ArneBab @ArneBab@rollenspiel.social

Carl Malamud has gone to court - even the Supreme Court - to defend your right to read and utter the law. He's risked millions in personal liability, even criminal prosecution, all because of his conviction that you should face no barriers to reading and reproducing the law.

Malamud set out the case for making the law free to read and publish in his 2013 essay, "The Twelve Tables of Code."

https://law.resource.org/pub/12tables.html

5/

I guess I'm old enough now where I can spout facts like "Well screensavers are called that because back in the day we used CRTs and if you left the same image up, it would literally burn into the screen" and either blow the minds of or supremely bore the youth

@cwebber And taking only 7W for the same amount of light as a 70W light bulb!

To boldly roll dice where no alien has rolled before - die 3. Episode "Schrottwichteln" von #SpacePirates

https://suddendice.de/gmscreen/2020/11/space-pirates-runde-1-teil-3-schrottwichteln/

ist erschienen!

#pnpde #Rollenspiel #Podcast #Audio #Space #Scifi #Humor

Die ungezählten Todesfälle aus Gangelt: Vergangene Woche hat der Virologe #Streeck seine Studie zur Infektionssterblichkeit veröffentlicht - doch rund jeden zweiten Todesfall nicht erfasst:

https://medwatch.de/2020/11/26/die-ungezaehlten-todesfaelle-aus-gangelt/

A lot of older adults have to turn to something like adult diapers and as much as I hate Trump, I don't like thinking about the proxy shame they may be feeling.

(I don't feel sorry for *Trump* though; given this is the kind of lowball mockery he himself enagages in/encourages.)

You can also follow these posts as a daily blog at pluralistic.net: no ads, trackers, or data-collection!

Here's today's edition: https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/25/the-peoples-amazon/

--

If you prefer a newsletter, subscribe to the plura-list, which is also ad- and tracker-free, and is utterly unadorned save a single daily emoji. Today's is "🐮". Suggestions solicited for future emojis!

Subscribe here: https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

15/

I wonder if the programmers who built this feature are subjected to it themselves? And if not, I wonder when they will be.

I mean, they won't be in the EU. This shit is radioactively illegal under the GDPR. But Americans have FREEDOM.

Now, you may be thinking, "I bet the managers who use this tool will regret it when THEIR bosses start using it on THEM."

10/

As Wolfie Christie points out in his thread, the arbitrary metrics that Microsoft has chosen will have a hugely distorting effect on workplace behavior. Remember Goodhart's Law: "Any measure becomes a target, and then ceases to be a useful measure."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

This is the quantitative fallacy on steroids: software can't measure qualitative factors like whether your work accomplished "soft goals" like "a better product" or "a conceptual breakthrough."

8/

Within days of the lockdown, this technological oppression raced up the privilege gradient in the form of "invigilation" software like Proctorio, cruel surveillance tools inflicted on university students. The company is pursuing its critics in court.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/17/proctorio-v-linkletter/#proctorio

6/

Lather, rinse, repeat: before long, everyone's been ropted in. If your meals were observed by a remote-monitored CCTV 20 years ago, it was because you were in a supermax prison. Today, it's because you bought a home video surveillance system from Google/Apple/Amazon.

3/

The Shitty Tech Adoption Curve describes the process by which oppressive technology is normalized and distributed through all levels of society. The more privilege someone has, the harder it is to coerce them to use dehumanizing tech, so it starts with marginalized people.

1/

Last year, Slate's Future Tense and ASU's Center for Science and the Imagination asked me to write some fiction illustrating the Shitty Technology Adoption Curve. The result it "Affordances," a story that grows dismally more relevant with each passing day.

https://slate.com/technology/2019/10/affordances-cory-doctorow-sf-story-algorithmic-bias-facial-recognition.html

eof/

You get a chart. Microsoft gets fine-grained data on your company's operations - data it can sell, or mine, or you know, just lose control over and leak all over the internet. That's some unprecedented Shitty Tech Adoption Curve accelerationism right there.

Not since the day when Amazon convinced Borders Books (RIP) to use it for all digital ordering and fulfilment (giving Amazon 10)% access to all Borders' customer data) has a tech company offered a shadier B2B deal.

12/

Wenn Idioten deine Freiheit und Gesundheit gefährden https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoxxh2qNZj4 #Empfehlung: Vielfach belegt. Danke #Rezo!

Ok, hear me out:

When I used Amazon Prime (through my browser), my laptop would get really hot. I took it as the way streaming works and such.

Now I'm using the stream from my cloud and, even if it is getting hotter, it is nowhere NEAR as hot.

And I bet I could get even less hotter if I played the songs locally.

But what's the difference between Prime Music and my cloud?

DRM.

DRM not only is bad for you, it's bad for the environment.

This is why I do everything important by email. Not because I like email. I hate email. I, too, have experienced the giddy new relationship energy that comes from switching to an IM-based service!

But I've also lived through the disastrous consequences of zawinskiian carcination enough times that I have learned my lesson. Much as I hate email, I can't quit it.

eof/