shit_game

A significant factor in vapes not overtaking cigarettes is the tobacco lobby; they pay to play in legislature to ban vapes and associated paraphernalia in many US states, as well as create their own vape products to play both sides of the market. It's difficult to use vapes to quit smoking cigarettes when vape juice and single use vapes get banned, yet cigarettes remain legal.

"I am not <this thing>, but if I were, I'd have <this opionion> about it." isn't a terribly convincing argument. Opinions (good ones, at least) are shaped by experience - what experience is there to shape your opinion on AI affecting art when you aren't an artist?

And what will anyone actually do when they are bound by an arbitration agreement that prevents class action lawsuits and/or will find against the user because it's an arbitration agreement (with an arbiter that will bend knee and suck cock for the corporations and governments overseeing it - read Five Eyes[0] and Israeli espionage in the US[1])? Or are forced out of court due to the obscene cost of legal action in most nations due to lobbying efforts to protect corporations? Or never get to court due to said obscene costs, or even the simple knowledge of the ofence? Or are simply homeless because all of their money (their most recent paycheck) was stolen, and they are now derelict?

The legal systems that are in place (at least, those in the US) are not sufficient or even designed to act in any amount of favor of individuals. Even leveraging collective action (class action cases), most individuals are left worse off after judgement when they are wronged. Signalling that you are an affected class is effectively an admission of, at minimum, association - and worse guilt, of whatever an inteligence agency may suspect you of. Intelligence is not justice, and does not "protect" individuals under the same standards. If a government wants you to be wronged, they will accomplish it regardless of law, and the information they have regarding you will be leveraged as aggressively as possible. If you are simply wronged, the cost of accomplishing justice is often insurmountable.

In the most innocent case of wrongdoing by one of these surveilance devices, what would you, as an individual, do if your bank details were compromised as a result of a "smart" device exposing your credentials to bad actors? Obviously, you would contact your banking institution and try your best to rememedy the situation. But say, for example, this smart device is on your home network, has your login details, and possibly used your 2fa details because you used it to log in to your banking institution. That is You™. You logged in. You actioned something. It's verifiable because of your IP and your cookies and your 2fa code and the heuristics of your device usage (time of day, and the previous factors, and more). Many smart device applications already include SDKs that act as residential proxies - it's not impossible to believe that malicious ones may act as MITM or such. The possibility of 0Day expoloits or even backdoors can never be ruled out as you do not own these devices.

People should be subject to shame. Every government and every company are composed of people (for now) - these people are what action these possible futures, and who action the exploits of now. They are shameless by trade because that is their value. Much like the adtech industry thrives on the compromise of compensation to overcome the shame of doing wrong, so does intelligence and clandestine commercial exploitation. Money affords people the things that they want and need, which are becoming ever more impossible to acquire without succumbing to the shame of doing Bad Things™ to acquire it. You are never going to be able to sue LG because your bank details were leaked by a public DB or some other endpoint. Nobody will. Because the value of the information that LG provides to governments circumventing established anti-surveilance law (in the US, the 4th Amendment) through sales is worth more than any dollar amount it costs these parties.

Shame on every fucking one of you stains who implements this, if you can feel it, hidden in the walls of your owned property.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_espionage_in_the_Unite...

People could return to burning down enterprises that they find unsavory or detrimental to society, such as they did during the industrial revolution, but this is problematic in that it's violent and not something the modern person often considers as viable. A part of why people consider this unviable now is in-part due to the consequences of these surveilance technologies. It's difficult to accomplish a revolution when everyone is being spied on all the time.

>this is going to be a massive business liability.

No. this is going to go "unnoticed" or at least unactioned. These are surveilance devices - compromising their value as source of surveilance is neither in the interest of industry (who are selling and buying the surveilance) or government (who are buying and acting on it). The age of shame is over. Current world goernments have flourished under the premise of being terrible, horrible, awful, evil enterprises that do bad for the sake of either being bad or enriching the bad - a consumer device with a ToS that says it will spy on you spying on people is nothing now. Laws be damned, because laws mean nothing now. These devices bery well may soon be the only lawfully available devices in the consumer market precisely because of their surveilance capabilities. Governments are reluctanty catching up to the capabilities of digital technologies, and they're finding them more useful now than ever before. We will be burning witches again before we ever prosecute tech companies for doing bad things.

I can get that being annoying. I enjoy that keybinds are a configurable thing in the linux distributions and DEs that I've used, and I've found that most tend to have sane defaults. I assume that the situation is similar in macOS, but I don't know. The last time I've used any version of macOS was in 2008 during school, and I was far too young to really "get" computers, so I never experienced them in the way that I assume many people do now. The only other Apple products I've used since has been some combination of fourth gen and seventh gen ipod nanos (which were excellent, save for windows iTunes). Is there some secret sauce that Apple has that I'm just unexposed to that makes it wonderful?

What are your gripes with linux desktops?

> The fine ends up back in their pockets in months in the form of loans and grants and tax avoidances and so on.

More importantly and less often talked about, these fines end up back in their pockets because Meta is a defense contractor in all but name. Governments gladly buy data from these companies; the US hapily buys data because it circumvents the 4th amendment. The reason the US does not have strong data privacy laws is because strong data privacy laws are antithetical to big tech, technofascism, and a surveilance state. Yes, the people running these companies are doing evil unto the world for profit, and arguably yes, they ought to face justice for such, and yes, what they are doing ought to be illegal because it is morally wrong and incredibly damaging. But when that justice is monopolized by the same governments that rely on these evil acts to fulfil their desire for power and self preservation, nothing will happen. Meta has been complicit in multiple genocides, yet you will never see it on any lists that harm its business.

Aunty Donna were so wise.

This strikes me more as an art project than a commercial endeavour. It can obviously be both. I've worked with a friend on a similar boutique concept, and one of the driving factors in its possible success is scarcity economics, or the deliberate limiticy of products that drives intrigue, percieved value, and experience. These are all things that brand designers work tirelessly on (either to embody or avoid, branding is a very bizarre world in which many approaches work in many markets). I would wager a good bit that this probably lost money in isolation, but it being part of the design firms portfolio, it probably adds more value than it cost in credibility and brand identity/authenticity for themselves.

This was a very significant talking point through most of covid, actually. Granted, there is an orders-of-magnitude disparity between office buildings and data centers regarding both their resource consumption and their local financial return through employment. Its no surprise that the attitude towards data centers is much more negative.

> YOU have become their product

LOL

behind the curve, and completely missing the point.

I'm only ~5 minutes into that first video and every single thing she has said so far rings so stupid true that its almost painful hearing it said so bluntly. Making things takes a lot of time, requires lots of fundamental skills, is expensive to do yourself, generally isn't going to be better than something other people are selling, and should be fun the entire time you're doing it.

This should be the comment that people read on this post. Watch these videos.

Well put; the scope of usefulness of surveilance data lies well beyond what is in that data itself, but how it relates to other data. You don't necessarily need to decrypt data to distill value from it, as its metadata (location, datetime, medium, etc.) is also (and potentially more) useful when related with other metadata. Storing this data is also a monumental task, given the fidelity of records that many consumer devices create, store, and upload.

Regardless of the computational needs to facilitate mass surveilance, there are inescapable storage needs precipitated by surveilance. Governments want to retain data because its value in the future is unknown in the present. This is the entire premise behind the Harvest Now Decrypt Later[0] principle that fuels much of the previous surveilance actions taken by governments. But HNDL is speculative; it either hedges on the bet that computational breakthroughs will weaken encryption methods to the point where brute force attempts at decryption are not financially feasible for most actors but still physically possible, or rely on a backdoor in an encryption algorithm to decrypt data that is valuable. There has been much speculation about this feasibility and value RE: quantum computation and also the design of encryption algorithms from the ground up (see things like the Clipper Chip and RSA's relationship with the NSA).

With things like video, photo, audio, and liturgical surveilance, the data is largely out in the open (or simply purchased from their hosting platforms, leading to social media and adtech companies like Facebook and Google being defense contractors by nature) and does not need to be decrypted (in most cases) - rather, it needs to be correlated. This is a great task for machine learning because that's what the field has largely been engineered to do for the last 60 years, but it relies so, so, so heavily on having data to both train on and use in its practice. Storage of all data is the perfect end-goal of a surveilance state. Storage requires data centers. Data centers of this calibre are effectively black sites in that they are nigh impenetrable in both practical and legal senses, and I'd wager many data centers host actual digital black sites simply due to their ubiquity as means of doing so coupled with the necessity of the hardware and facilities they provide that are needed for doing so.

Theres really nothing that will ever be publicly available that would say "this data center has a hundred thousand SOTA GPUs in it that are doing gait recognition on every camera in every airport in the world in real time" versus "this data center is a bunch of tape machines that store everything ever recorded from every facsimilie of Room 641A[1]".

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvest_now%2C_decrypt_later

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

The perception of what a polymath is is changing incredibly fast, as both the floor and ceiling for being passable or outstanding in any field is rising exponentially. For the last 50-oddish years, it's been the case that being proficient with a single piece of software can make you an invaluable asset in industry; understanding the concepts behind the software and the problems it solves even moreso. Rather recently, we've reached a point where software ergonomics, freely available education and information, and even AI assistance in development or usage have lowered this floor in terms of cost, knowledge, effort, and skill. For example, it's trivially easier today to create a 3d animation than it was 5, 10, or 20 years ago, and the visual quality of it would be similarly disproportionately better.

The domains of different crafts are ever-expanding, including all of their history and all new developments, of which new developments seem to be coming at an ever-increasing pace as populations grow, internet access grows, and the free time of populations spent doing things other than merely surviving grows. There is a larger and broader base of knowledge necessary for a person to be considered competent in the current state of anything, and the number of disciplines is also increasing. Two decades ago, having a person specializing in frontend development for a specific web browser would have been unthinkable.

All of this work is built upon the backs of other people. Game engines, 3d modeling and texturing and animating, language design and implementation, audio software and sound design, graphics libraries, runtime optimizations, operating system APIs, networking improvements, distribution networks, etc. etc.. To think that any one person could possibly create everything they use to then create these final products, no matter the scale they are, is ignorant.

The reason that you bought your watch and the reason that other people buy these hand crafted mechanical watches are very, very different. Once upon a time, utility used to be what necessitated an accurate movement, and it came at great cost because of the skill, knowledge, precision, and artistic talent needed to make one; this justified further embellishing the movement with a beautiful case and band because it would be in poor taste to make something that is both expensive and ugly when your primary consumers would be aristocrats. Eventually timepieces became commodified as industrialization made their manufacture feasible at a larger scale, and later then the advent of the quartz crystal made mechanical movements functionally obsolete as a means of telling time accurately. Approaching perfect timekeeping in a mechanical movement is not meant to be utilitarian, but rather a practice in artistry. Mechanical watches are jewelry, and jewelry irrationally commands the price that any luxury does because it's a matter of taste and not utility. Nobody buying a Patek Philippe is doing so because they want millisecond accuracy via atmoic clock GPS signals - they buy Seikos for that.

Representation under a union is voluntary, and if an employee doesn't wish to be represented by that union, they may quit. I'm sure there are some other means of avoiding union representation in unionized workplaces in the US, but I don't know the speciics of them. This is generally called strikebreaking, though the act of working with a company outside of its unionized workforce isn't strongly defined outside the terms of a labor strike. Similarly to agreeing to the employment contract, agreeing to the union contract is binding and one ought to agree to its terms, which may be vague enough to state things such as "advancement in career title and duties may be subject to discretion of the union", or other similar terms. If you don't want to be represented by a union, you should choose not to be.

The tide is a local water level; every boat on the water is lifted by the tide. A swell or wave may lift one boat, regardless of tide.

Any company is free to hire whoever it cares at its own discretion, and in most (49/50) US states fire them without cause; perhaps due diligence is required of companies that are unionized to ensure that they are investing wisely in the labor they pay for, rather than accepting that all labor must be paid less on the argument that maybe it is of poorer quality than desired.

If you work in a unionized workplace and have complaints about a coworkers capability, your complaints should first be heard by your union because your union is the arbiter of your labor force, as per the contract you sign with said union.

Guilds were (and in some non-US places still are) a solution to this issue, in which some level of competence must be demonstrated through time spent and qualifications earned to gain acceptance to a guild. Some unions in the US still practice this measure of trial for their members, but they are generally relegated to the skilled trades, and this isn't something that common labor unions do.

The rising tide lifts all boats.

Denying people agency and power in their negotiation by claiming they are "not as good as someone else" is antithetical to the struggle of labor - work deserves to be compensated fairly.

>When I worked at a unionized place I was blocked from an opportunity my employer offered me because it was better than what the standard negotiated terms were

Your union blocked this because your employer was trying to break your unions negotiating power by separating your interests from the collective workforce. If people who are sympathetic to management and accept that they will be compensated greater by acting against the interests of the labor union, the union should block these promotions. If you don't want to protect your coworkers by negotiating with them, then you must be interested in exploiting them by negotiating against them. Labor is a zero sum game.

Arguably, "exceptional" products are not ones that can vanish on a whim, like a great, great many of Google products have. Or they actually compete with other products in the same space, like a great, great many of Google products have not. Also, one would argue a good product is not one that is bought out and then deliberately destroyed to prevent its expansion into or development of a market for itself. Google is an advertising company with tremendous reach because of a handful of very aggressive and very fortunate business decisions that successfully exploded. It now uses its massive influence to exert market pressure, but the market does not always bend to its whim because sometimes it does things wrong, some of those products it pushes fail, and I can only assume some products are slaughtered because of projections on their performance regardless of their quality or utility.

https://killedbygoogle.com/

>One of my sites is image heavy and serves 10 TB of traffic per month

I can't imagine this kind of traffic without acting as a CDN, advertising broker, pornographer, or part of a massive ecommerce site. I have to wonder, what are you doing that generates 10TB of traffic per month?

Only tangentially related, but I've found myself down a rabbit hole with some ancient BigKeys keyboards (designed/manufactured by Greystone Digital), and a small handful of them have a physical switch on their underside that switches them between QWERTY and ASDF layout; it's genuinely perplexing because the code theyre running on the boards is not at all standard PS/2 or USB (save a few later revisions/models). There is a DFK48 V1.2 (mfg 1994) that I have been fighting with for some time now, and it angers me to no end.

The lengths that peripheral manufacturers will go to to create "functionality" is wild, having looked at hardware like this for the first time. Granted, I'm working with what is widely considered an accessibility HID, the fact that "stickey keys" (as theyre known in Windows) is a default function of this keyboard, which breaks all common passive PS/2 -> USB adapters due to encoding differences, significantly fucks up my workflow in using it with modern hardware by using unique encodings AFAICT. It's a wonderful puzzle, but an annoyance for someone trying to accomplish anything.

I'm confident this shit could be oneshot with LLMs, but that's not the point of the work, in case anyone was considering chiming in about them.

Part of me needs to realize that this was made 30+ years ago, before we knew what we now know. But another part of me feels intense animosity for such early, unabashed, and shameless abandon in regards to HID standards/protocols. Using what is effectively Stickey Keys by default and breaking PS/2 -> USB adaptability because of that is annoying as hell, even if the thing is $50 on ebay.

lobste.rs has a pretty decent system with a global invite tree, where users can provide access for other people. it comes with the benefit of creating an association graph of accounts that allows for swift moderation, and lets the userbase grow within a community of people likely to appreciate the culture.

I was just about to say that my question in regards to this was "what are web browsers doing about it?"

Hypothetically, preemptive market recapture? This could theoretically make foss OSs non-kosher for any suitably large market (websites, games, chat platforms, etc), and serve to force foss OSs into a niche where theyre technically capable of being personal desktop software, but practically unusable because of lockout.

If I counted things correctly, 53,836.

I wanted to hook into the THREE object and explore the scene, but I wasn't able to figure out how to bring it back into scope after it's been optimized out of the js context, so instead I searched through the bundle to find where it unpacks the data and did that manually.

That first photo looks so much like a watercolor that it's uncanny. Glass is such a cool material.

Whats to stop malicious actors (bad extensions, compromised cdn, etc.) from painting over the qr code or injecting their own? This is so incredibly terrible.

> That psychological environment is not conducive to art and fun. It sucks.

I think that two significant social conditions that very strongly affect how people socialize online now are

a) there are multiple parallel well-established, invasive, unstoppable, government-sanctioned economies of theft that seek to profit at everyones expense (advertising, AI, surveilance). Why would anyone want to share anything if it's going to be stolen? Why would anyone want to be online if they're going to be spied on? Why would anyone want to look at anything if it's all advertisements?

b) it's politically en vogue for major online platforms to allow (and even propagate) hateful content because of the current political situation in the west. The companies that have grown to control the online spaces that people use are the same companies operating the economies of theft, and have demonstrated that they will happily bend the knee if it means they are allowed to continue stealing and spying and selling all this data to governments. Why would anyone want to use a platform filled with hate speech and political propaganda?

I would describe this combination of conditions as repulsive. There's no more appeal in the social internet because the bad guys won.