mctoasterson

@mctoasterson@reddthat.com

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Employees at Amazon headquarters were asked on Monday to volunteer their time to the company’s warehouses to assist with grocery delivery⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  For those who haven’t been paying attention, ot appears Amazon is trying to “disrupt” the grocery market. Anecdotally they have been selling shit for crazy low prices and they’ll make like 30 separate trips to your house all on the same day with lined/insulated packing for the perishable items and frozen water bottles (no extra charge to the customer) in each bag to keep the food cool in transit.

  It seems like there is no way they can be making money on this process, which tells me they are speedrunning Walmarts strategy of operating at a loss to force other grocers out of the market.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK: NASA’s Moon landing relied on Nazi scientists — and a secret U.S. program brought them here⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Sure, although it requires a special kind of dedicated cynicism to not realize that technological capture of human capital with previously heinous associations, diverted toward inarguably more important scientific pursuits such as space exploration, is a net gain.

  The US already had weaponized just about every other technology it had a reasonable grasp on, and had even used nukes by the end of WWII. So collaborating with former Nazis to develop peacetime rocketry for space exploration is pretty mild by comparison.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You're not alone: This email from Google's Gemini team is concerning⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  My understanding is that, in broad strokes…

  1. Aurora acts like a proxy or mirror that doesn’t require you to sign in to get Google Play Store apps. It doesn’t provide any other software besides what you specifically download from it, and it doesn’t include any telemetry/tracking like normal Google Play Store would.

  2. microG is a reimplementation of Google Play services (the suite of proprietary background services that Google runs on normal Android phones). MicroG doesn’t have the bloat and tracking and other closed source functionality, but rather acts as a stand-in that other apps can talk to (when they’d normally be talking to Google Play services). This has to be installed and configured and I would refer to the microG github or other documentation.

  3. GrapheneOS has its own sandboxed Google Play Services which is basically unmodified Google Play Services, crammed into its own sandbox with no special permissions, and a compatibility layer that retains some functionality while keeping it from being able to access app data with high level permissions like it would normally do on a vanilla Android phone.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You're not alone: This email from Google's Gemini team is concerning⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If you want you can install Pixel Camera (official Google camera) from Aurora Store, and deny it Network permissions and any other permissions you want. It still works pretty well for point and shoot but I can’t speak for every single feature. Also you can install simulated services that the Gcam requires to function, without having to run Play Services.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Millions of Americans Who Have Waited Decades for Fast Internet Connections Will Keep Waiting After the Trump Administration Threw a $42 Billion High-Speed Internet Program Into Disarray.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  To be fair, this federal program was a cluster eff since they started it in about 2010. It passed a bunch of grant money through to the states, which all did different “things” with it. Most held semi-public meetings and planning sessions for 5-10 years or wrote detailed planning documents but never delivered any physical infrastructure (actual results to the residents).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Here's your first look at the rebooted Digg | TechCrunch⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Maybe if they allow API access for alternative frontends that eliminate ads and block telemetry. Otherwise, not interested.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is the U.S. Vulnerable to a Drone Sneak Attack?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Its possible a sleeper cell of terrorists could effectuate some small area drone strikes with commercial off the shelf drones and improvised explosives.

  The large scale military drones you are envisioning that can do the same damage as military aerial bombardment, that is a much harder thing to “sneak” into the US at any kind of scale or to build in secret.

  As for future state actor capabilities. It seems possible that China is working on drone tech deployed from submarines or other force-projection platforms. Yet another reason to avoid a hot war with near peer militaries in current year.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AOSP isn't dead, but Google just landed a huge blow to custom ROM developers⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I am running GoS on a Pixel 7, which means I’ve had this device for ~2.5 years at this point, and back when I transitioned to this setup I was aware they were talking about being beholden to Pixels due to the hardware security module not being available on other devices.

  It has been a known issue. I understand it is a very difficult and costly undertaking to develop new hardware and new entrants would be competing against the big guys for fab space, manufacturing and assembly etc.

  We need some kind of nonprofit or independently financed group to advance this cause. Could it be FUTO, Framework, or some other company/organization like this?

  There would be market incentive to solve these problems - There has got to be a lot of demand for a neutral hardware platform that meets the hardware security module and other requirements for bootloader security, custom ROMs, etc.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YouTube relaxes moderation rules to allow more controversial content. Videos are allowed if "freedom of expression value may outweigh harm risk"⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  They won’t ever say it out loud but they have always removed videos for mentioning alternative frontends or other technology they view as direct threats to their revenue stream.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Dildo-as-a-Service

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Whatever happened to cheap eReaders? – Terence Eden’s Blog⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Side note -

  I literally have the reader pictured in the thumbnail. It is a Kindle keyboard from 10+ years ago at this point. It still works fine. At one point the original battery went to shit, and it cost very little to get an aftermarket replacement and install it myself.

  I keep it offline and read 100% sideloaded .epub books from various sources. The lockscreen ads don’t even try to display anymore.

  Sure it isn’t backlit or waterproof but it still functions flawlessly as a generic reader. Old tech like this is awesome. Why not get a decade of use (or more) out of something that still works?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YouTube tops Disney and Netflix in TV viewing⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m having an OK time with alternatives, namely GrayJay on Android and Windows desktop. Basically I had to make sure my subscriptions included the 50-75 creators I am actually interested in, then the list becomes 100% relevant because it is just videos from creators you are subbed to. On the Desktop app it still uses algorithm of some sort for sidebar content based on the current video you are watching only. So if you still want to “organically discover” things you can, but don’t have to.

  The only bad part with the Windows desktop version is it will crash the entire app mid-playback sometimes. Hopefully the bugs get fixed eventually. Also the “home” tab of Grayjay is some weird pseudo political stuff but at least you can ignore that entire tab and just look at your own subscriptions.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Warhammer 40,000 Maker Games Workshop Is Doing So Well It’s Giving $27 Million to Its Staff⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I dunno if there is a subculture of printing the models at home. I would think resin printers would have more than enough resolution to make good miniatures. Is that frowned upon? There is no reason to buy overpriced licensed shit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YouTube's new ad strategy is bound to upset users: YouTube Peak Points utilise Gemini to identify moments where users will be most engaged, so advertisers can place ads at the point.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  They already do it in Podcasts and it is usually extremely ham-fisted. The presenter will be mid sentence talking about something and suddenly IMPROVE YOUR DIET WITH FACTOR

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nintendo Anti-Piracy Policy Device Lock Update Warns of Console Bricks for Unauthorized Use⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Is this to me counteract the Migswitch specifically?

  Seems like a load of crap either way.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Shinji need a little bit of motivation⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  He would disappoint their expectations by not having enough length to fill even half of the hand tunnel.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Fire Emblem on a TI-84⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s more like Advance Wars with individual characters instead of troop units.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Recommendations for "girly" games?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You could try Animal Well. Dark yet pastel-oriented colorschemes. Minimal “combat” but more of a puzzle and exploration style of gameplay. More mysterious than scary. Mild peril. Not romantic in the slightest, but very original.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mark Zuckerberg Says Social Media Is Over⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This is ironic because all the 40 year old chicks who are career users of FB since college, all cite the same justification for continuing to use it: “But all my photos and the current happenings of my friends”.

  If you showed them epirical data that only 17% of what they consume on the platform is actually even tangentially related to their friends and family, maybe they’d finally decouple themselves from FB.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Almost 19% of Japanese people in their 20s have spent so much money on gacha they struggled with covering living expenses, survey reveals - AUTOMATON WEST⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I knew this was a fucked up industry when I heard they were successfully diversifying into women-centric gatcha games where the game is also centered on gooning over various character designs but the gatcha pulls correspond to specific romance scenes and interactions.

  Japanese companies really have minmaxed exploiting every demographic. They have this garbage for the young people and pachinko parlors for old people and rural folks.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Perplexity’s Android App Is Infested With Security Flaws, Report Finds⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Sweet, looking forward to the FOSS app utilizing Perplexity API.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨TLS Certificate Lifetimes Will Officially Reduce to 47 Days⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The most-aggressively short timelines don’t apply until 2029. Regardless, now is the time to get serious about automation. That is going to require vendors of a lot of off-the-shelf products to come up with better (or any) automation integrations for existing cert management systems or whatever the new standard becomes.

  The current workflow many big orgs use is something like:

  1. Poor bastard application engineer/support guy is forced to keep a spreadsheet for all the machines and URLs he “owns” and set 30-day reminders when they will expire,

  2. manually generate CSRs,

  3. reach out to some internal or 3rd party group who may ignore his request or fuck it up twice before giving him correct signed certs,

  4. schedule and get approval for one or more “possible brief outage” maintenance windows because the software requires manually rebinding the new certs in some archaic way involving handjamming each cert into a web interface on a separate Windows box.

  As the validity period shrinks and the number of environments the average production application uses grows, the concept of doing these processes manually becomes a total clusterfuck.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Most Americans think AI won’t improve their lives, survey says⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  AI can look at a bajillion examples of code and spit out its own derivative impersonation of that code.

  AI isn’t good at doing a lot of other things software engineers actually do. It isn’t very good at attending meetings, gathering requirements, managing projects, writing documentation for highly-industry-specific products and features that have never existed before, working user tickets, etc.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I mean......if you really think about it.....⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  “It’s all Isekai?”

  “Always has been”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Trump Will Bring America First Drug Prices by Knocking Out the Middlemen, Making Europe Pay Its Fair Share⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Many critical treatments and medicines are developed in the US. Congress could pass protectionist trade laws requiring that the poorest uninsured American can’t be charged a penny more than whatever artificially low negotiated costs are paid by foreign countries systems like the Canadians or the British NHS.

  Its possible that other countries could retaliate with cost controls for their own domestically developed drugs but it feels like this is an area where the US can and should have leverage.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google’s ‘Secret’ Update Scans All Your Photos⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  People don’t seem to understand the risks presented by normalizing client-side scanning on closed source devices. Think about how image recognition works. It scans image content locally and matches to keywords or tags, describing the person, objects, emotions, and other characteristics. Even the rudimentary open-source model on an immich deployment on a Raspberry Pi can process thousands of images and make all the contents searchable with alarming speed and accuracy.

  So once similar image analysis is done on a phone locally, and pre-encryption, it is trivial for Apple or Google to use that for whatever purposes their use terms allow. Forget the iCloud encryption backdoor. The big tech players can already scan content on your device pre-encryption.

  And just because someone does a traffic analysis of the process itself (safety core or mediaanalysisd or whatever) and shows it doesn’t directly phone home, doesn’t mean it is safe. The entire OS is closed source, and it needs only to backchannel small amounts of data in order to fuck you over.

  Remember the original justification for clientside scanning from Apple was “detecting CSAM”. Well they backed away from that line of thinking but they kept all the client side scanning in iOS and Mac OS. It would be trivial for them to flag many other types of content and furnish that data to governments or third parties.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tech jobs are now white collar trades that need apprentices⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I love how the trend in tech seems to be to shift 100% of responsibility for professional development to the employee.

  “Just get some certs on your own and build a homelab.”

  Yeah, I have 2 degrees and a bunch of certs, of which many require CEU or renewal costs. Everytime I ask for professional development it’s “yeah there might be some budget for this one specific thing next quarter”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Xbox Sales Hit Rock Bottom After Historic 2024 Decline⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Honestly all of this bullshit is why I went with a Steamdeck a few years ago. As a working adult with a family I have different economic obligations and priorities.

  I need to build a new PC soon (mine is now 10 years old) but I can’t justify spending $5K on a gaming rig. If I built now with a flagship card, just the card itself would cost more than I spent on my entire rig when I built it in 2014/2015. Pair that with Microsoft’s ridiculous operating system enshittification, and the PC situation gets even more complicated for me.

  Consoles have gotten to be a bad value proposition for me as well. Paper launches, scalping during the pandemic, DRM etc., services going offline. All that garbage leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

  I’m having a decent enough time with Steam sale games, Indy games, and retro emulation.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  They need to make an open source version of the Hitster card game that lets you use this to listen to the whole song (if you choose) whether you have a Spotify account or not.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Smartwatch That Was Too Good For This World⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Anyone got a good recommendation for an affordable smart watch that works with GadgetBridge?

  I’m looking to move on from an ancient Garmin that barely holds charge for 2 days…