Notices by Kyle Rankin (kylerankin@mastodon.social)

@kylerankin So ultimately human teachers become a luxury good and cash-strapped school boards save money by hiring fewer teachers and buying heavily-subsidized tech to replace them.

@kylerankin You see this in Silicon Valley today. Tech billionaires send kids to private schools that tout being tech-free and hands-on with human teachers.

Education is moving to a divide along class lines: the rich are taught by humans in a tech-free environment. Everyone else will be taught by computers subsidized by Big Tech in exchange for data and lock-in.

Software engineers are indoctrinated to believe: "People only hate ads when they aren't relevant." This doctrine has led to over 20 years of mass data collection. It's a lie, and if more engineers dared to question it, we'd get a lot further on #privacy.

It says something about the proprietary mess that is modern messaging apps that a single tech company has 3 incompatible messaging networks and making them compatible with each other is newsworthy. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/technology/facebook-instagram-whatsapp-messenger.html

My Mom got a new phone 6 months ago and only shared her new # with me and 3 others. Months later she bought a new laptop and registered Microsoft Word (which apparently requires her phone # now?). A day or two later she started getting a stream of telemarketing calls. #privacy