Snot Flickerman

Go stick your head in a pig?

iPod. It was the first commercially available MP3 player that sported more than 512mb of storage. First model was 5GB. Second was 10GB.

I got in on the second model, as a Windows PC user. I had to buy a FireWire expansion card just to use it.

Literally nothing else was like it, and at the time, you could leave it on the seat of your car while you went shopping because that far back, nobody knew what the fuck it was and so would leave it alone.

They didn’t create the first MP3 player, but they created the first massively commercially successful one.

Through this, they also pioneered the first digital storefront for music which in itself was a fucking feat considering there is already a music company named Apple. They threaded the fucking needle with that one. They had trademark disputes with Apple Corps (holding company for music by The Beatles) going back to the 1970’s but put that all to bed with the release of the iTunes store.

If it weren’t for double standards, he’d have no standards at all.

I know that JS, CSS, and HTML aren’t perfect, but it feels like this person is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

I want to have empathy for this viewpoint, but dogging on HTML as being a difficult markup language is… comical?

HTML literally continues to be one of the easiest markup languages to learn.

Also, this person has clearly not heard of HTMX.

It’s a good ethos, but it really seems like it’s asking for the world on a silver platter. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good, you know?

I’m also not really sure how or why they connect paying artists fairly with HTML being easier to use? There was a great way to pay artists directly for a long time: Bandcamp. Hardly anyone used it and most chose Spotify instead. That has fuck-all to do with how HTML works?

Finally, if we’re talking about the web being accessible, when are we going to start talking about fucking ownership of hardware and connections? Even if we own our own servers, we’re still using infrastructure to send data over that is owned by private companies.

How is open software “freeing” us if we’re still doing it all on someone else’s property?

EDIT: Also, obligatory XKCD on them wanting to build another, new markup language: https://xkcd.com/927/

I’m not saying those people don’t really exist, there are tons of them out there for sure, but we also have extensive evidence of governments doing this.

GCHQ in the UK had JTRIG using many forum disruption techniques.

There’s also the Five Eyes and how they use information sharing to essentially do an end-run around being able to spy on their own citizens. Technically, they’re not spying on their own citizens, a foreign nation is, they just so happen to have an agreement with that foreign nation to get info on their own citizens.

The US definitely engages in this kind of stuff on foreign nations as well. They tried to create a social media service for Cuba to influence Cuban politics and do information gathering.

Do either the UK or the US have to spy on their own citizens if they can rely on each other to run influence campaigns in each others countries? The US had to apologize to Angela Merkel for tapping her phone.

Israel has many different programs aimed at managing the PR of the state of Israel online. From paying college students to speak positively of Israel online to having “Think Tanks” use teams of people to influence Wikipedia.

We know that Hacking Team was selling their surveillance software to oppressive regimes, who were definitely using it to oppress the population. If they’re using these kind of tools, they’re using online disinformation tools as well.

So once again, there’s tons of real life absolute maniacs when it comes to politics. There’s also incentive for governments around the world to run influence campaigns for pennies on the dollar with digital tools in the digital world.

Counterpoint: Violently unhinged MAGAts who literally make worshipping Trump and “owning the libz” their entire personality.

I’m not saying you’re not correct (you are), but I’m saying there’s other types of political toxicity out there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_personal_is_political

but if the Pope shits in the woods, and no one is around, does it make a sound?

Political topics are also the topics that are most strongly gamed by political actors using Persona Management software to make it seem like their opinion is in the majority. The idea that people who participate in things such as “forum sliding” aren’t toxic in their interactions is absurd, so we’re left with assuming a large number of these toxic accounts aren’t actually real people.

I’m not saying people deep into politics can’t be toxic. Plenty of them are, sure. However, it’s in the interest of people with political power (especially politicians with politically unpopular ideas) to make regular people not want to participate in politics. One way you do that is to make all political people seem unhinged, angry, and just terrible. People wonder why hardly anyone votes in elections, this kind of stuff is why, and it’s not on accident that these folks seem like the majority.

I’m fully convinced the majority of them are bots trying to make politics in general seem more toxic than it actually is to dissuade more people from even wanting to be involved. The intent is to drive political apathy.

Sources:

US government developing Persona Management software in 2011: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-social-networks

Eglin Air Force Base is most “Reddit Addicted City” in 2014: https://web.archive.org/web/20160604042751/http://www.redditblog.com/2013/05/get-ready-for-global-reddit-meetup-day.html

One of many research papers on Persona Management and Influencing Social Networks from Eglin AFB: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.5644.pdf

Helpful Reading Materials:

The Gentleperson’s Guide To Forum Spies: https://cryptome.org/2012/07/gent-forum-spies.htm

I mean, Beeper is the same company that was selling the main product (a matrix server to combine all your chat services into one using bridges) when it was still completely half-baked and they had a 45-minute onboarding process to get people to set up their services, because it was so complicated. They’ve clearly made it a lot less complicated now, so why did they feel it was necessary to charge money up-front when it was still half-baked and needed someone to guide you through complicated setup processes? It just feels like they’re happy to have their asses hanging out and charge for it without really feeling the need to prove things work as intended. I was never on the service during this early time (or at all), but I remember seeing lots of complaints of failures and service interruptions, and it never made sense to me to be paying for an unfinished product.

So, in my opinion, this is entirely on brand for Beeper.

Sounds like more people should just use the same Matrix bridges that Beeper is using for their main service and just spinning up their own Matrix server instead of trusting a third party with their Apple credentials logged into a Mac that lives on their property and is technically owned by them. The “original plan” was to send out refurbished iPhone 4’s to people to use, but apparently letting consumers have a little more control was going to be too confusing or something and instead they rolled out a fleet of Macs internally.

Matrix is trusted and secure. Why bother with a third party charging for a service of… setting it up for you, with a flashy front-end?

I don’t understand why people are rooting for Beeper knowing how badly Eric Migicovsky screwed developers on the way out from Pebble Watch.

He already sold a failing company once, and he’s already hit a roadblock with his current company. How long until he gets bored and sells this one?

Also, I was on the waiting list way back when, and declined to sign up for Beeper when I had no indication that my onboarding would be recorded. Then I showed up to the onboarding zoom meeting with a note about it being recorded. No advance notice from a service that claims to respect privacy? You just showed your ass, Beeper. I never signed up, and when I wrote them with follow up questions (“How can I trust that the privacy policy will stay the same if the business is sold to another party?”) they declined to respond to any questions. Months later I would get an automated email reminding me about my place in line like I gave a shit anymore.

I personally don’t trust this companies promises, period. They’ve made it clear they’re less than honest about the privacy stuff and the founders past doesn’t scream “He will stand by this company when things get hard.”

I hate to be that guy, but the documentation for AD DHCP goes over this.

It isn’t always Microsoft’s fault when they fail to save their customers from their own stupidity and lack of concern for security.

It is bad that this is the default behavior, but defaults aren’t always defaults because they are the best, they are the defaults that will all work functionally together as long as everything is at default settings.

It is more about making it “work out of the box” with defaults than “making sure it is secure out of the box.”

Frankly, the security of their AD DHCP/DNS is the job of the SysAdmin, not Microsoft. A SysAdmin is supposed to be a professional, so why do they want to blame a third party for their own shortcomings and lack of security conscientiousness?

Nobody is blaming Linus for badly secured Linux servers, or saying the defaults should be more secure.

Literally don’t know why you’d take that away from my comment. We need a wealth tax.

I guess my point had less to do with cryptocurrency and more to do with currency in general. It’s not a defense of bitcoin as much as it’s a critique of how much energy the system in general uses, either way.

However, it’s also one that’s not easily solved. Even with paper/coin money, you’re still using finite resources to produce the bank-notes.

I mean, yeah, it’s bad. We shouldn’t be ignoring how bad bitcoin is for the environment.

But are you really gonna tell me that all the computers and CPU time that Wall Street uses for trading somehow takes less?

It doesn’t matter what financial system you use, you’re still burning energy to make it work.

He has wealth, he has to dip into selling stock to have “money.”

I don’t disagree otherwise, but when your wealth is in the companies you own, you pretty much have to sell the whole shebang in one go (what Musk reportedly tried to do with Apple, offering to sell them Tesla as a whole) or selling it piecemeal, by selling off portions of stock (which he does fairly regularly for cash infusions).

His wealth will surely insulate him for quite a long time. However, it is not a permanent insulator, and he has made a series of, let’s say, questionable decisions. It’s very likely that it will either take decades for it to really hurt him, or that it just may make him far less wealthy, but still wealthy enough to be annoying.

We’re also at a precipice, because the kinds of things that he is saying were the kinds of things that used to get you shitcanned from the business community as a whole. Nobody would do business with a virulent anti-semite. It’s one of the reasons Musk bought Twitter, really, because they are busy normalizing positions like anti-semitism.

The normalizing of his hate will actually get him farther, longer, than his wealth.

Agreed, that band-aid needs to be ripped off, because the site is really dead anyway. (It only appears alive because of bots trolling for engagement.)

You’d be surprised. Lots of people live like this, with all their devices and accounts. Ever piling up never read messages, whether emails, texts, or DMs. I don’t know if they’re just fine with it or if its something psychological making that many messages seem to big to approach, or because they don’t want to hear everyone’s cruel responses to what they said or I don’t know. But people do use accounts like that, for sure.