Notices by mhoye (mhoye@mastodon.social)

Franklin D. Roosevelt, on the campaign trail, once said "I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made", and I think about that whenever I remember that Jordan Peterson has this weird, longstanding and completely unreciprocated beef with Elmo.

Edited to clarify: the muppet.

Edited again because that isn’t enough of a clarification: from Sesame Street.

A few last thoughts about Facebook and Threads.

Their claimed user numbers are obviously bullshit. Even taken at face value, millions of people clicking a new button is not millions of people using a new service.

Second, their business is serving ads only. They have as an organization proven, repeatedly, that they will accept any adverse human impact up to and including genocide as long as their graphs go up. Their stated intentions are irrelevant and believing otherwise makes you a mark.

I often wonder if the common nerdbrain social fallacy that friendship is transitive - A(f)B & B(f)C -> A(f)C - somehow metastasizes in our minds and blinds us to the metabehaviors and strategies of organizations that pay lip service to our goals and values. "Microsoft😍Linux", then buys github to monopolize the world's devchains. "Google❤️AI-ethics" until ethics impedes market domination, then goodbye.

To Amazon's credit, at least they never snowed their own employees pretending to give a shit.

Finally, there's not a lot of evidence that people will switch services en masse for any reason other than a tectonic failure of their current service. Microsoft spent billions on Mixer, it was one click away from Twitch and it didn't matter. Nobody is moving off Threads to the Fedi, but interesting posts from the Fedi will keep people clicking around in Threads.

The utility of the Fedi to Facebook is shelter from regulatory scrutiny with a side helping of content farming. That's it.

Anyway are a lot of people on here who phoned in their poli-sci credit in first year and think being able to write their own shellcode means they can reinvent the humanities from first principles, who don't quite have the self-awareness to realize that ideology is an attack surface and they're years and maybe decades behind on their updates.

There's just a lot of people on here today saying "give facebook a chance" who do not seem to want to talk about what facebook does with the chances it's given.

You (uninspired, bland, predictable): syntax highlighting with colours.

Me, (innovative, experimental, pushing the envelope): syntax highlighting with fonts.

"Automated translation of web content is now available to Firefox users! Unlike cloud-based alternatives, translation is done locally in Firefox, so that the text being translated does not leave your machine."

I got to see the early demos of this and it is jaws-on-the-floor bonkers wizard magic. Entirely local - and good - translation with no cloud service and like 6MB of storage per language.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/118.0/releasenotes/

Dear academics: If you're allowed to email people copies of your paper if they ask, consider setting up a mail rule for yourself that autoreplied to any mail you receive that has the DOI of a paper you wrote in the subject with a copy of that paper.

https://mastodon.social/@EposVox@glitch.lgbt/109531796578961888

@javierpallero Our Modern Silicon Valley in a nutshell.

What, if I may be so bold, the _fuck_.

About a decade ago, shortly after Portal 2 came out, I emailed GabeN on a lark and said "Often tech companies make shirts to commemorate family-friendly events like Aperture's Bring Your Daughter To Work Day, but I didn't see any in the Valve store. Obviously this was a minor oversight but I thought I would bring it to your attention, thank you for your time, mhoye."

To my astonishment, he emailed me back. And copied Valve’s merch lead. And said, you’re absolutely right, thank you for bringing this to our attention, we’ll address it directly.” Ten years and two kids later these well loved shirts don’t fit anyone in the house anymore, so it’s time to give the shirt Valve made for my daughter away.

@tagomago Unfortunately, it is basically impossible to develop software without incremental deployment and robust telemetry. Without them, every change becomes an uncontrolled experiment across your entire user base with no feedback mechanism and no baseline. There's too much too-different hardware, OS and other operational context in the world now, and no organization with front-line privacy and security obligations can responsibly be flying blind in that environment.

Hey, so this is super cool.

Google has been collecting call and messaging data about who you talk to or send text messages to for years. There's no opt-out, no notifcation in their TOS they're doing this, and you can't see the results of that collection in Google Takeout.

https://www.scss.tcd.ie/doug.leith/privacyofdialerandsmsapps.pdf

Between you and me, this is one of the most frustrating things about working at Mozilla. We spend _years_ busting our asses on privacy, agonizing over minimalist, rigorously anonymized telemetry, making sure it's all transparent and safe and has opt-outs, and the internet screams at us for it anyway. And every other tech company out there responds to the years of research it takes to prove they don't give a shit about any of this with "whoops yeah sorry my bad we'll definitely do something".

Had somebody roll past me in their car honking their horn while I was biking with my kids, then drive past me half a block, take my picture, give me the finger and peel off, so I’m looking forward to being famous in some noxious car-karens Facebook group in a few hours.