Notices by sungo (sungo@hackers.town)

Oh hello xorg screen blanking, my old foe

It probably needs said again that the RPI is not an open product, is not designed for being hacked on itself, and is full of proprietary closed code. If you're use an rpi and think you're throwing up your middles to The Powers, you're not. You're funding Broadcom.

National Weather Service confirms that at least seven tornadoes touched down in the Dayton Ohio area on Monday. Three of those were likely EF3 level.

https://www.whio.com/news/local/ef3-tornado-confirmed-beavercreek/vjklb2LUNZvmtyj78jNaZN/

If any of you are hams who used to go to the shindig in Hara Arena in Dayton, it's not gone but the front half of it is severely damaged.

Let me get this straight. The Firefox function that allows Mozillia to download and run “studies” is named Normandy, after the WW2 site where the Allies invaded Axis-controlled territories? You know, where major powers forcibly landed troops, took control of the area, and staged an invasion of the whole country? It says soooo much about the philosophy and design of that Firefox function.

Let me tell you something, townies and listeners.

I'm here on HT because this community has it going on. Cool folks, cool projects, cool ideas. Yeah, a lot of us love a good fire, particularly if it's flying a megacorp flag. But I want to see what you're building, from physical to philosophical. The weirder the better.

There is a lot to burn down these days. And burn it we shall. But at the end, when we're sitting in the ashes, successful beyond our dreams, what the fuck then? If we don't already have a culture of creation, then there will be nothing left.

So build some stuff. Dream some new dreams. Post that shit up here. And if the haters come, well, I did promise you something to burn.

Image source: https://leasticoulddo.com/comic/20190417

"The human's decisions were based on an unbroken straight line chain of 85 million years of "I am the primate who did not get eaten", layered with decades of fine motor control trailing. Whereas the AI based its decisions on whatever ad hoc junk a bunch of low-paid contractors dumped into the training set over a period maybe as long as 18 months.

So they're building an AI whose goal is to lie to you -- to build your confidence in decisions made by AIs.

We are so completely doomed."

- JWZ - "Frogger AI Explains Its Decisions" https://www.jwz.org/blog/2019/04/frogger-ai-explains-its-decisions/

Burn, motherfucker, burn.

"Facebook revealed on Thursday it didn't properly mask the passwords of hundreds of millions of its users and stored them as plain text in an internal database that could be accessed by its staff."

[cnn] https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/21/tech/facebook-password-database/index.html

This is an older article but I still agree with it. Coding as a blue collar job is why we also absolutely need labor and trade unions for coding. Too many coders are essentially wage slaves or old school gold panners, deluded by the notion that they're going to have The Idea and strike it rich. We need to organize, accept that the huge salaries are aberrations, dig in and protect our own from predatory employers.

https://www.wired.com/2017/02/programming-is-the-new-blue-collar-job/

HT @sng

Thing about being a digital plumber is that your name gets lost to history. So, yeah, Time Warner Cable won a technical emmy for essentially inventing this era of video streaming on the internet, particularly to mobile devices. But I know whose handwriting was on that hotel napkin, which hotel’s logo was on the napkin, and I know who was at that hotel bar table. I know whose names were on the commits and who sold the dream to our CEO. No patent carries our names because slicker employees wrote patents based on our work. No standard carries our names because we were already on to the next impossible problem.

We didn’t cure cancer. We didn’t smash the patriarchy. But we did change the world. When you watch Netflix or Amazon Video, when you hit a porn site, or when you watch a Twitch feed, we’re there in the bits watching back. We are the nameless, the forgotten, the digital plumbers.