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mcc

@mcc@mastodon.social

glitch girl

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mcc , to random
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Joe Biden just banned Tik Tok.

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/04/24/biden-signs-israel-ukraine-tiktok-bill-into-law.html

If America can do this to Tik Tok, America can and will do it to whatever internet thing it is you like just as easily. Don't imagine China itself was the point of this. (The ban[s] cover ByteDance plus any company 20%+ owned within a country on this short list https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/4872#:~:text=metals%20and%20alloys.-,(2)Covered%20nation,-.%E2%80%94The%20term but given how easily this passed it seems a precedent is set for Congress to add whatever other company, organization or country it feels like to the list.)

mcc OP ,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

The final law is basically two separate bans, either of which would potentially be sufficient to ban TikTok (H.R 815, Divisions H and I https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/815/text#toc-HA3ED19E8F4F24124B4029233F64B1549 ) Section I concerns foreign transfer of PII and could be unobjectionable and EU-like if it defined "Personal Data" more narrowly, but as-is it I expect could be construed to cover even normal operations of privacy-conscious online services. Section H, which names TikTok/ByteDance by name, is not privacy related and is wild in its scope

mcc OP ,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

Of course, in all likelihood Tik Tok will not wind up being literally banned, so we won't yet get a full exploration of the new expansion of state powers here. But what will happen, and what the point of this bill is, is Tik Tok will get sold to American right-wingers, because that is who buys social networks in America. This will eventually result in influencing speech to favor the right, which was the reason Donald Trump originally proposed this ban, and the reason America is passing it now.

futurebird , (edited ) to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

Sometimes a "wandering trader" come up to you in Minecraft and it's very annoying since he has llamas that make noise and can get in the way. Most players just kill him.

It would be nice if Minecraft added a "goodbye" button that would cause him to leave. Or even a "go away button"

All the murder is both funny and it does not sit well with me.

mcc ,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

@futurebird "I will buy a commemorative snowglobe if you will just go away"

This could be paired with a mechanic where commemorative snowglobes cannot be recrafted or held and must be put somewhere, so eventually the player must create a Loathed Knickknack Table to store all the snowglobes they don't want but had to buy

campuscodi , to random
@campuscodi@mastodon.social avatar

Gentoo has banned AI-generated code

https://www.mail-archive.com/gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org/msg99042.html

mcc ,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

@campuscodi This should be standard for every open source project. If it came from an LLM, you don't know whether it's regurgitated a non-trivial portion of someone else's copyrighted code. And that means you don't know if you have the right to open source it.

LLM code is mystery meat.

futurebird , to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

If you were worried about the juror who said she likes how Trump "speaks his mind" don't.

She said she gets her news from "google" and listens to the breakfast club

The breakfast club is a NYC radio show that lots of black people like. It's total fluff. Fun.

This person isn't interested in politics. "google" ?

And I think that's fine. Not everyone has the disease that I have (and maybe you too.) In a trial they explain everything. The case is good so this kind of juror is good.

mcc ,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

@futurebird quietly I actually think Google News is the best way to get news on the whole internet. I have been using it since 2004.

But it's not clear that's what this person meant I guess.

mcc ,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

@futurebird Yes, it is just an overview of different current news stories on different sources. All it displays is headlines and pull photos. But it groups links together "by story", so for any one news item you get to see what each different paper's take on it is, and it floats stories that lots of sources are talking about closer to the top. It is like getting an average of everybody's biases at once. Or a histogram I guess.

mcc ,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

@futurebird I like it because it is like a counterweight to me reading news that fits my ideological biases. "Okay, but here's what the news looks to everyone ELSE." Even when the mainline position is wrong I know how it's wrong.

The change they made in 2017 I don't like is that they started making the news feed customized to you and your preferences. But to me the whole point was it wasn't about me :)

mcc ,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

@futurebird You are probably right.

mcc ,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

@futurebird Yeah, it's decent! I tried it for a bit but then went back to Google's version.

mcc , to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

HOLY FUCK I HAVE JUST DISCOVERED THAT THE PHONE APP IN ANDROID 13 VIBRATES WHEN AN OUTGOING CALL CONNECTS

AN OUTGOING CALL

THERE IS NO WAY TO TURN THIS OFF EXCEPT TO DISABLE ALL VIBRATION ON YOUR PHONE

SO YOU MAKE A PHONE CALL, YOU PUT IT UP TO YOUR EAR, AND THEN THIS THING THAT YOU'VE PUT UP TO THE SIDE OF YOUR FACE VIBRATES INTENSELY. IT IS THE MOST DEEPLY UNPLEASANT, UNNECESSARY THING. I ALREADY KNEW I WAS MAKING A FUCKING PHONE CALL I PRESSED THE BUTTON

mcc OP ,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

Please excuse the capital letters I am just SO FUCKING SICK of how Google is so deadset on taking what used to be a basically fine phone OS and finding constant new ways to punish me for using it. This has been going on for so many years now

mcc , to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

When I think about the security of a computer system, I have a specific scale I rate it on:

  1. The US government can crack it OR the government of China can crack it (equivalent)
  2. The government of Israel can crack it
  3. My friend Kristin could crack it
  4. The government of Russia can crack it
  5. A nation-state not listed above can crack it
  6. A well-qualified single infosec professional could crack it
  7. I could crack it
mcc OP ,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

Notes:

  • Kristin is very nice. She is also the reason I have tap-to-pay disabled on all my credit cards.
  • I would possibly swap the order of 3 and 4 depending on what the thing being cracked is.
  • There are levels of security below 7, but if a system is 7 or below I don't use it so it doesn't matter.
  • It's possible my tierlist is out of date and there are some countries that by now deserve to be moved above Russia. Germany? Turkey?
mcc OP ,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

@dangillmor Serious answer: You call your credit card company and say "please disable tap-to-pay on my credit card". This is a thing they can and will do on request

futurebird , to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

What do you call it when someone gets obsessed with isopods due to online content?

"pill bug pilled"

mcc ,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

@futurebird It turns out due to a miscalibration in the recommendations algorithm, our social media network has been for several years now systematically radicalizing the users to love isopods. We call it the pill bug pilled bug

mcc , to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

The process of keeping trans people suppressed is a process of continually forgetting, so that trans people are continually new, and five years later are again new, and five years after that are again a new thing, and five years after that are again a new thing that just came out of nowhere all of a sudden

mcc OP ,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

"Well, I just don't think we should be exposing youth to this experimental medical procedure", they say of my medical regime, which has been performed in western countries in basically its current form since 1965, and before that is known to have been performed at the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in the 1920s until the Nazis stopped it, and before that is attested in ambiguous accounts to have probably been performed in ancient Greece via unknown herbal analogues

mcc , to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

There's a trilogy by Alastair Reynolds with the slightly clunky name of "The Perfect Dreyfus Mysteries". The books are named Aurora Rising, Elysium Fire, and Machine Vendetta. Oddly, the Toronto public library has only the second two, not the first, in its ebook app.

I think I've managed to convince myself this is because there's an unrelated book from a decade later named "Aurora Rising". I think some person or program convinced themselves they were the same book, so they didn't need both.

Aurora Rising (2019), by Anne Koffman and Jay Kristoff, cover

mcc OP ,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

@sollat …huh.

See follow-up.

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