Notices by Federated Republic of Sean (freakazoid@retro.social), page 3

Earlier I posted about the possibility of a de facto social credit system, and I speculated that it was probably already happening. Turns out it was.

So much for Apple not building its business on monetizing the private details of your life. They're as much surveillance capitalism as Facebook or Google.

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/apple-trust-score-iphone-data-black-mirror-email-phone-fraud-a8546051.html

@kelbot @minoru @saper @ajroach42 As I thought, an RSS to JSON converter was trivial to write. I kinda feel like a tiny command line program like this should be in Rust or Go or something, though, because to make it work you still need to install feedparser, which if you're being a purist will require a virtualenv, etc.

https://github.com/seanlynch/misc_python/blob/master/rss2json.py

The strongest nostalgia I get is for a time when I was excited about the future of computing. I have dreams about being on that alternate timeline all the time. Now that I've seen the direction it went, I'd prefer to go back to when it was just possibilities.

@Lexi @deejoe @natecull @enkiv2 I would love to see spreadsheets and databases make the tools of software engineering more accessible to their users. The major problem that I'd see with folks writing things in Apps Script or inside spreadsheets at Google was that there was no version control or release process or ability to easily write tests. There's no reason that stuff couldn't have been built in.

If you're interested in devops/SRE but don't feel like you have the experience or education yet, and/or you like task-driven work and incident response/management, and you're interested in working on the SF peninsula, have I got the job for you! I'm building a team that will be responsible for keeping the lights on at Roblox.

Electron is basically one giant security hole.

https://groups.google.com/forum/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer#!msg/cap-talk/2PP7eH1gehk/T6_YjfGHCQAJ

Families often avoid conflict by not talking about politics and religion at the dinner table. Facebook is like being at the dinner table 24x7, except that it's designed so that you forget your entire family is there. It's also designed to make you angry and get you to talk about politics and religion. In other words, Facebook is designed to provoke conflict in families, which has torn many families apart that might otherwise still be able to tolerate one another.

I don't understand *at all* why a company would be willing to publish marking material in a "Medium" where there's a "Get Started" button in the top right AND an overlay at the bottom that tries to get the reader to sign up for ANOTHER COMPANY'S product.

If your marketing director thinks this is a good idea, FIRE THEM.

Anyone know of an #HTML5 #microformat for #OPML for sharing #blogs / #RSS feeds?

You want cyberpunk dystopia? Because that's how you get cyberpunk dystopia.

This is massive corporate welfare for the giant (mostly American) corporations who can easily afford to do the filtering that lets them keep their safe harbor under this law (and are already doing it). It's also corporate welfare for the American content cartel.

And here I thought Europeans didn't like Google, Facebook, and Hollywood.

Any #astronomy folks know of any amateur experiment to extract relative #pulsar phase and frequency, say for position and timing purposes? I'm thinking galactic positioning system in your backyard instead of using x-ray pulsars in space.

I'm very conflicted about #GDPR. Frankly, I don't see how an intelligent human being can not be conflicted about it. This law hurts Google and Facebook, yes. But it hurts smaller businesses far more. And it sets a precedent for other kinds of unilateral laws governing the Internet such as censorship laws and laws forcing companies to share information about dissidents with the government. China is as big a market as Europe.