kbal

Okay Google, if you can guess my age accurately to within a decade based on my youtube viewing history and whatever other data you can get, I will give you a cookie.

Mine’s more of a databivouac.

It’s centralized, it doesn’t officially allow 3rd-party clients, it requires a phone number, and the desktop app kinda sucks. I use it anyway, but it could be better.

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The dotcom bubble was based on technology that had already been around for ten years. The AI bubble is based on technology that doesn’t exist yet.

Windows users have regrets

Mac users have stockholm syndrome

Linux users have a computer

It’s not for the end user’s boss, it’s there to collect data for the future Microsoft user behaviour analysis tools that will be sold to the end user’s boss’s boss.

I wish Signal was developed more openly, more like the linux kernel for a “critical infrastructure” example. I wish it had more features, so it could take the place of something like Slack. I wish it supported interoperability like fedi.

But it’s good for what it is and I sure am glad it’s around. People who disrespect it don’t know what they’re talking about.

One Mozilla developer claimed that explaining PPA would be too challenging

It’s not that difficult to explain. “When you visit the website of a participating advertiser whose ads you’ve seen, do you want us to tell them that someone saw their ads and visited their site, without telling them it was you? Y/N”

But if they asked such a question almost all of the small fraction of users who bother to read the whole sentence would still see no good reason to want to participate. Coming up with one is that hard part. It requires some pretty fancy rationalizations. Firefox keeping track of which ads I’ve seen? No, thanks.

If there was an option to make sure that advertisers whose ads I’ve blocked know that they got blocked, I might go for that.

The writer apparently thinks that the previous Mozilla misstep into advertising land was the Mr. Robot thing six years ago, which seems to confirm my impression that this one is getting a bigger reaction than their other recent moves in this direction. We’ll see if the rest of the tech press picks it up. Maybe one day when the cumulative loss of users shows up more clearly in the telemetry they’ll reconsider.

Suddenly I’m worried about AI’s energy draw. “6 percent of global electricity” is not a small amount of electricity.

There’s no need to go back to paper maps if it’s just GPS and mobile Internet that are unavailable. Osmand works just fine without them. It’s the map application I always wanted, none of that always-online nonsense.

Hmm. Maybe if I live long enough, my only slightly rusty skills in map reading and navigation by dead reckoning will once again be useful.

Wow, cool, even NBC is catching on to the Fediverse now?

… nope, it’s just another blockchain fueled social media system, the main use of which so far seems to be as a haven for QAnon types (according to Wikipedia,) rapidly burning up venture capital. Good luck to them, I guess.

Normally when people identify all the “P.C. crap” that Seinfeld complains about as coming from the “extreme left” I figure it’s because they’ve gone so far to the right that from way out there Bill Gates looks like a communist. But it’s tempting to give Seinfeld the benefit of the doubt and assume that he might just be confused and ill-informed. The same refusal to accept reality that leaves him unable to let go of the urge to put a llama with a human head in his movie about Pop-Tarts may also have been sufficient to prevent him learning anything at all about politics for the past 30 years.

Google and Apple have been very successful at convincing everyone, including banks, to see the idea of users having control over their own phone-like computers as dangerous.

The surprise is that apparently 28 percent of “experienced programmers” don’t have an ad blocker. I’m not sure how they got the data, but I wonder if their methods are up to the task of sorting out any possible inverse correlation between blocking ads and being willing to respond to polls.

A “printer”? Oh right, those things we used to spray ink on dead trees back in the 20th century.