• 0 Posts
  • 36 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 20th, 2023

help-circle
  • For those wondering about the upswing here:

    If the age verification movement goes unchecked, it’s possible that you could be forced to tie your government ID to much of your online activity, Gillmor says. Some civil rights groups fear it could usher in a new era of state and corporate surveillance that would transform our online behaviour.

    “This is the canary in the coalmine, it isn’t just about porn,” says Evan Greer, director of Fight for the Future, a digital rights advocacy group. Greer says age verification laws are a thinly veiled ploy to impose censorship across the web. A host of campaigners warn that these measures could be used to limit access not just to pornography, but to art, literature and basic facts about sex education and LGBTQ+ life.


  • I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.

    Corporate culture is a malicious bad actor.

    Corporate culture, from management books to magazine ads to magic quadrants is all about profits over people, short term over stability, and massaging statistics over building a trustworthy reputation.

    All of it is fully orchestrated from the top down to make the richest folks richer right now at the expense of everything else. All of it. From open floor plans to unlimited PTO to perverting every decent plan whether it be agile or ITIL or whatever, every idea it lays its hands on turns into a shell of itself with only one goal.

    Until we fix that problem, the enshittification, the golden parachutes, and the passing around of horrible execs who prove time and time again they should not be in charge of anything will continue as part of the game where we sacrifice human beings on the Altar of Record Quarterly Profits.


  • Aside from one (seemingly very out of place at the time) early mention that the author used Bitcoin, there was no hint of it being pro-bitcoin until the very, very end.

    I found it to be a very worthwhile article right up until that point and even slightly intriguing from an academic perspective after that point.

    I despise the endless blind parroting of the typical cryptobro refrains elsewhere on the Internet when crypto is brought up and I still liked the article, so I wouldn’t write it off just because one guy with a cryptohammer inevitably sees the very real SMTP problem as a cryptonail in the end. It’s natural when you have a “solution in search of a problem” situation like we do with crypto (and block chain, and for that matter SharePoint. People with knowledge of a thing often try to use it to solve problems it probably wasn’t meant for.)


  • they could really tell the IRS to audit 501© and remove their status from the churches and bullshit Republican charities

    That would be juuuuuust about the dumbest thing they could possibly do. It would mobilize gigantic swaths of voters who are heavily invested in rhetoric over fact-checking.

    Doing away with Roe mobilized many of those voters who could be considered to be fence sitters towards the left. Removing church tax exemptions would move them right back and it would do NOTHING to solve the problem, because while the actual big offenders are happily USING the hell out of that tax exemption, they’re rich enough that they’ll get along fine without it.

    It WOULD hurt a whole lot of TINY churches that employ 1-50 people per church and actually do community work, though. All of those would go away. That’s a LOT of rural food shelves.

    I’m largely against the religious tax exemption, but that’s a problem we should worry about AFTER we can replace the nationwide infrastructure we’d be dismantling by doing so with something at least as effective as what’s there now.



  • They’re processed, yes. The corn is milled, pressed into triangles, coated with preservative-heavy flavor powder and cooked in one order or another, possibly repeatedly.

    What makes it ULTRA processed?

    Frickin… most raw potatoes are “processed” because they’re typically not covered in topsoil when they get put in 5lb plastic bags.

    A grass-fed organic, antibiotic free, roaming free-range massaged poterhouse steak is “processed” because it’s not still attached to the cow.

    I’m trying to understand the definition, here. Almost everything is processed to some degree or another.

    Is white flour ultra processed because they bleach and de-hull the wheat berries? Or only when it’s made into cake flour? Or do both of those count as “processed” and only “cake MIX” counts as “ultra processed”?

    Am I making sense?


  • Do they?

    I don’t even know what an “ultra processed food” •IS•.

    How is it different than the “processed cheese product” that passes for most individually wrapped “American cheese” cheese slices? Or is that ultra processed?

    Are Doritos ultra processed or just the regular kind of processed?

    Which kind of ground beef qualifies for “ultra”? Only the pink slime or anything that’s been chemically treated?

    I’m not being a pedantic contrary asshat, I legitimately do not know what qualifies something to be in this category and why it’s worse than normal processing.

    Bpa from plastic tubing used in the processing of Annie’s organic leeched into the food. Is that considered contamination or a side effect of processing?










  • This is also why there’s such a a prevalence of flashing warning banners, fake pseudobluescreens, and other scary shit disguised in chrome notifications.

    The notifications in chrome are as close to on by default as you can get and with the right code snippets you can make it look like the FBI locked down your workstation and you need to call them.

    Firefox should start hardening against this behavior now because popularity gets targeted even more specifically.

    Make it an end user safety feature.

    Force every notification to have

    “This is a notification from a website that you elected to receive by allowing notifications. You can disable these notifications here”

    with a link to the setting on the frame of of every one, no fullscreen allowed, no flashing, double-check and prohibit the words FBI, CIA, NSA, TSA, IRS, Social Security, Microsoft, etc.


  • What do you use now?

    I work in IT and between the Advent of “agile” methodologies meaning lots of documentation is out of date as soon as it’s approved for release and AI results more likely to be invented instead of regurgitated from forum posts, it’s getting progressively more difficult to find relevant answers to weird one-off questions than it used to be. This would be less of a problem if everything was open source and we could just look at the code but most of the vendors corporate America uses don’t ascribe to that set of values, because “Mah intellectual properties” and stuff.

    Couple that with tech sector cuts and outsourcing of vendor support and things are getting hairy in ways AI can’t do anything about.




  • And while it hurts now, it’s REALLY going to hurt when large swaths of useful answers that don’t exist anywhere else are gone and there’s nothing replacing them.

    Noone writes hundreds of pages of documentation for their stuff anymore. Without the collected knowledge learned from experience there, what do we have?

    Unless we have source code to read, very little.

    I’m still feeling the pain of google search results sucking combined with most of the large coding forums being gone and reddit slowly going to garbage. Stack Overflow was the last bastion of collected knowledge of it’s type… and it’s not like it was 25 years ago where we still had phonebook-sized manuals for almost all major software because agile has killed the concept of exhaustive definitive documentation for a given version of something.

    I used to sorta roll my eyes at people shouting about federating everything, but at this point I’m scared and agreeing with them.