• 4 Posts
  • 233 Comments
Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: October 20th, 2023

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  • If you can look at women losing basic human rights over the course of a single workday and not care because the guy you liked that had spent literally decades actively dicking over Democrats in Vermont (seriously. Look it up. It is hilarious) didn’t get the full support of the entire party instnatly?

    You are a monster.

    Anyone who ACTUALLY cares about human rights should understand the importance of voting for harm reduction. They should have fucking understood it in 2016 but they better fucking understand it in 2024.

    Because, here is the thing: I’m Chinese. Both parties use my family as the bogeyman the moment it is convenient. AND we have been indoctrinated to let people step on us if it helps others because we “are the model minority”. You give me a candidate who actually gives a fuck about 7.2% of the country and I am gonna scream from the rooftops in joy.

    Doesn’t matter. Because I also give a shit about women and immigrants and LGBTQ+ folk and so forth.

    And if someone is throwing a hissy because they didn’t win in 2015 at the expense of those folk? They are horrible and SHOULD feel bad.


  • You do both.

    I am not as focused on ranked choice as others (I very much argue we basically already have the outcome with the primary system) and would rather a focus on getting rid of the electoral college entirely to allow for a popular vote. It doesn’t matter

    What matters is making sure we have a country where we can push toward that in a few years. Since, especially in 2024, one candidate is outright talking about dismantling democracy entirely. And, because of 2016, we have a supreme court that is basically “what do republicans want us to do?” at any given moment.


  • Its great that you liked Sanders. I… have very mixed feelings about him and mostly am angry at how much influence he pissed away.

    But here is the thing? If you don’t think you are being represented by the party? Then work with it. Even Sanders learned that after he spent most of his career actively dicking over the Democrats and it resulted in him becoming a household name.

    Contact your local Democratic party. The Internet loves to paint them as bogeymen who actively hurt any good candidates and… some do. But the majority are the idealists who joined up because they gave a shit about Obama or Hilary or even Sanders. But they support the people who run because… they understand that the goal is harm reduction. Someone who gives a crap and is willing to do outreach work? You have a LOT of influence and can work on seeking out those candidates who DO represent you. And as you shift the local party, so too do you eventually shift the bigger party. Because as much as people hate ol’ Genocidde Joe: he is ridiculously left of Clinton and, in some aspects, even Obama.

    I am glad we got The Squad, even if they are sometimes idiots. But Sanders should have led to a mass shift in the party as a whole.


  • Yeah. My father is a REAL piece of shit and said it in the context of “I hate that <homophobic slur> Bush” but it still sticks with me:

    In primaries? Vote for who you like. When it is time for the real election? Vote for the platform you hate the least. Bare minimum, it gives you the right to bitch and moan come February. Because if you don’t vote? You actively chose to not have a say in the government.

    … well, you also may have been disenfranchised by a bunch of republican shitheads. But it is the thought that counts.


  • Also, if you are putting all of your energy into telling people that the election is rigged and the candidate is unelectable and your vote doesn’t matter? It doesn’t matter if that particular moron is “just venting” and still plan to vote. You are actively discouraging others from voting.

    And those tend to be the same kind of idiots who think you vote once every four years. Rather than every single year. Because your representatives in congress matter a lot. So does the god damned local comptroller in your town. Because “grass roots” is not a bunch of people online deciding they like the c-span meme guy. “Grass roots” is about shifting your local party in the direction you want so that you can get those good candidates in office and turn a red state blue and so forth.



  • Even ignoring the ideological reasons to not want facebook integration: There are only so many hours in the day and so many dollars in the donation bucket. If an open source project is dedicating a disproportionate percentage of that on a feature that a significant part of the community actively do not want: That is exactly WHY you fork a project.

    And once we consider the ideological and safety related reasons to not want facebook and giant corporate interests involved?

    I have a lot of issue with the people who decide the answer is harassment and hate. But if enough development and organizational energy want to fork this? Fuckin’ A.



  • Not sure if google is particularly different but the way this works for the other services is basically low energy bluetooth scanning coupled with the phones providing their location*. So basically all the devices on that scanning/spy network periodically ping/listen for nearby devices/trackers. When it finds one, it sends a quick message to the servers with that phone’s location and the ID of the tracker. Get enough of those pings and you can triangulate the position of the tracker pretty precisely.

    Which… is why this fundamentally does not work with “hacker” solutions that allegedly emphasize privacy. Because you just don’t have enough devices listening. This was painfully obvious with tile back in the day and is still an issue with Samsung in some countries.

    *: Via a combination of gps, cell tower, and wifi network scanning. The less obvious part of that being wifi networks which is the majority of how interior positioning works.


  • I mean… bluetooth is literally broadcasting your position (sort of/it depends on the implementation). It is not at all a stretch that you should turn that off if you care about privacy. Same with not scanning for what wifi networks are available or even pinging GPS satellites (because that leaves a log). Hell… cell tower logs are a treat for cops/TLAs for a reason.

    Aside from that? Good for you. If you actually follow through on that I can respect it. My point is more that this particular solution seems like the worst of all worlds.

    Either you are demolishing your battery with regular phone homes to a server you hopefully control or you are relying on a push via SMS and the hope that you lose your phone somewhere you havea reception. And you still only have YOUR phone and YOUR network to track it which has significant drawbacks if you travel.


  • If people truly change their lives and focus on it, you can do a lot. But it does not take much, at all, to become compromised to one degree or another and people vastly underestimate the amount of redundancy. Or even the impact of a sibling or partner or even friend.

    Instead, the common case is people will tweak one small aspect and think that does anything other than inconvenience them. Or, worse, they’ll watch a youtube and decide to put EVERYTHING through their vpn which… defeats the purpose because they are still one easily collated set of profiles/cookies that can trivially reveal that “Fred Smith in Afghanistan” is really “Fred Smith in North Carolina”

    Which is why my approach is that there is data I very much want to protect and data I know I can’t. So I focus on understanding the former while doing what I can with the latter.

    And something like this? There are probably specific niche use cases for this. But it is a product/service that fundamentally requires aggregated data. And, depending on the implementation, it is going to fuck with your battery hard.


  • I guess. But it is really going to depend on where you live and just how frequently it does dial home.

    My personal use for these networks is luggage tags. But a friend lost her phone on a hike a few years back and the find my phone stuff was more or less useless due to poor reception and ever dwindling battery.

    The real benefit is the low energy bluetooth magic and OTHER devices to do the phoning home. Because maybe I have shit reception but someone hiking a hundred feet away has good reception and updates the ping.


  • Took a bit to figure out what it was even claiming to do

    When enabled your phone constantly sends e2e encrypted your location to the server where you can than access it from a webbrowser.

    God no. Just take a hatchet to my battery and be done with it.

    Also: Until a month or two ago, sure. But google finally got their shit together-ish and set up a tracking network the same as apple and samsung. And that is what you are sacrificing your privacy for. Yes, you give Big Tech tracking information… that they already have. In exchange you can actually have peace of mind of knowing your luggage is in the same airport or even where you parked. And you can’t really self-host a crowd-sourced network.


  • Corporate culture comes from the head. It is why when a company has systemic sexual harassment problems? It is almost guaranteed the CEO/influencers in charge of it are sex pests too.

    Spacex is “special” because so much of the leadership were blatantly poached from NASA and JPL and the various labs. So while you still have a LOT of corporate culture problems, it is also accepted that musk is the guy who does fund raising rather than the leader and he doesn’t have much say in actual moment to moment.

    Whereas he purged enough of tesla leadership that it is “his” company.