Notices by Coffee & Aspirin (deejoe@mastodon.sdf.org), page 8

I'm really, really pissed off. These are not TVs, these are bloated smartphones with large screens. Why the fuck would I choose to have Google Assistant on a fucking TV.

I hereby declare the #MastoOps hashtag for the use of Mastodon System Operators (MSOs) to discuss the operation of Mastodon Systems (known as Mastodon Instances in the common vernacular).

Such topics could include, but are not limited to:

Containerization Strategy and Logistics
Webscale Engineering
Content Delivery Network (
CDN
) Comparisons and Discussion
Coordination between instance MSOs
Cloud

NEVER GIVE UP. NEVER! BE DEFIANT TO YOUR DESPAIR. IT'S NEVER TOO LATE TO FIND YOUR WAY, AND YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT'S AROUND THE CORNER.

BE POWERFUL. 💪 :xatu:

Google admitted that contractors can access recordings made by Assistant, after some of its recordings were leaked.

Been absolutely refusing to use any of these devices for precisely this reason. Google and Amazon have both been very quiet on how data is kept and access to it. The recent NHS direct news, teaming up with amazon to give medical advice, horrified me for exactly this.
Both companies have had data breaches, they should be allowed nowhere near NHS services

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/11/google-home-assistant-listen-recordings-users-privacy

'There is a form of #privacy being violated— activist Maciej Cegłowski calls it #ambientprivacy: “the understanding that there is value in having our everyday interactions with one another remain outside the reach of #monitoring, and that the small details of our daily lives should pass by unremembered. What we do at home, work, church, school or in our leisure time does not belong in a #permanentrecord.

Not every #conversation needs to be a #deposition.”'

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/11/can-we-talk-in-confidence-the-death-of-candour-in-the-age-of-surveillance

They're not weeds. They're native pioneer species attempting to restart ecological succession to reclaim lawns for nature.

We live in the future. I just said “I don’t think I’d give my TV Internet access” and it didn’t feel weird at all.

White teenagers think it's acceptable to "act out" with symbols of hate because they have absorbed the white American value that racial equality is a matter of respectability, not morality. Because white ppl's idea of racial harmony is so divorced from moral values but consists of injunctions for politeness (don't say slurs etc.) their children break these injunctions for simple shock value without caring who they're hurting.

I grew up on dialup. 1200bps, max. I remember what it was like to get anything done at that speed, and now that it's no longer a thing I wouldn't inflict it upon anyone. That's why I try to keep my stuff as lightweight as possible, with as few deps as possible.

Treat others as you'd want to be treated, right?

A couple of years back I went to an HTML5 meetup and hung out with a bunch of web developers. I suck at web design (so much so that I didn't bother to try to write a new theme for my website, I used one that someone else made and tweaked it a little). One of the webdevs noticed that I use a couple of adblockers and yelled at me for taking money out of his mouth. That one cannot eat money, and that he gets paid a (much larger) salary (than I do) is beside the point.

So I put my laptop on the local network (Windbringer had been tethered to my mobile - OPSEC, ya' know) and asked him for the URL of the website he works on. He gave it to me. I opened it in a bare Firefox profile (no addons, no config tweaks, new right out of the box). His precious website loaded fully after just under three minutes.

Then, to make things fair, I rebooted Windbringer, got back on the local wireless, and opened it in my usual Firefox profile, with all the adblockers turned on. His website loaded in about five seconds.

"Your website loads so much tracking garbage up front that your page won't load in less than three minutes. I don't have time for that." And I left.

Unsurprisingly, I haven't been invited back, but my point stands - too much crap means your page won't load in a reasonable period of time.

@craigmaloney @maloki @briecs "The mediocre programmer"! Wow, I was just thinking the other day that I'd love to see a book (or a talk, or something) with that title. I'll keep an eye on it!