FoxQuirk 🦊 @quirk@computerfairi.es

lots of people talking about Zoom training AI on audio/video/messages without opt-in — bear in mind that legallly this is a definite no-no because of the way the European Electronic Communications Code (#EECC) modified the #ePrivacy Directive in 2020 to apply confidentiality duties to over-the-top services like #Zoom.

Have a silly little TUNIC doodle
🧀​

#tunic #tunicgame

crochet

Stop doing phones

Humans were not meant to be reachable 24/7

Years of calling yet no real-world use found for transmitting voices over distances

Wanted to reach someone anyway for a laugh? We already had that: It was called letters

"Yes, please call me at 3 am. Please spend hours with a strange device attached to your ear"—Statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged

They have played us for absolute fools

Sips monster energy out of this

just watched a video about the lack of bicycles in hollywood productions. e.g. there are post apocalypse shows where there's no fuel or they can't use engines for other reasons, and the characters are shown walking or riding a horse. they never try bikes even though it's the most popular mode of transportation on the planet. Daryl from TWD on a bicycle? uncool. if a protagonist is doing it, it's a comedy. riding a bicycle is seen as a ridiculous thing to do unless you're a child. I am stunned.

Good morning

Why is it always "eat the rich" and never "grill a hambourgeoisie"?

I'm following the devastating news from Slovenia, where one month's worth of rain fell in 24 hours. It's the biggest natural disaster in the young country's 32-year history. Large parts of the country are flooded. I can't even begin to imagine the time and money needed to recover from this.

But it's hard to find non-Slovenian coverage of this disaster. Press agencies like Reuters and AP are reporting it, but newspapers in, say, Germany or the US aren't picking it up.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/floods-hit-slovenia-forcing-evacuations-disrupting-transport-2023-08-04/

i say this sometimes because i worry that when i say "you don't get to demand CWs from people" that i'm discouraging someone from asking me

there is a big difference between politely asking someone you already have a relationship with to cw something (with the knowledge that part of asking politely is being okay with "no")

and demanding things get cwed from strangers

The corollary to this is that there isn’t such a thing as “magic free will” that will make it so you can do things if you just have the Willpower or Motivation.

Often, the best thing we can do for ourselves is to change our *environment* in ways that help us move more towards what we want.

Sometimes, there’s nothing we can control, and the best option is self-forgiveness.

reminder: failing to do something you
*want to do* isn't ever laziness

sometimes it's environmental;
sometimes it's situational;
and sometimes you're just expecting something beyond your capability at the moment

but *none of those things are laziness*

this is what peak thought looks like (unmute)

trying to sell an upright piano to a scotsman, but when i tell him the price he says it's grand

One of the areas hit hard in Patreon’s layoffs was security, at least one of their security teams was laid off entirely. Unsurprisingly, the current blunder seems to be because of an automated system for flagging fraudulent entries being a bit overeager at flagging entries

(Paraphrasing John Gall in The System’s Bible: the most common failure mode for a system is for it to do exactly what it was designed to do, just in an unexpected way.)

“Patreon issues are causing paused payouts and canceled subscriptions - The Verge”

We’re seeing an increase in tech co blunders—exactly what rational people would expect a few months after a mass layoff. Patreon has laid of over 17% of its workforce in the past year or so. https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/3/23818598/patreon-payment-blocked-processing-declined-subscription-canceled

Modern media has no notion of consequences. Otherwise we’d be seeing a reminder of the mass layoffs every time one of these blunders happens.

And they’re only going to keep happening because layoffs like what tech has been doing will always have a serious detrimental effect.

programmers are always posting like "worked on tracking down an issue with a Flurble deployment for twelve hours. the problem wasn't in Flurble at all - it was in the Gumbies install. It turns out if you install Gumbies 3.0 over Gumbies 2.7 and don't do a cache flush on all the client spiders they'll get stuck in the crystal maze." then you look up Gumbies and the site is one of those scroll scroll scroll types with one sentence per page, like

"GUMBIES is a lean, expressive sharding sandcube for testing and deploying large scale Woodchips playgrounds.

GUMBIES automates and streamlines away watersliding phases, meaning your team can get right to the chipping.

See why Microsoft, OpenAI and Bloingo have embraced GUMBIES in their Woodchips workflows."

and you get to the bottom and you're like I want this I guess but I still don't know what it is