29 Oct 2024 Search

Satire Without Purpose Will Wander In Dark Places Broadly labelling the entirety of Warhammer 40,000 as satire is no longer sufficient to address what the game has become in the almost 40 years since its inception. It also fails to answer the rather awkward question of why, exactly, these fascists who are allegedly too stupid to understand satire are continually showing up in your satirical community in the first place.

Why I’m staying with Firefox for now – Michael Kjörling [T]he most reasonable option is to keep using Firefox, despite the flaws of the organization behind it. So far, at least these things can be disabled through settings (for example, their privacy-preserving ad measurement), and those settings can be prepared in advance.

Google accused of shadow campaigns redirecting antitrust scrutiny to Microsoft, Google’s Shadow Campaigns (so wait a minute, Microsoft won’t let companies use their existing Microsoft Windows licenses for VMs in the Google cloud, and Google is doing a sneaky advocacy campaign? Sounds like content marketing for Amazon Linux®

Scripting News My friends at Automattic showed me how to turn on ActivityPub on a WordPress site. I wrote a test post in my simple WordPress editor, forgetting that it would be cross-posted to Mastodon. When I just checked in on Masto, there was the freaking post. After I recovered from passing out, I wondered what happens if I update the post in my editor, and save it to the WordPress site that’s hooked up to Masto via ActivityPub. So I made a change and saved it. I waited and waited, nothing happened. I got ready to add a comment saying ahh I guess it doesn’t update, when—it updated. (Like being happy when a new web site opens in a new browser, a good sign that ActivityPub is the connecting point for this kind of connected innovation.) Related: The Web Is a Customer Service Medium (Ftrain.com) by Paul Ford.

China Telecom’s next 150,000 servers will mostly use local processors Among China Telecom’s server buys this year are machines running processors from local champion Loongson, which has developed an architecture that blends elements of RISC-V and MIPS.

Removal of Russian coders spurs debate about Linux kernel’s politics Employees of companies on the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control list of Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons (OFAC SDN), or connected to them, will have their collaborations subject to restrictions, and cannot be in the MAINTAINERS file.

The TikTokification of Social Media May Finally Be Its Undoing by Julia Angwin. If tech platforms are actively shaping our experiences, after all, maybe they should be held liable for creating experiences that damage our bodies, our children, our communities and our democracy.

Cheap Solar Panels Are Changing the World The latest global report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) notes that solar is on track to overtake all other forms of energy by 2033.

Conceptual models of space colonization - Charlie’s Diary (one more: Kurt Vonnegut’s concept for spreading genetic material)

(protip: you can always close your browser tabs with creepy tech news, there will be more in a few minutes… Location tracking of phones is out of control. Here’s how to fight back. LinkedIn fined $335 million in EU for tracking ads privacy breaches Pinterest faces EU privacy complaint over tracking ads Dems want tax prep firms charged for improper data sharing Dow Jones says Perplexity is “freeriding,” sues over copyright infringement You Have a ‘Work Number’ on This Site, and You Should Freeze It Roblox stock falls after Hindenburg blasts the social gaming platform over bots and pedophiles)

It Was Ten Years Ago Today that David Rosenthal predicted that cryptocurrency networks will be dominated by a few, perhaps just one, large participant.

Writing Projects (good start for a checklist before turning in a writing project. Maybe I should write Git hooks for these.)

Word.(s). (Includes some good vintage car ads. Remember when most car ads were about the car, not just buttering up the driver with how successful you must be to afford this thing?)

Social Distance and the Patent System [I]t was clear from our conversation that [Judge Paul] Michel doesn’t have a very deep understanding of the concerns of many in the software industry. And, more to the point, he clearly wasn’t very interested in understanding those concerns better or addressing them. On a theoretical level, he knew that there was a lot of litigation in the software industry and that a lot of people were upset about it. But like Fed and the unemployment rate, this kind of theoretical knowledge doesn’t always create a sense of urgency. One has to imagine that if people close to Michel—say, a son who was trying to start a software company—were regularly getting hit by frivolous patent lawsuits, he would suddenly take the issue more seriously. But successful software entrepreneurs are a small fraction of the population, and most likely no judges of the Federal Circuit have close relationships with one.

(Rapids is the script that gathers these, and it got a clean bill of health from the feed reader score report after I fixed the Last-Modified/If-Modified-Since and Etag handling. So expect more link dump posts here, I guess.)