zephyreon

There’s been a few threads on the Salt Typhoon operation but government encouraging use of encryption feels like a new twist.

Why am I being redirected to what appears to be a randomly generated authkit subdomain? Please take some time to ensure your product appears to be your product.

https://valuable-nebula-60.authkit.app/

I’ve always been a big fan of Jekyll because it’s so easy to use & so stable. This adds a lot of value to the ecosystem. I’ve built a bunch of faculty websites over the years where I needed a lot of structured, repetitive data (papers, honors/awards, etc.). It would have been so much easier to manage if I could have stored that data in a database instead of just flat files.

As a user of Transit (thank you for such a great app!) this was always one of my biggest annoyances. Not just transit though — with any app that supports navigation on public transit (looking at you Apple Maps).

I figured someone was working on this but it’s so refreshing to read about the thought and level of detail that went into your design. What an effort too! Congratulations transit team, you all should be so proud for solving what I’d imagine is one of transit’s largest small gripes.

I have a CarThing and managed to get this working on it after several attempts and it is actually pretty good. If they revamp the website and README it really has the potential to take off.

I was able to submit an edit request for the lynxboo link by guessing the email on record was hello@lynx.boo.

This seems like it could be abused pretty easily. Not necessarily insecure but I could get a lot of spam no?

Google also revamped their appointment scheduling feature in Google Calendar, though I believe it is limited to Google Workspace subscribers. It’s basic but works quite well.

https://workspace.google.com/resources/appointment-schedulin...

Amazing thank you for this.

As an aside, I’ve started reviewing companies’ privacy policies, terms of service, etc. before I decide to sign up. This is coming from someone who has previously just clicked “I Agree” to whatever terms are there on signup (be nice).

Laughably, the privacy policy states in several areas that they only collect, share, or retain data consistent with the privacy policy. E.g.

> The Company will retain Your Personal Data only for as long as is necessary for the purposes set out in this Privacy Policy.

And the privacy policy essentially provides for every purpose they would want to use your data. Sharing, for example:

> With Affiliates: We may share Your information with Our affiliates, in which case we will require those affiliates to honor this Privacy Policy. Affiliates include Our parent company and any other subsidiaries, joint venture partners or other companies that We control or that are under common control with Us.

> With business partners: We may share Your information with Our business partners to offer You certain products, services or promotions.

Pretty egregious.

https://www.eartho.io/legal/privacy-policy

The privacy policy is a litany of statements about how they collect all sorts of data and may share it with pretty much anyone under the sun.

Some of the more egregious ones I found:

Regarding using a social media provider to log in.

> We may collect Personal data that is already associated with Your Third-Party Social Media Service's account, such as Your name, Your email address, Your activities or Your contact list associated with that account.

Kind of a given if you’re logging in with a social media provider but still.

Regarding collection of your location.

> While using Our Application, in order to provide features of Our Application, We may collect, with Your prior permission: Information regarding your location. We use this information to provide features of Our Service, to improve and customize Our Service. The information may be uploaded to the Company's servers and/or a Service Provider's server or it may be simply stored on Your device.

Regarding sharing of your data.

> With Affiliates: We may share Your information with Our affiliates, in which case we will require those affiliates to honor this Privacy Policy. Affiliates include Our parent company and any other subsidiaries, joint venture partners or other companies that We control or that are under common control with Us.

> With business partners: We may share Your information with Our business partners to offer You certain products, services or promotions.

How we use your data section basically says we use it for everything and share it with everyone.

https://www.eartho.io/legal/privacy-policy

My immediate thought was that this was a post about how someone got root access to a cigarette lighter and I was totally ready to believe it.

My parents oven gets regular software updates so I didn’t even question whether the cigarette lighter was “smart.”

10DLC is a nightmare. I’ve had to deal with it across several different projects and it essentially comes down to very specific language & processes for opting-in / removing subscribers. Feels like 10DLC was designed to be obtuse — if I was going to spam people I certainly wouldn’t want to jump through all the hoops.

That said, if you look up the best practices and use the very specific language / processes that the DCAs are looking for, you should be able to get approved with little effort.

Some things I’ve learned, in no particular order:

— If your provider (e.g. Twilio) has specific language they advise you include on a form / website / etc., use that exact language verbatim.

— For forms where you collect a phone number, have the compliance text very visible, perhaps even sacrificing UI/UX. After your campaign is approved, you can clean it up.

— Make sure you include your business / project name & opt-out instructions (reply STOP) in every sample message you submit for the campaign.

— Stick to the use case you selected & do not deviate. Make sure your campaign details align with the campaign description.

— Marketing-related campaigns — avoid if at all possible.

I appreciate that people still find AM radio useful, nostalgic, etc. This feels like something that should not be regulated. Let auto manufacturers decide to include it or not, consumers will vote with their wallets. I doubt most people will miss AM radio all that much.

I’m thinking of knowledge regurgitation in the context of a very structured environment — a la knowledge base for a company & internal policies as opposed to the entire internet.

A better way to convey this might be that LLMs are good at being conversational and given the appropriate context and guardrails, they can regurgitate knowledge from said context with reasonable accuracy.

Google’s mishaps (eating rocks, etc.) demonstrate there’s still quite a bit of work to do for this to work at scale, but the tech is still pretty good.

I think a lot of the time it’s about jumping on the hype train. “We’re going to use shiny new AI Agent for X” is easy to understand for higher-ups as progress. This feels pretty normal for progress.

I do think some of the underlying technologies have merit in certain areas, but imo they’re mostly in customer service/success where actual agents are overburdened and thus can’t provide a good customer experience. Knowledge regurgitation is something current tech (LLMs) are good at, so to me this makes sense. Feels like in the longer term more technical functions will start to work better once reasoning becomes better.

I’ll echo this, I found Atomic Habits to be one of the only self help books whose strategies I actually use on a daily basis. Required a lot of work but I really improved myself after first reading this book.

facepalm duh

> For $1/mo you get 10 pages (color included), and overages are 10 cents/pg.

The math works out when I think about it but for some reason I’m still floored by the fact that $12 only gets you 10 pages of paper for an entire year.