metadope

I confess I haven't paid much attention to privacy issues in my laziness and indifference over the years. But as I witness the development of escalating violations of personal space and the invasive seizures of sensitive data by corporations and governments and random script kiddies employed for their demolition skills, I am resolving, here and now, to stop shaking my fist at the clouds and yelling to Get Off My Lawn.

Coincidentally, I just bought an old Pixel on eBay today. Because it had GrapheneOS already installed.

My interest in privacy is growing, but I confess I was mostly motivated by an admiration for the GrapheneOS project... They're really good at what they're doing, and they are swamped with work, and attacked by bots, weirdos and authoritarian speculators.

And, because I want to sport that monochromatic minimalist interface. Maybe I'll come out of my cocoon to pitch in.

The honourable thing?

More importantly this is the smart choice, the only thing, to do: Shake the dust from your sandals, walk away, don't look back.

This is the ongoing horror of the overbearing state, which wants to rule efficiently by knowing everything that everybody is doing all the time. Those who focus on and value law enforcement before freedom.

Racism, it seems to me, is often applied selectively, an active prejudice that is formed over time, using personal experiences and sometimes exposure to loudmouths.

You can be a raging racist and still participate and express respect for Others' cultures. It's a transitory thing, depends on your mood that day. Perhaps.

Being racist is not an absolute, right? Or is it, Once a racist, always a racist?

For example, I myself have respect and sometimes admiration for Mexicans (for their work ethic, from my personal experience working side-by-side in early life service industry), while also retaining a lifelong negative prejudice against Puerto Ricans (based, again, on personal, early life exposure to some bad apples).

I do not consider myself a racist, but I know I have prejudices and preferences that could offend some of my absolutist fellow citizens. I discriminate in my tolerances, enjoying those (sub)cultures that appeal to me, and turning away from those that rub me the wrong way (subwoofers and bass pounding noisemaking mofos).

But some haters just don't discriminate, and here is the problem facing our world. Someone, some entity, roused these rabble, stirred them up into a lather, turned them into intolerant hate machines.

It isn't racism that fuels their rage now, it is Other-ism. Anything other than the old and familiar is subject to backlash. So, Diwali can engage-the-rage because it reminds of all the other cultural intrusions and pollutions and dilutions and... You Will Not Replace Me! Christmas! Not Kwanzaa!

It is easy to rouse the rabble; difficult to rein in (or reign over) the rage. It is easy to tear stuff down; not so easy to build something better.

I hope our billionaire corporate overlords are learning a lesson from this...

>5) goto 1

This. Here is your main Microsoft engineering failure, using a Basic goto statement in their implementation of a marketing algorithm. Shame!

This fashion fad proves the adage "Some People just have too much money".

We need this accessory, or something else like this, because of the phatness of phablet-sized phones. But we don't need the overpriced fashion.

This story makes for an apt addendum to the current active HN discussion around poverty (Being poor vs. being broke)<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45928912>

When you're poor you find your fashion in resale shops and free stores.

Steve Cutts <https://www.stevecutts.com> explains American unhappiness and tendency to complain (even though we've had it better than almost everyone ever).

The Pursuit Of Happiness is humanity's universal right, but our culture and the economy depends upon everybody always wanting more, and better...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9dZQelULDk

How do you feel about legal immigration?

This was a good read and I thank Fraterkes for posting it.

I commiserate with the author, and his sense of self-chastisement: He might as well title the piece Pearls Before Swine and brush the dust from his shoulder.

This is a dilemma for the (socially) faithful, those who (naively) expect good behavior, those who generously give the benefit of the doubt. Even as a small voice whispers warnings, a theory of mind arises that imagines the other to be of like mind and is bound to be disappointed when a decidedly different species reveals itself.

Critics say we don't really need a National Ass calling-themselves-Scholars.

Here's the current US administration's goal-- to revise history and gaslight the world.

The Blaze is joining the not-so-subtle effort to "recast the entire story" and "unravel the carefully crafted, zealously defended Democrat narrative that massive crowds of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol as part of an insurrection to keep Trump in office and deny Joseph R. Biden Jr. the presidency."

The reality of what we witnessed with our own eyes doesn't matter.

This is part of their ongoing "shoot someone on 5th Avenue" moment, their one-trick-pony strategy, to pound on the table, toss a dead cat, and snicker at the rabble they roused into a stupor of regurgitated belief.

They're also recently made a coordinated effort to blacken the BBC for making slanted edits, trying to generate outrage over editorial positions and storytelling techniques, in order to plead their case in the court of public opinion. They got CBS to pay; maybe the BBC will pay too.

But it's all just an insult to our aggregated intelligence.

Agreed. The speculation is telling and reflects on the speculators more than reflecting a reality we understand. No one knows what will happen next.

I remember the days when Facebook and Google and other familiar giants were painted with the same brush-- all negative speculation as to them being overvalued and on the cliff's edge of doom, because no one could imagine how they'd survive their obscene overvaluations. How and when will they monetize? How will they ever bring in enough revenue to justify the insane capital spending?

Jumping up onto a stage, approaching uninvited, while wearing a full backpack... this kind of political stunt is ignorant and irresponsible.

Not as intrusive and obnoxious as a shaving cream pie-in-the-face, but actions like these lead to future reactionary violence from security personnel.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/billionaire-ai-overlord-sam-al...

I do all of my browsing with Javascript disabled. I've done this for decades now, as a security precaution mainly, but I've also enjoyed some welcome side-effects where paywalls disappeared and ads became static and unobtrusive. I wasn't looking for those benefits but I'll take 'em. In stride.

I've also witnessed a welcome (but slow) change in site implementations over the years: there are few sites completely broken by the absence of JS. Still some give blank screens and even braindead :hidden attributes thrown into the <noscript> main page to needlessly forbid access... but not as many as back in the day when JS first became the rage.

I don't know much about XSLT other than the fact that my Hiawatha web server uses it to make my directory listings prettier, and I don't have to add CSS or JS to get some style. I hate to see a useful standard abandoned by the big boys, but what can I do about it?

I bristle when I encounter pages with a few hundred words of content surrounded by literally megabytes of framework and flotsam, but that's the gig, right, wading through the crap to find the ponies.

Also, the hole in the wall will make it easier to locate the studs onto which you mount.

I am elderly and I am an addict. But my screen addiction is only a small part of my lifelong problem. The real, root cause, my major malfunction, is an ongoing aversion to reality, a constant urge and willfulness to escape, an addiction to fantasy and an increasing willingness to indulge myself.

I am not alone in this.

Yes, my first screen addiction was probably the NTSC broadcasts from a black & white childhood, but all those paperbacks counted too, Heinlein and Fleming and MacDonald et al.

Even my early career as a software engineer was motivated by a self-indulgent escape from reality. I preferred the small world of intense coding in 6510 cycle shaving loops, to the expansive reality that surrounded my basement. The outside world went on without me as my screen addiction grew all the way to 640x400.

Now people enjoy an escape into the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe). I've been living there since the print versions were only 12 cents each.

Nowadaze everybody I know have become as addicted as I've always been. But is it a problem for society? Or is shared fantasy the actual basis on which our society is built?

The crime is broadcasting without a license.

We are all guilty, making waves, swamping the spectrum with antagonistic signals that often interfere with each other.

We have too many signals in our society. The resulting noise, the cacophony of lies, are echoed and amplified and evolve into perpetual crosstalk and distortion.

Too many signals transmitting too frequently with too much power.

We can't really outlaw advertising.

But we could limit and license spectrum, like we do with radio frequencies. We could legislate the broadcasting and publication of information, based on that extended simile: regulating 'antenna power' and the airwave spectrum... Holding any broadcaster responsible for the public welfare of their listeners.

We share the infosphere. These channels are theoretically owned by us, the aggregate public. Certainly we are all swimming in the same ocean.

We might want to agree on some boundaries, and even licensing, for broadcasters.