Ariel Millennium Thornton @arielmt@computerfairi.es

Last thing: When I said "No" is a Privacy-Enhancing Technology, I didn't just mean an opt-out.

I mean the engineers growing a fucking spine and telling their boss, "No, we shouldn't collect this data."

"No" is a better privacy-enhancing technology than the state-of-the-art differential privacy techniques.

It's efficient! Not collecting data requires at most O(1) bandwidth, O(1) storage, and O(1) compute.

"No" is not "Maybe later".

"No" is not "Ask me again in 3 days".

"No" is not "Maybe after a few more beers", since many of the people that need to hear the first part of his message likely also needs the second.

Here's a privacy-enhancing technology for you to consider:

"No."

You don't need to know. You don't need to measure. The efficacy of an advertising campaigns, market segmentation, and relevance targeting should be minimized for the good of humanity.

At #RealWorldCrypto this year, there was a session on "privacy-enhancing technologies".

The first talk in the session was about a new encryption method for Tor.

The next two were painful examples of "a person cannot be convinced of something when their salary depends on them not knowing it".

Advertisers wants to collect signals about populations without being individually identifying. So let's talk about differential privacy techniques to let them do that.

One example was "Meta wants to know what percentage of its teneage users blocked a contact today".

At no point did they address the elephants in the room.

• Why do they want this data in the first place?
• What are they even doing with this signal?
• Have you considered telling them to fuck off and not collect it in the first place?

As tempting as it might be to hand wave it and say "well yes but their business model depends on it" to which I say "then perish".

same

Salty today.

"If you want to improve the model's output, you can write skill files with more specific instructions!"

"Oh wow so like a file that tells the computer to do exactly what you want?"

"Yep!"

"You're never gonna believe this."

how it feels using a smartphone in 2026

Bein' my sassy chee self! 💜

Arts by Claire Bear (https://clairebear.fursona.one/)

Claude Desktop app was unresponsive for users for several hours because it did not account for daylight savings time:
https://status.claude.com/incidents/pqpgkf52p3tg

> Root cause: Users with scheduled tasks in Claude Cowork or Claude Code who are in a timezone that observed daylight saving time last night were affected by an infinite loop. When the app tried to locate tasks scheduled during the “skipped” hour, it couldn’t resolve them and got stuck.

Enterprise quality. Serious company. Many wow. 🤡

#AI #Hype #Claude

TIL a LLM-based simulation of a specific person (like Grammarly does without asking) is called a “sloppelgänger”

This is a gentle reminder that you should probably change the air filters in your home.

It's probably been a while.