orthogonal to alive @avi@computerfairi.es

dear nonprofits: "size of pride parade" is an awful metric for the quality of life of lgbtq+ people and you need to stop

I'm circling back to one of my favorite writers, Corey Robin, and his definiton of conservatism: "A meditation on--and theoretical rendition of--the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back."

This is what the poor white person has in common with the billionaire: having power, and seeing it threatened. It's the common thread behind reactionary ideology from bathroom bills to bank deregulation. It's not false consciousness at all. It's a true expression of having held social power and refusing to admit that that power might be illegitimate.

You might argue that there will be more to be gained if you erase racism and focus on the real shared enemy, the bourgeoisie, and you'd certainly be right, but you'd be missing a key component of what's happened here.

Namely, someone who has no power in the economic sphere has been given the right to have power in a social sphere. In other words, they sit at the top of a different hierarchy now. Sure, they don't currently have anything to gain from lowering billionaire taxes, but that's not the point. They now have a vested interest in *maintaining hierarchies exactly as they are.*

Because if being a billionaire is illegitimate, then whiteness might be illegitimate, and then the whole social order around which they've built their lives might crumble.

However, things start to go wrong, when you realize that a lot of the voices he's been amplifying are the voices of popular Youtubers, a lot of whom are part of the cryptofascist skeptic community. Then, there's the reminiscing of the old bygone era of the internet, with the implicit desire to enact a palingenesis of the online culture circa 2007. Calling it the "golden age" of the internet.

Here's the truth, there are no golden ages of the internet, every era has its own set of issues and problems, and I can tell you that 13 years ago, the internet was a toxic cesspit of neoliberalism, where online american jingoism started becoming popular, not to mention all the normalized homophobia, transphobia, misogyny and ableism running rampant.

This is what goes through my head when I'm faced with liberals' hot topics

*you're not really that way you just taught yourself to act that way on purpose*

*you're not really riding a bike you just taught yourself to ride a bike on purpose*

@onf Android is based on the Linux kernel. Linux, as an explicit design decision made by Linus Torvalds, lacks a Hardware Abstraction Layer. The upshot to this is that kernel changes break all hardware drivers; this is intended to force hardware manufacturers to open-source their drivers, but in practice they just stop updating anything as soon as the hardware is off the market.

When Android updates, all phone hardware drivers have to update. But each Android phone is different: cellular radio, wi-fi radio, Bluetooth radio, CPU, GPU, display, touch panel, microphone, GPS, audio system, etc., so the OS update is slowed down to the slowest driver update. Google’s control over this is restricted to whatever agreements they have with hardware manufacturers, but Android’s specs are open and Google has a test suite with a guarantee: if your driver and hardware passes these tests, you can sell your phone and call it Android Compatible. So Google doesn’t have any way to require that manufacturers keep their hardware up to date, except as pertains to phones that Google itself is manufacturing and selling.

Meanwhile, cell phone radios pose their own problems. They’re a bit like cable modems: they have to share a communication channel with their neighbors, and a sufficiently haywire modem can screw up a network for everyone in an area. This is why Comcast only lets you use one of a few modems (and prefers to just lease you one) - those are the ones they tested.

Cell phone modems are somewhat standardized, and carriers can push firmware updates (involuntarily!) to users for network management purposes. But Android OS updates can screw up the radio in ways separate from how the radio firmware screws it up, so the carrier wants to test it first. Consider: if Samsung releases an OS update that accidentally chews up 1GB of mobile data per hour, who will pay for that data usage? Samsung who never agreed to do that, the users who don’t have $25000 lying around to it for the overage, or the mobile phone service provider who just kinda has to eat the cost and pay for customer service agents to soothe angry customers and try to explain what happened and clean up the mess?

Most users get phone tech support from their phone provider, which is another reason carriers want to approve OS updates - if it’s broken, they’re taking the first line tech support expense, which can add up. Apple is different-ish in urban areas because they have their own stores and branding offering tech support, which makes carriers willing to be less picky about updates, and Apple uses much more uniform hardware and does have special agreements with carriers to get OS patches out faster - with Apple taking some of the risks of a bad update that, under a conventional model, would fall on the carrier instead.

Google is trying to fix this but it’s hard, because part of the problem goes all the way to the bottom layer of the OS and is made worse by limitations of what is financially viable for manufacturers of cheap phone parts.

So, Google Play Services - an awkward and bloated “everything bucket” that is just as disorganized as you expect, although there’s constant work to try to clean it up - is a necessary workaround. The more that is handled by the updateable component, the less is stuck in code that is very hard to change, which is important as exciting new security holes are discovered; better for them to be in the code that is practical to replace on the deployed fleet in a timely manner.

17776 is homestuck for boomers

I think this is what annoys me about companies and orgs with a 99% white male base going "we wanna be DiVeRsE"

You wanna be diverse, that's fantastic. Do you know how to *BE* diverse??

B/c if you're goal is to hire more black/brown folk, and you haven't *REALLY* reflected on how you treat black/brown folks in your day-to-day, then what you're REALLY saying is:

"we'd love to be diverse but putting in the work to not be a racist cuts into my Outer Worlds time, and you know how that is".

@apLundell i'm thinking about stuff like food blogs, like the only reason recipes on the internet are completely fucking insufferable to read is because of SEO

like sure life ain't fair but if you're not working to make it more fair then what's the goddamn point

Today on SubSimulatorGPT2, bots discuss a fake incident from 2011 that involved a steak-eating ritual that turned deadly

yo this is a story all about how
my life got flipped turned upside down
and i'd like to take a minute just sit right there
i'll tell you how i became the witch of a town called blair