They claimed that the government was focusing on this one issue when really it was a small part of a much larger legislation. Whether it’s good or bad is a separate judgement.

This was part of an overall package including aid to Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan.

Personally, I just find it really disappointing. This Tik Tok issue could have been an opportunity to improve privacy and reduce data collection across the board. Instead, it’s a surgical strike in order to not disrupt American tech companies doing the same thing.

What will happen is that Bytedance will sell the US Tik Tok to an American VC firm and it will continue data hoarding as before. This time, the US government will be getting the data instead of the CCP. I’d rather nobody got it.

This happens to me if I have my VPN on from my phone app.

In college, we used to go to the top of parking garages to smoke weed at night. This kinda looks like a parking garage.

I heard the three basic rules from somewhere:

1. Always use the right tool for the job
2. A hammer is always the right tool
3. Every tool is a hammer

I’m a Wikipedia addict but I’m not complaining

Why do they want to step into what we are doing here?

I think there’s a much simpler explanation. Elon’s actions are causing users to want to leave the platform. Meta wants to pounce on this opportunity. ActivityPub is an established, open source protocol that allows Meta to quickly spin up a Twitter competitor. The federated nature means that Meta can reduce regulatory risk. At the same time, they can lobby for increased scrutiny of Twitter since it isn’t interroperable like Threads.

I have no idea if this is actually how Meta is strategizing. But what I definitely know is that Meta absolutely doesn’t consider federated social media a threat. They aren’t trying to squash us. They’re aimed at Twitter. If they make some change that degrades the experience for us, absolutely we should consider defederation. Until then, let’s try to make some converts out of Threads users.

When she finally starts to get it, that’s when Santa becomes real.

That probably would’ve been true even if they did follow through.

I’m surprised nobody has linked the Technology Connections video on this.

Can someone translate this to English?

A friend of mine had a very reliable car. Then he had to get new spark plugs and brake pads around the same time. He got tired of the car having “problems” so he got a…used mini cooper.

Japan is trying to change things. I think it’s just really far behind. While I was there, I remember government run/funded dating programs. The government names and shames companies that overwork their employees. But their definition of overwork is probably well beyond ours. The one-employer-for-life mentality is slowly eroding but it’s slow.

I lived and worked in Japan before returning to the US. It’s much worse in Japan. When you leave college, you’re basically employed for life by one company. Your place in society is determined by your work in that company. My company was one of the more progressive ones. Salaried personnel still had to clock in and out to prevent people from working too much overtime. People put in great effort to cheat the time clock and put in more overtime than would be acceptable. People would get to work an hour early and leave at 10pm. There was little effort to make work more efficient because the employees can just work more. The company had an employee discount deal with customer products and employees were pressured into buying their products. It’s much better in America where the common tactic is to switch jobs every few years. America has a long way to go when it comes to work, but saying it’s almost as bad as Japan is just not true.

Better editorial and moderation transparency are good. I support that. I’m worried about the “mitigating emotional harm” part of the bill. This could mean that the fringes of society are allowed to use coded language and dog whistles but people aren’t allowed to call them out (for example). Information about transitioning could be deemed “emotionally harmful”. I’m skeptical about the government’s ability to define “emotionally harmful” content, especially in the current political climate. It seems too broad.

Thunder keeps crashing for me. I switched to Connect today. We’ll see how it goes.

Torque. It allows you to connect to your car’s OBD2 port via a cheap Bluetooth adapter. From the app, you can read and clear diagnostic codes, setup custom gauges, and log data. It was very helpful when my alternator was dying and when my car was overheating. I don’t have voltage or coolant temp gauges.

Mine did that one night. Sleepy fight-or-flight kicked in and I popped her on the top of the head. I felt bad about it immediately but she hasn’t done it since.

Google will appeal so they haven’t won yet. The next jury might believe them to be patent trolls. Who knows.