FoxQuirk 🦊 @quirk@computerfairi.es

me in my twenties: oh neat, a free program

me in my forties: oh neat, a free program, what horrors are concealed within

Stop placing complex chronic illness patients on psych holds.

If you don’t know how to treat someone, say so. Don’t tell them it’s all in their head.

Placing patients in the psych ward breaks their trust, sets back their baseline and sends a clear message that they’re not safe in your care.

Medical trauma is real. It maims and kills. Respect our expertise in our bodies. Listen to us and let us be partners in our care.

https://time.com/7206080/long-covid-psychiatric-wards/

#chronicillness #longcovid #mecfs #spoonie #gaslighting #medicalptsd #trauma #disability #ableism

Perfection.

I have broken my windows in a unique way: I'm using a high-DPI display, but my menu size and some other metrics are set wrong.

This happened for reasons. But since Windows 10 removed the Appearances control panel, you can't fix it.

what if I use a ported Windows 8 appearances control panel? THAT'S HOW I BROKE IT IN THE FIRST PLACE

oh hey, some light reading (for $4.48 plus shipping for paperback, or $18 hardcover)

https://sunypress.edu/Books/A/A-History-of-Transgender-Medicine-in-the-United-States

I tried to ask my roommate to do some static-DHCP nonsense and sent her the following MAC address:
28💿c1:0e:78:ea

> The company’s aim is to build out a constellation of 300 satellites that can provide real-time updates for any sensor or device outfitted with a Bluetooth low energy (BLE) chip. On its website, Hubble proposes use cases that span industries — from child safety

yeah, life360 spysat network is... bad

@munin @pikhq @beka_valentine

actually i took a closer look at their website, particularly their jobs page (figured there'd be more technical details there)

> We differentiate ourselves as the first modem-less and gateway-less, direct-to-satellite network from off-the-shelf BLE chips.

(so, BTLE, not BR/EDR, which is even easier sync-wise AIUI though I know less about that PHY)

and

> Just upload our firmware to your existing chipstack and you're globally connected.

critically, the note there that there's /firmware for the existing BTLE modem/. the rest of their marketing material similarly talks about /off-the-shelf BT chips/ - but if there's custom firmware involved, they could be doing all sorts of wild stuff that a normal BTLE controller won't. so i wonder if they may just have a fully custom protocol (very feasible for e.g. nrf52)

and indeed, let's hop over to the FCC database and search for Hubble:

https://apps.fcc.gov/els/GetAtt.html?id=343217&x=.

aha! that explains everything! critically, this bit:

> Licensee is authorized to conduct testing for one Hubble terrestrial Endpoint located
at a center point of geographical coordinates 33°27'11" N, 96°46'17" W and a radius
of 24.14 km in Gunter, TX, to transmit to Spire’s Hubble-1, Hubble-2, and Hubble-3
non-geostationary
orbit (“NGSO”) satellites in the 2482.710675-2483.424 MHz frequency band
(Earth-to-space).

that frequency band is *outside the BTLE and BR/EDR range*, and notably it's a tiny frequency range - not even enough for one full 1MHz channel! That's not Bluetooth! (This is probably intention

Furthermore, we can see they're using FSK modulation (probably GFSK) and an emissions designator of 25K0F1D - basically "no more than 25KHz bandwidth, digital modulation". 25KHz bandwidth? That's *definitely* not Bluetooth.

So, what they've done is made a reasonable, slow, low-bandwidth network protocol (maybe LoRA-based), wrote a stack for it that /runs on existing Bluetooth chips/ (probably the NRF52 series, which are highly programmable and highly popular in IOT), and deployed /that/. They're not doing Space Bluetooth, they're being misleading fuckers with their marketing.

yc-backed company "hubble network" claims to do commodity bluetooth to space, using existing bluetooth devices such as your current phone lol

this sounds like fraud

its a sign of the kind of due diligence that garry tan's yc does: absolutely none, its all smoke up the ass

I KNOW PROGRAMMERS WHO USE DPI SCALING AND THEY'RE ALL COWARDS

We are so deep into the “AI” bubble now that I had almost forgotten what it felt like when everyone was talking about “blockchain preparedness” and some of our most desperate and opportunistic community members were trying to convince everyone that category theory on the blockchain was the real applied category theory… What a time!

Junior dev: "I messed up badly. I'm so fired."

Senior dev: "Been there, done that...twice. *proceeds to drink coffee like it's no big deal*"

Me: "They named a production outage after me, and it was in the newspapers. *proceeds to drink coffee while staring wistfully out the window*"

days since "security" has made my life worse: [ 0 ]

(i broke the screen of my phone and scrcpy refuses to show me anything related to banking. upsetting)

yayyyy, kitsune tails went over 700 steam reviews! 🥳

Principles like "innocent until proven guilty" and "freedom of speech" are important not just because they're somehow inherently "good," but because they are specifically useful tools to prevent abuses of power.

This is why we apply them to governments and their arms specifically, because in the way our society is structured they are nominally at the top of the power hierarchy. The government can imprison or even kill you. It can take away your livelihood or your right to vote. These are unique powers governments have.

So, when looking at whether and how to apply these principles to a situation, it's important to look at the power dynamics involved!

When a government, a major corporation, or a rich and influential person accuses someone else of something, they hold immense power to make that person's life miserable. They may even be able to leverage state power against them, even if they don't directly hold such power! And so it's important to hold them to a very high standard.

But the other way around? When a powerless person accuses a powerful entity of something? It doesn't work the same way, and it's important to recognize that.