AmbitiousProcess (they/them)

My father often bikes up to Canada, which means crossing the border. (obviously)

Normally, there’s a long line of cars, and a bit of a wait.

There wasn’t a single person in front of him when he got there, and just 2 cars waiting when he came back.

Maybe it’s just me, but seeing regular ass people who were previously entirely disinterested in politics start marching in the street, actively educating themselves about the political landscape, and even seeing some break off into actual blockades of ICE facilities gives me a lot more hope than seeing people do nothing in the first place.

You have to remember, the average person mostly just cares about their family and personal financial circumstances, doesn’t take risks, and just reposts platitudes on facebook from time to time.

This is an improvement from the status quo, and any progress toward a better direction is good. I guarantee you, you will see many more people engaging in concrete actions as time goes on, because these sorts of protests help spur people into further action. Hell, we’ve already seen that happening.

These protests are gateways to concrete actions, not something that replaces them.

That’s why there needs to be a clear line that people know exists between performative protest and concrete protest.

For anyone confused:

Performative protests, like the No Kings protests, serve to:

• Get people energized to either take concrete action or donate/join organizations that can
• Reduce feelings of hopelessness/despair
• Make people more aware who were previously not following the news much if all

Concrete protests actually delay or stop the bad thing in question (e.g. blocking exits to ICE facilities)

A lot of people are hoping No Kings and similar protests will stop Trump. They won’t. Of course they won’t. But you can bet there’s a lot more people donating to charities that either legally fight the administration’s actions, or disrupt fascist policies on the ground, and a lot of people end up breaking off from these more liberal protests to later go to more concrete ones.

They’re not worthless, but nothing beats direct, concrete action.

https://beautifultrouble.org/toolbox/tool/dont-expect-a-concrete-outcome-from-a-symbolic-action

Depends on how exactly the person approaches the house. If they go up and just start screaming in their face, they could probably be trespassed, but there’s this legal principle known as “implied license,” which essentially just means that if you have a way to enter your property, you’ve sort of implied that you’re allowing people to go there for legitimate purposes, such as getting your attention, delivering mail, soliciting (unless a sign specifies otherwise), etc.

So even if they had a sign saying “no tresspassing,” if their neighbor were to walk over and knock on their door to let them know their back gate was left open, that wouldn’t be tresspassing, because it’s implied that they still are allowing people to walk on the footpath to their door, to get their attention for any purpose deemed reasonable or legitimate.

As a public servant, someone coming up to your door and trying to tell you something, or a journalist coming up to ask you some questions, could very well be considered covered by implied license, and thus not tresspassing, though I’m sure the courts would have to debate that a lot to actually determine if that’s the case given the situation.

Because the assumption is that the president won’t be a fucking dumbass, and will need to utilize the emergency powers immediately, because of an actual imminent threat they can’t wait around for approval for.

"And I look forward to working with everyone, including billionaires, to make a city that is fair for all of them,” he added.

You do not work with the people causing inequality to make things fair. Actual moronic behavior.

Holy shit this is good 😆

Not like this.

If everyone’s phones had been actively using the microphone without consent to record people, we would have found out by now. I know a lot of people like to say that “oh I got this ad that only showed up because I talked about x with a friend and my phone heard me,” but that’s just due to both selection bias and a number of other tracking methods and datapoints other than conversations.

You’ve still got time. Even when management transitions, it takes MUCH longer for actual systems and processes to catch up to the new “vision” they have for it.

If you want to delete your data, now would be the time before they actually start implementing any new practices.

I believe that’s probably why they specify in the headline “at Microsoft” rather than just “independent.”

You can have an independent division within a company that doesn’t get orders from the company’s main CEO, or you can have it be fully under that person’s oversight. It used to be a separate division with its own management, now it’s not, thus it’s no longer internally independent.

“No no guys you don’t understand, robots.txt actually means just search engines, it totally doesn’t imply all automated systems!!!”

Tech bros will always choose the most overcomplicated option over the simplest, most effective ones.

Why build a battery and just install some more solar panels to charge it during the day when you could have a mirror in orbit beam down a tiny fraction of the light required to generate power anywhere near regular daytime capacity, for only a small portion of the night before the satellite is out of range, in only a small area, in a manner that can only work for one single client per satellite at a time, meaning it gets less cost effective at scale?

Yeah, though I feel like it’s hard to do anything too crazy with a calendar app.

I’d expect larger changes for apps related to music, tools like photo editing ones, photo galleries, etc, since they have a lot more subjectivity as to how they can be designed without it feeling confusing to use.

I have a feeling there’s a reason they picked the calendar app first, and it’s precisely because the changes weren’t hard for them to do comparatively.

Apple stock did, and unfortunately it even makes sense why. Considering how self-centered Trump is, and how easily swayed he can be by a literal shiny rock being given to him, this was probably a legitimately good trade for Apple.

They spend some money on a gold brick with some laser-cut glass, and the president of the entire country either gives them preferential treatment, or simply doesn’t take any more extreme actions he was planning to take against them.

If it was “easy to police now with AI,” then companies wouldn’t still regularly have issues with all kinds of code injection on their websites, since literally any security vendor would have implemented bulletproof AI protection for it already.

An AI model designed for moderation could probably block some things, but it would be no better than traditional mechanisms employed by large organizations who’s job it is to keep things secure, that still regularly fall victim to these kinds of vulnerabilities. Many of these organizations already use AI-powered tools to police their systems, and they know they’re not anywhere close to even being a full replacement, let alone foolproof.

Don’t forget racist, too!

They don’t delete your content, they just redact your username and disassociate each individual comment from your larger profile so nobody could, for example, click on the deleted user who posted a comment in r/abc and see they also posted a particular comment in r/xyz.

The reason tools like Redact (many of them all use this same name lol) have taken off in popularity is because they delete, or redact the contents of your posts before you delete the account, thus making even that vestigial data worthless.

Give BuyNothing a shot if you haven’t already!

They have an app and facebook groups depending on where people are willing to use it, but instead of it being a marketplace, everything on it is free. (though you can offer to pay shipping from a local provider)

Lots of people offer up furniture, especially older/antique stuff on there all the time, as well as tons of other stuff. Also a great way to get rid of things you don’t personally want anymore but don’t want anyone to end up paying out of pocket for.

Actual downloadable software or just a website?

I’ve heard of Soundiiz before for migrating playlists to something like YouTube, though it’s paid for larger playlists, and after that yt-dlp will work well for the now non-DRM protected playlists on sites like YouTube Music, but not on DRM-protected ones like Spotify, or ones that only show samples by default like Deezer.

If you ever find that an artist on other platforms isn’t on Bandcamp, you’ll usually find them on Qobuz’s Download Store since that’s a common place that they also tend to publish.

It’s a little less convenient than Bandcamp, and is often a little more randomly priced across artists and even individual songs from an artist, but if your goal is to compensate them and get a high quality audio download, it’ll be another option.

They also have a streaming offering with way better payout rates for artists at what tends to be around $0.01873 per stream as of last year, in case you’re not ready to ditch streaming, though I can’t speak to how good it is as I haven’t tried it myself.