Bobby Brown @bobbyd0g@hellsite.net

Some Stafford Beer for your Friday.

The closer I get to this stuff, the clearer it is to me that "addict/surveil/extract/sell" biz models have ruined the internet really are wrecking mental health, propagating disinfo, dissolving social cohesion, etc. with very little real compensating upside. I think the case for this gets stronger everyday. But there is a TON of resistance to this among "tech people" generally, even those who work for places that would benefit from the demise of surveillance capitalism.

Mastodon admins: remember that your threat model is now based on the people who have chosen to make their home in your instance. If that includes Saudis or Chinese people critical of their governments, Turkish journalists, any kind of diplomatic personnel, military aerospace engineers... their threats are now your threats.

Today is the day. Web Push on iOS.

https://webkit.org/blog/13878/web-push-for-web-apps-on-ios-and-ipados/

Roses are red, my code is a disaster
git push --force origin master

A reminder that if you claim something is end-to-end encrypted and there is a vulnerability, it's quite possible that people will die.

E2E systems are safety critical and shouldn't be taken lightly.

I wonder how many people don't know that Firefox's "reader view" can bypass a lot of paywalls they hit. You'll have to hit refresh after enabling it on a page, but that's it. No special extensions required.

(This doesn't work on all paywalls. Just the ones that initially deliver you the content on the page before some javascript takes it away.)

just uploaded some ultra obscure freeware to #macintosh garden: micahsoft Button Maker

this little utility lets you generate mac os x aqua-like buttons programmatically.

afaik, this program hasn't been seen by a human being in 20 years. was an obscure internet archive find.

https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/micahsoft-button-maker

accidentally wrote "saad" instead of "saas" in a text to my partner; they immediately coined "Software as a Disappointment"

and honestly, where is the lie

Me, as aspiring staff eng: I want to be in the room where decisions are made

Me in the room where decisions are made: I wonder if the window is locked and how far the drop would be if I climbed out

OMG.

1. Google has some bad summarization telling people that throwing batteries into the ocean is good.
2. News articles were written about this.
3. Bing's summarization interprets these articles as advice to ... throw batteries in the ocean!

🤦

last chance to use tools to easily move your followings from Twitter to Mastodon since Twitter is finally shutting down their free API. https://fedifinder.glitch.me/ was handy for me

kind of amazing poetic justice that we created an easily searchable archive of almost all human knowledge and now we’re going to render it near-useless by filling it with brainless bullshit written by algorithms

Well this is utterly fucking nightmarish

Summary from tweet: Voice actors are increasingly being asked to sign rights to their voices away so clients can use artificial intelligence to generate synthetic versions that could eventually replace them.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/5d37za/voice-actors-sign-away-rights-to-artificial-intelligence