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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • Remember when China told Google to censor web search results and Google said, “No. How about we show those search results with notes that they were censored and why since the sites will be blocked anyway?”, and China was like, “You can’t show them at all.”, and Google said, “Fuck you. We’d rather lose access to the Chinese market than violate our principles.”, and instantly shut down any service in China that would require censorship or disclosing private data and closed all Chinese offices working on any of those technologies?

    What a time we’re living in.








  • Google used to allow third party payments. It turned out to be expensive.

    This is like forcing Walmart to let companies take up space in their stores rent free and process their own payments. When it turns out a bunch of those little stores are stealing personal information and credit card info and money, those customers go to the Walmart service desk and when Walmart employees shrug and say, “I don’t know what the fuck those guys are doing. You see, we give you the big store, but once you step into that smaller store hey are you falling asleep?” it’s national news and it’s Walmart’s fault and they’re called to testify in front of congress to get yelled at for not protecting customers. This is a weird precedent.

    I don’t agree with Google’s decision to force payments through Google. Since congress and courts and media expect Google to police the safety of all apps downloaded from the Play Store, I can’t think of a better solution that also respects privacy, isn’t, “We’ll monitor everything every app does, but pinky swear it’s just so we can make sure they’re being nice to you.”





  • Last I checked, Firefox had also been switching to Manifest v3 because they’re also combating the tide of add-ons that pretend to do something useful, but actually steal your information. They asked uBlock at least a few times how they could build Manifest v3 in a way that’d be compatible. Instead of the browser asking about each URL, thereby giving the add-on access to personal information, uBlock could tell the browser what to block. uBlock’s answer was always, “No. That’s not good enough. Give the add-on access to URLs.” It seemed to me like every time uBlock was approached, they turned to news sites to complain and IIR, the feature that would have given uBlock some functionality was removed from v3 because if nobody’s going to use it, why build it?

    I wonder, now that uBlock has conflated the discussion of, “How much should extensions be able to see and modify URLs you’re visiting?”, with, “v3 is a war on ad blockers!”, how quickly Firefox will move forward with v3, if at all.






  • As someone who maintained an API, 80% to 90% of my time was discovering that hackers were attempting an exploit, blocking it, adding monitoring, building abuse prevention. After we shut our API off, we could turn services back on, especially free services that we only took away because hackers.

    Not to mention the support volume. More than half of our support calls were, “Why did you suspend my account? I’m a poor old grandpa. I want to appeal.” Okay, yep we looked into activity and you sent 50000 requests in less than a minute and that’s all you ever did with this account. Did you know hackers lie and will spend hours getting tech support? You go to school to be an engineer to build cool stuff and instead field bullshit support requests all day from people trying to destroy the thing you want to build so they can maybe make thirty bucks and cost you tens of thousands. It sucked the life out of me and turned me eternally cynical.



  • The, “Everyone assumed roles were 100% different, but they were 100% the same, which really says something about you western people.” is distasteful to me and factually incorrect. We can see what people who live and lived without technology and access to shared culture do. Generally, men hunted more and women cared for children more. The observation has been that women spend a portion of their lives pregnant and nursing, so men go out and do things that require them to be away. We haven’t documented gender roles because preconceptions or because we’re western, but through direct observation. Those observations of how people lived could be combined with our knowledge of wear patterns on bones to construct a better understanding of how roles may have been less distinct and how bones wear. The assertion that we have 100% confidence in perceiving people’s entire lives by looking at bones and we can’t trust anything anyone said before because they were all sexist… excuse me… had preconceptions is unhelpful.