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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 8th, 2023

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  • This is ironic because all the 40 year old chicks who are career users of FB since college, all cite the same justification for continuing to use it: “But all my photos and the current happenings of my friends”.

    If you showed them epirical data that only 17% of what they consume on the platform is actually even tangentially related to their friends and family, maybe they’d finally decouple themselves from FB.





  • The most-aggressively short timelines don’t apply until 2029. Regardless, now is the time to get serious about automation. That is going to require vendors of a lot of off-the-shelf products to come up with better (or any) automation integrations for existing cert management systems or whatever the new standard becomes.

    The current workflow many big orgs use is something like:

    1. Poor bastard application engineer/support guy is forced to keep a spreadsheet for all the machines and URLs he “owns” and set 30-day reminders when they will expire,

    2. manually generate CSRs,

    3. reach out to some internal or 3rd party group who may ignore his request or fuck it up twice before giving him correct signed certs,

    4. schedule and get approval for one or more “possible brief outage” maintenance windows because the software requires manually rebinding the new certs in some archaic way involving handjamming each cert into a web interface on a separate Windows box.

    As the validity period shrinks and the number of environments the average production application uses grows, the concept of doing these processes manually becomes a total clusterfuck.



  • What many Americans would gravitate toward in the market is a “transitional” medium SUV or crossover type vehicle that is a Plugin Electric Hybrid (PHEV). This is the best option for many suburbanites because the infrastructure isn’t there for full electric for most uses cases, but most people living in single-family homes could afford to retrofit their residential electrical service at their own cost, and thereby do 90% of their driving on electricity while still retaining the capability of doing longer trips with gasoline. They need to be able to take the kid to baseball practice and fit the other kids Tuba or Cello in the back hatch etc.

    Personally I know many people who would settle for this compromise as a transitional vehicle. We just need a few more options that aren’t $50K+ new.


  • Even if the stated goal was to reshore large amounts of production of goods to the US, there are several problems with that.

    One, history shows that it is largely not possible, at least in any practical sense. US companies make t-shirts in Vietnam and Pakistan because they can sell them to consumers here for $10. Are US consumers magically going to decide they’re OK with an Old Navy (low quality) garment costing $35 instead of $10?

    Secondly, standing up manufacturing and distribution domestically isn’t an overnight thing. Funding, site selection, construction, supply chain integration etc. all take time. Trump thinks he can trade a few weeks of bad headlines and market hit, for some magically reappearing domestic manufacturing. It doesnt work that way. Even if it were possible, it wouldn’t create positive economic conditions on any kind of timeline sufficient to offset the negative effects real consumers are already experiencing.

    “Sorry little Johnny, not only can we not afford new Nikes for you anymore, but also you can forget about that Nintendo Switch 2 for Christmas because we can’t even order one. But at least we know your GED-educated uncle Jimbo in northern Michigan might be able to get a lower-middle class factory job assembling widgets again… maybe… in 2 years.”

    That isn’t a good economic pitch for most people.




  • My friends dumbass 12 year old kid was told he wouldn’t be given access to any social media until he was at least 16. He claimed he understood, and then proceeded to make an Instagram account with his real name and started sending pervy messages to various insta thott accounts.

    Basically as a parent you have to give them access to very limited apps and make them repeatedly demonstrate they won’t misuse them. Then as they get older, assuming they don’t do anything stupid or illegal, training wheels gradually come off.






  • Chinese cars are a known data privacy nightmare with proprietary software/ecosystems.

    Tesla is much the same in the US… I’ve heard it analogized as “Tesla is the Apple of the automotive industry” and it is hard to argue they’re not. Like the iPhone at its first launch, Teslas were the “new hotness” until they became so ubiquitous they are now the most basic bitch car ever. They’re massively overpriced for what they are, they promise lots of features that often fall flat in execution, they are terminally online and reliant on proprietary cloud services. They collect tons of user data and do lord knows what with it.

    All that said, can you imagine if Apple itself had successfully launched a car in the US market? Its fanbase would be beyond insufferable and it would likely have all the worst issues of both Chinese cars and US EVs.


  • People don’t seem to understand the risks presented by normalizing client-side scanning on closed source devices. Think about how image recognition works. It scans image content locally and matches to keywords or tags, describing the person, objects, emotions, and other characteristics. Even the rudimentary open-source model on an immich deployment on a Raspberry Pi can process thousands of images and make all the contents searchable with alarming speed and accuracy.

    So once similar image analysis is done on a phone locally, and pre-encryption, it is trivial for Apple or Google to use that for whatever purposes their use terms allow. Forget the iCloud encryption backdoor. The big tech players can already scan content on your device pre-encryption.

    And just because someone does a traffic analysis of the process itself (safety core or mediaanalysisd or whatever) and shows it doesn’t directly phone home, doesn’t mean it is safe. The entire OS is closed source, and it needs only to backchannel small amounts of data in order to fuck you over.

    Remember the original justification for clientside scanning from Apple was “detecting CSAM”. Well they backed away from that line of thinking but they kept all the client side scanning in iOS and Mac OS. It would be trivial for them to flag many other types of content and furnish that data to governments or third parties.



  • Remember, when iPhones are off, they just become Airtags. Most modern phones are sending/receiving BLE signals even if you don’t expressly intend them to. I wouldn’t go anywhere near a protest with anything besides degoogled Android, because its the only OS where you can actually disable the radios. Even then I would probably opt for a Faraday bag.

    Other considerations… Apple (and probably Google) devices are doing client side scanning of images and turning on GPS to geotag images unless you specifically disabled that features. In other words, there are ways you can be correlated to locations and activities after the fact. Just ask all those J6 rioters.