Most of what I do in the tech space these days are absurd and ridiculous hacks to attempt to get applications and services to work like they should and that they formerly did, rather than as their authoritarian makers are attempting to herd me to into.
I don’t herd well.
I realize that most of it is about ability to steal data and personal info, but that’s not any kind of excuse. I miss the days when I was in control of my own machine and what it did. They were far better.
How Big Pharma Is Wrecking the Inflation Reduction Act.
The No-Hunger Games: How GLP-1 Medication Adoption is Changing Consumer Food Purchases.
The remote Kazakh Steppe that became a gateway to space.
The Players on the Eve of Destruction. The insanity of war has returned to our world. And we’re just at the beginning of the beginning.
What to know about string of US hacks blamed on China.
Russia furious: China’s electronics aren’t battlefield ready.
Still on the hunt, the FBI shares new details about pipe bombs placed ahead of Jan. 6.
93rd Brigade of Ukraine repels Russian AFV column attack on the Bakhmut front.
This attack is very notable because in addition to the BMPs and other equipment, the destruction of 5 Russian T-62 tanks that took part in this attack was already visually confirmed (by… https://t.co/xvStDGe0CN pic.twitter.com/IWjYfdgjnj
— Special Kherson Cat 🐈🇺🇦 (@bayraktar_1love) December 27, 2024
Huh. Those T-62s are old. Shows the Russians really are near to running out of anything useful. Those tanks were last produced by Russia in 1975 — 50 years ago now.
Siri “unintentionally” recorded private convos; Apple agrees to pay $95M.
Remember when this was a “conspiracy theory?” I do — I recall when you were laughed at and mocked by the “smart” people for saying that your phone listened to conversations, even though it was obvious that it was happening if you had more than one brain cell.
As it turns out, both Apple and Android devices were doing it.
Fuck all y’all. Not so smart it turns out. Corporate shills are beyond contemptible.
Can someone explain to me why you prefer conversation view in your email client? Tell me either here or offline. I just need to hear someone offer some sort of logic.
Modern email clients already did conversations (reply/forward, etc.) as a feature and have for 30+ years. For me, the “improved” conversation view makes items absolutely impossible to find. That might come from that I worked on helpdesk and related for so long and really need to be able to identify items and requests by date, which conversation view makes extremely difficult.
I just don’t get it and probably never will. But I’d still at least like to hear some sort of reasoning about it.
Today I learned I’ve had dementia since I was three years old.
Server 2003 was the peak of functionality and design. It did exactly what it was supposed to do and nothing else. It was easy to use and it did not pretend to be a tablet or a phone. It hummed along without thieving any data at all and just worked.
I miss the days of non-cloud. Cloud nonsense made my job more difficult and far, far more complex, contra the claims of MBAs and cloud propagandists everywhere. That’s a lost fight now, of course — everyone seems perfectly willing to cough up every last bit of data, self-determination and self-respect to unaccountable corporations.
Server 2003 wasn’t perfect and it was still part of Microsoft’s stack, and even then they were doing very despicable things to be fair.
But IT, tech and the world has gotten worse since then, and more hostile to the users on all sides.
The clownish and evil bastards at Mozilla have worked very hard to take away Tabmix Plus, which is the best extension ever made for Firefox. The Mozilla team seemed to wage a particular war against that extension and its users for some reason1. What I didn’t realize is that the developer with great effort managed to revive it.
The installation directions are a bit convoluted, but it works fine once you get it slammed in there.
It’s such a great extension that makes using the internet so vastly better. I donated $50 to the dev. What I wish I could do, though, is donate a billion dollars to myself, buy Mozilla, fire everyone and blackball them from the industry forever. But dare to dream, eh?
NIMBYs have made all of us significantly poorer compared to what could have been. One economist estimated that GDP would be 30% higher without NIMBY evil. I think that is probably correct, though I suspect the real number could be as much as 50% larger if we’d crushed NIMBYs when we should have (during the 1970s). Preventing people from living where productive work and economic prosperity is located has all sorts of follow-on effects that are difficult to account for.
Areas with year-round good weather like San Diego and its immediate surroundings should probably have a population of 20+ million.
Manta rays inspire faster swimming robots and better water filters.
The torture of an unphilosophical life.
Breaking Down the Wealth of America’s Top 20 Billionaires.
Drugmakers to raise US prices on over 250 medicines starting Jan. 1.
UnitedHealth’s Army of Doctors Helped It Collect Billions More From Medicare.
How Vietnam emerged as a serious rival to China’s export machine.
US Treasury says it was hacked by China in ‘major incident.’
A Politics of Hope Is Our Best Hope.
America, China, and the Death of the International Monetary Non-System.
https://t.co/Uxnya1boot pic.twitter.com/3H2PvgFzZS
— Alex Godofsky (@AlexGodofsky) December 29, 2024
This reminds me of when we lived in Bellingham, Wa. There’s a place nearby called Chuckanut Ridge. That area is mostly populated by hoity-toity rich (for the area) folks. During that time, there was some more housing proposed to be built on the Ridge. This caused the NIMBYs who lived there to put up yard signs and to festoon their Volvos with bumper stickers that said “SAVE CHUCKANUT RIDGE.” They desperately wanted the Ridge preserved in its “natural” state, you see.
However, as I wanted to point out to these people but never did, the “natural” state is their not being there. They never would’ve understood, though. To all of them, they were the last valid resident that moved in so any changes they made (built their house, cleared their land, whatever) were the last justified alterations and anyone after that was some interloper there solely to harm them and their way of life.
It would’ve been pointless to bring this set of ideas to their attention as they would’ve been completely unable to comprehend them. But it made me laugh at the time. And still does.
We’re already at war with China — it’s just that they are the only ones actually fighting or who even realize it.
Just a man having a productive day.
Meth is a hell of a drug; it makes you feel extremely productive but also causes you to be absurdly incompetent1.
Behind the scenes a thousand less obtrusive electronics media are humming and stirring and bleeping through the hours. Important office blocks in Hong Kong nowadays are built, as it were, around their electronics. The territory has borrowed an idiom from the Americans as it borrows so many, and calls them not merely ‘high-tech,’ but actually ‘intelligent’ buildings, able to think. They can think through the circuits that are laid between their storeys, through the aerials and dishes on their roofs, through laser beams and TV systems. The Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank thinks constantly about the state of the Hang Seng financial index, displaying its conclusions on VDU screens all over the place. The Exchange Building will think also, if you pay it a fat enough subscription, about the day’s races at Shatin and Happy Valley, and present the runners’ names, the odds and the form through display units on your executive desk. It also talks: its elevators announce their progress in a sepulchral, very English male voice, like a butler’s. At night, however late, there are always lights burning in such office blocks of Central, and when I see them it gives me a not unpleasant tremor of the uncanny, as though they are lights from another world. I do not imagine people at their desks in there, only banks of computers, walls of flickering screens, tapes electronically whirring, cursors moving up and down, all bathed in the pale green light of the computer age. Nowhere is more inextricably enmeshed in electronics than is Hong Kong, and if we could see its myriad lines of inner communication, as one sees laser beams, the skies would be criss-crossed, the streets would be festooned, and we would be tripping over percentages wherever we went.
Jan Morris on Hong Kong in the 1980s
