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thehatfox

@thehatfox@lemmy.world

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Amazon exec says it’s time for workers to ‘disagree and commit’ to office return — “I don’t have data to back it up, but I know it’s better.” (fortune.com)

Amazon exec says it’s time for workers to ‘disagree and commit’ to office return — “I don’t have data to back it up, but I know it’s better.”::“We’re here, we’re back. It’s working,” an Amazon Studios head said in a meeting, before acknowledging a lack of evidence.

thehatfox ,
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Because executives and investors are often cut from the same cloth, flaws and all. Plenty of them will have the same baseless belief that office-based work is “just better”.

Plenty of the are also investors in commercial real estate as well as tech companies, and property bubbles need regular reinflation.

thehatfox ,
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“It was a bug” is the common excuse when an intentional feature backfires.

Loading screen ads seem like an obvious next step of enshittification. They are creeping back into video with ads breaks on streaming, only a matter of time before they are in games too.

Commercial Flights Are Experiencing 'Unthinkable' GPS Attacks and Nobody Knows What to Do (www.vice.com)

Commercial Flights Are Experiencing ‘Unthinkable’ GPS Attacks and Nobody Knows What to Do::New “spoofing” attacks resulting in total navigation failure have been occurring above the Middle East for months, which is “highly significant” for airline safety.

thehatfox ,
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They use gyroscopes and accelerometers to measure the aircrafts movement from the starting position at takeoff. That can then be used to plot the course the aircraft has taken to show the current location.

thehatfox ,
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This sounds rather dangerous. GPS was originally opened up to civilian use for the purpose of keeping flights on course, after the disaster of Korean Air Flight 007 straying into Soviet airspace and being shot down back in the 1980s.

I can’t understand what is to be gained by deliberately trying to knock civilian airliners off course.

thehatfox ,
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User agents are not unfortunately not the only way to identify a browser, there are other ways to fingerprint a platform.

thehatfox ,
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There are multiple dedicated ESP32 flashing programs available for most operating systems, there should be no reason to use any web browser to flash a microcontroller.

The fact this even needs to be said says a lot about modern web browsers, and software development in general.

thehatfox ,
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Firefox supports a new “Copy Link Without Site Tracking” feature in the context menu which ensures that copied links no longer contain tracking information.

This will be handy, so many sites add tracking tokens to URLs now. I see the YouTube tokens a lot on links shared on Lemmy.

thehatfox OP ,
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It wouldn’t surprise me if there were still a few production Itanium systems in server rooms somewhere, running some obscure or bespoke proprietary software that can’t be migrated to anything else. There are other more arcane systems still being limped along in businesses around the world, for some frighteningly critical applications in some case.

Itanium support being dropped probably has a handful of admins panicking, but in the eyes of the kernel developers it’s a case of “put up or shut up”.

thehatfox OP ,
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The AS/400 platform is still alive and actively maintained by IBM so I’m told, although I think it goes under the Power Systems and IBM i brands now. I know several business still using them, with development teams still coding with RPG etc. Apparently there is also reasonable ecosystem of middleware to interface with more modern systems, and some sort of *nix compatibility layer to run more modern software on the platform.

I’ve never touched one myself, but they are keeping a few greybeards I know in steady work.

Elon Musk’s X sues media watchdog Media Matters over report on pro-Nazi content on the social media site (www.cnn.com)

Elon Musk’s X sues media watchdog Media Matters over report on pro-Nazi content on the social media site::After a devastating advertiser exodus last week involving some of the world’s largest media companies, X owner Elon Musk is suing the progressive watchdog group Media Matters over its analysis highlighting antisemitic...

thehatfox ,
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“Stop calling my website pro-Nazi” says man constantly saying pro-Nazi things on said website.

thehatfox ,
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There’s been huge expansion of fibre networks in my area of the UK, but I haven’t seen any new poles put up, apart from newly built housing estates maybe. All the fibre I’ve seen has been run using existing poles and conduits.

It seems there are shenanigans afoot in Hull. Most the telecoms network in the UK was formed into a single network decades ago, now privatised as Openreach. Except in Hull, which kept an independent network, which was also eventually privatised as KCOM. Openreach allow any other fibre provider to use existing cable infrastructure like poles and underground ducts, but according to this news article KCOM are not being so cooperative. So new fibre providers are having to install their own poles, often right next to existing ones. Planning rules have also been changed recently which means poles can be installed with minimal planning permissions needed.

thehatfox ,
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There is a lot of protectionism at the heart of the EU. They are quite happy to heavily regulate Big Tech when it’s not based in their own market. Unfortunately they don’t have quite the same passion for nurturing the European tech industry as much as stifling the foreign ones.

They are it purely fighting these fights for the greater good, or they wouldn’t also be pushing things like the recent browser certificate debacle.

thehatfox ,
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There’s a big difference between a person’s DNA and a person’s art. DNA is the principle part of someone’s biometric identity, which can be used to reveal an enormous amount of information about a person. Hence it is not unreasonable to expect that its usage will be handled in a careful and clearly defined manner. Most countries have very strict laws on biometric data for a reason.

The same can not be said for a piece of art. While an an artwork will often convey aspects of the artist’s personality, and can conform to an identifiable style, it would provide no where near the level of insight into a persons physical identity as a DNA sample.

It also seems a stretch to conflate sharing something privately and publishing something publicly. The former will have expectations of privacy and control, regardless of whatever is stated any legalese incomprehensible to the average person. The latter however assumes a loss of control, to share something publicly is in some ways to cede it to the public.

thehatfox ,
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how can we realistically protect something we broadcast.

With appropriate privacy laws and security measures. A smartphone is publicly broadcasting information, in that any other person could receive the radio transmissions emitted from them. But such eavesdropping would be illegal in most cases, and is mostly encrypted to hinder bad actors who don’t obey such laws.

It’s important we act now to ensure there are suitable privacy provisions in place now for all biometrics, before such things as mass DNA collection and sequencing are practical. Once such technology is available, perhaps we will also have to adapt our behaviour in public to prevent leakage of unprotected biometric assets.

Time to start advocating for biometric privacy, and investing in bodysuits and hair nets.

thehatfox ,
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Mozilla expanding into social media feels like it will be walking a very delicate line regarding privacy. Things like Pocket have already been contentious enough.

They are putting a lot of emphasis on recommendation feeds and helping content publishers “build audiences”, and of course there will ultimately be some form of (so far unspoken) monetisation. Mozilla are only going get so far with that until they start wanting user data, data which will be so temptingly convenient when it’s tied to Mozilla accounts.

Chrome has already demonstrated the negative consequences of web browsers and web platforms becoming too intertwined. Maybe I’m just too cynical, but even with the best of intentions I’m not sure Mozilla can avoid the same fate here.

thehatfox ,
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Tim Cook is the perfect captain to keep the ship on a steady course and not rock the boat, but I’m not convinced he is an innovator. I sometimes wonder if Jobs selected Cook as his successor, because Jobs expected to overcome his health problems and return, and wanted Apple in safe pair of hands during his cancer battle.

That said, Apple only appears to be “failing” from the angle of the stock markets obsession with infinite growth. They are still an enormous company with high brand strength and large cash reserves.

thehatfox ,
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Yes, it shouldn’t take a C-suite level decision to remove content praising Hitler and the Holocaust. The fact that it does suggests there is major disfunction in X/Twitter’s approach to content moderation, which the article hints at but doesn’t really explain.

thehatfox ,
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It’s a PR blunder. “Our content moderation is so broken the CEO had directly intervene to remove a post praising the Holocaust” isn’t a great message.

thehatfox ,
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I grew up in a very flat part of England, flatness to me is the default and I get genuinely excited by hills.

thehatfox ,
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Don’t mistake the Netherlands for the Nether Regions either.

thehatfox OP ,
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Loading… if you can still see this message, this post probably doesn’t exist.

The link to your blog post seems to be broken.

thehatfox OP ,
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There’s barely any engineering or even editorial oversight going on with some of the AI content appearing now, just piping the output of an LLM directly into a blogging platform. The initial prompt themselves could even be just be scraped headlines from elsewhere.

thehatfox OP ,
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The authors angle seems to be more of “hate the game not the players”, and even the they aren’t entirely sympathetic to all of them. The more that search engines became the main entrance to the web, the more that website owners would seek to get closer to the entrance, and the SEO people illustrated in the article are the result.

thehatfox ,
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Firefox become popular originally because it differentiated itself from other browsers (well, mainly one particular browser) by offering great useful features that the others didn’t have. Many of them were targeted at power users who went on to evangelise Firefox to others.

These days Mozilla only seems to get publicity and attention for gimmicks, or for removing features. The few useful ideas it has produced, like Containers, languish in obscurity. In the face of Google’s aggressive moves with Chrome, Firefox has withered has a result.

A change of direction is sorely needed.

thehatfox ,
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There’s not many phone boxes left in the UK of any design now.

I’ve seen a few converted into tiny libraries or art displays.

thehatfox ,
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The TARDIS is a police box, not a regular telephone box. Very few of them survive now.

thehatfox ,
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A lack of visible positive role models is a big part of it. When nobody else wants to engage with isolated and directionless young white men, people like Peterson will fill the vacuum. Couple that with amoral algorithms of social media generating engagement at any cost, and they soon have an audience.

Ensuring everyone has opportunities and and a sense of inclusion would go a lot further than just trying to teach everyone to recognise false shepherds. That’s just treating the symptom and not the cause, and would likely end up with them falling prey to another wolf with a better sheepskin.

thehatfox ,
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This was a meme before we even called them memes.

Best Budget Phone for LineageOS & Other Custom ROMs

I’m currently an iPhone user and want to dip my toes back into the Android world. I used to run CyanogenMod before switching to iPhone, and I would intend to run LineageOS now. I’d also by interested in trying other Android distributions such as GrapheneOS. While not strictly Android, I’d also like to have a device to...

thehatfox ,
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The focus on chronological feeds is what I like about Mastodon, and Fediverse platforms in general. I don’t want to be slapped in the face with what some algorithm with ulterior motives has decided I should see - I want to see the things I follow in the order they were posted.

thehatfox ,
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People that post quality content don’t tend to care about internet points. People that care about internet points won’t bother to collect them via posting quality content.

Downvote systems can also discourage open discussion, as too many people can’t help themselves from downvoting dissenting views. Communities end up one sided hiveminds.

Maybe there is a middle ground, perhaps downvotes could be rationed instead of outright disabled.

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