click it. We kept making our product worse, we kept consciously crippling the cheaper versions so we could force people to move to the more expensive options.

Back then I was the lead of one of the two dev divisions working on WordPress.com, so my job was mainly to discuss what we were going to be doing, when and how. And I was getting drained by a constant state of fight against a constant wave of shit they wanted us to build. So much than by the end of 2020, the CEO quietly told me to follow the growth team plans and shut up or step down.

So I requested to move to tumblr, because I thought the pastures were greener over there. But it was all the same: Adding login walls to what we were pretending to be "the last bastion of the free internet", cramping in embarrasingly obvious money-making schemes disguised as features, and making them silently opt-out instead of opt-in so the less people the possible would deactivate them, having to fend off the pressure from the CEO to make everything algorithmic timelines because, you know, tiktok makes a lot of money and why aren't we, etc etc.

I found myself in a place where building something good that people enjoy using was no longer a priority, but tricking people into generating more money for the company was. And when I looked around me, I could see that happening everywhere else, not only in my company. Experiencing the start of the enshittification years from inside wasn't easy.

And, as in the article, the people who decided to turn the shit-metter up to 200%, have a name, in every case. And these people, no matter if they are called Sundar and Prabhakar or Matt and Mark, are destroying the internet. These people are milllionaires, or billionaries, and are destroying our shared, common spaces to squeeze some extra cash from us.

That's why the fediverse and its principles are important. Because that's how we take back internet from their dirty hands. That's how we make internet resilient against them. That's how we build the commons.

BigJackBrass, 1 month ago to random

Whenever the IT department says they can't help with my problem because I'm working from home, I think I'll send them a link to NASA fixing Voyager 1 despite it being outside the solar system.

gwynnion, 1 month ago to random

NASA recovered a space probe's 47-year-old computer with about as much memory as my old Commodore 64 over a distance of 15 billion miles so it can (hopefully) continue to do science work, and it reminds me of how much ingenuity used to go into computers back when the assumption was you couldn't consume the water and electricity of a small nation just to power Ask Jeeves.

timbray, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago) to random

When you have to enter a chunk of text on your mobile…

[boosts appreciated]

Konenpanien, 1 month ago to chile

Today, on International Earth Day, I bring you a photo of my favorite Chilean plant. Puya alpestris or chagual, this beautiful plant is slow growing, and can take many years to flower, between 2 and 5 years. Human action has caused the population of these plants to decrease, which is affecting species such as the largest butterfly in Chile, which is now in danger of extinction. You never know how the disappearance of one species could doom another.
#Earthday #naturephotohraphy #chile #plants #wildflowers #endemic #nature #takecareofthe planet

In the photo, a plant endemic to Chile, Puya alpestris appears as a bush of gray-green and pointed leaves; It has tall stems arranged in an inflorescence containing many very unusual blue-green flowers.

akosma, 1 month ago to random

So, I made a thing.

Did you know that Windows Notepad, at least since Windows 3.1, has a journaling option? Just create a file with the line ".LOG" on top, and every time you open the file, the current date and time gets inserted at the bottom.

Well, I wanted the same for Visual Studio Code, so here it goes.

https://gitlab.com/akosma/notepad-dotlog

wmd, 1 month ago to WholesomeMemes

#wholesomememes

freakonometrics, 1 month ago to random French

it's more complex than a rotating hyperbolic paraboloid, right?

video/mp4

dfeldman, 1 month ago to random

The problem with trying to sell developer tooling is that developers have no purchasing authority

Salesperson needs to spend $1,000? No big deal.
Finance needs to spend $100,000? No big deal.
Engineer wants to buy a $50 book? They need forms signed from their VP in triplicate.

dpaldrich, 1 month ago to random

American pharm advertising

video/mp4

Tutanota, 1 month ago to google

🚨 PRIVACY WIN 🚨

#Google must destroy $5 billion worth of user data illegally collected in Incognito Mode 💪

Because #privacy matters.

Read more on the court ruling:
👉 https://tuta.com/blog/google-incognito-lawsuit

ilumium, 1 month ago to Skydiving

Holy shit, I thought I knew how evil the #SurveillanceAds industry was but here we are:

Two-thirds of European websites just ignore your #cookie choice and track you anyways, researchers from #ETHzurich found. 🤯

https://www.usenix.org/system/files/sec23winter-prepub-107-bouhoula.pdf

#privacy #TrackingFreeAds #consent #gdpr #ePrivacy #BanSurveillanceAdvertising

samplereality, 1 month ago to random

Twice in the past week I've read scholars who should know better repeat the urban legend that the QWERTY keyboard was designed to slow down typing, and thus, jamming, on early typewriters.

That'd be cool if it were true, but it's not, and the the truth is even cooler. The QWERTY keyboard evolved over time, shaped by two forces: (1) since the early machines were used by telegraph operators, the keys were arranged to avoid common transcription errors; and (2) competing patents of the typewriter slightly arranged the keyboard layout in order to qualify as new (and therefore patentable) designs.

Check out this research for more: https://repository.kulib.kyoto-u.ac.jp/dspace/bitstream/2433/139379/1/42_161.pdf

kgajos, 1 month ago to random

A physical 3-way OR-gate (implemented out of 2 2-way OR-gates): the owner of any of the 3 padlocks can unlock this gate.

dfeldman, 1 month ago to random

As a physics major you have so many career options! You can work at a hedge fund, or in high frequency trading, or buy side, or sell side, or as a portfolio manager, or doing FX arbitrage, or as a risk analyst, or even trading derivatives! Everyone should major in physics!

gerrymcgovern, 1 month ago to random

In a city called The Dalles, in Oregon, USA, local people were worried that Google’s water use was soaring. As is so often the case, the city officials, who had given Google hundreds of millions in tax breaks, had no intention of letting anyone know how much water Google was using. It was up to a local paper, The Oregonian, to try and find out. They were forced to bring a case to court. City officials were ordered by Google to claim that Google’s use of scarce pubic water was a “trade secret”.

Salty, 1 month ago to NewZealand

#nzpol

Today's letter to the Minister for Climate Change --

Minister,

On RNZ this morning you were quoted as being disappointed that we have not inherited a climate change action plan sufficient to meet our targets.

Your government has already or is committed to:

• Cancelled the Clean Car Scheme
• Taken $500M in funding away from public transport and active mode transport projects
• Directed Waka Kotahi to stop all work on cycle and walkway projects