Notices by Irenes (many) (irenes@mastodon.social), page 5

it would make us very happy if people would recognize that mobile notifications are both a privacy nightmare and a trick to advertise to you in ways you don't feel like you can complain about because you opted in

and simply disable them everywhere, across the board

this has always been the case. it's not new. recent revelations made public what privacy people have been assuming for years - that law enforcement treats records of notifications as a tool of surveillance - but it was always obvious that this would happen, because it's technically feasible and like... when have you ever known cops to want LESS data

@cwebber federation is a governance structure whereby one large hierarchy is turned into many smaller hierarchies which have a tree relationship with each other

that thing where your robot vacuum is like "hmm there seems to be something in front of the closet today, I guess I'll just clean the closet"

@ct_bergstrom a couple years ago we had the thought, well, pretty soon it's not going to be possible to get web scrapes that don't have LLM output in them anymore. the copies of Common Crawl that exist now (2021ish) are the best that will ever exist.

as usual with our predictions these days, we'd rather have been wrong.

@ryanc strap down the shirt sleeve and around the hand then back up. same with the other strap. uh... no clasp, huh, we don't know how to handle that part

as usual, when there's a strike, listen to what the workers are saying with regard to whether they want a boycott or not

the Washington Post workers are on strike tomorrow, December 7th, and they ARE calling for a boycott. they would like us all to avoid interacting with ANY WaPo content, new or old, tomorrow.

@Alice we're just not standing close enough, the full level of detail turns on when you get inside

as you can see from our bespoke iconography, the laptop is quite busy

good news the phone is now flake-ified, which should really help with the logistics

there's a new NixOS release and that means it's keep touching the screen of our phone so the compiler doesn't go to sleep o'clock

@bennomatic we do think that Asimov's larger point was that these were engineering problems and were solvable. from context around his non-fiction, his lectures, etc it's very clear he thought that robots were a good idea and humans should make some. the point of the stories was to get people thinking about how to solve those problems well in advance of them arising.

doesn't seem to have worked, huh.

@bennomatic the fundamental conflict that we've seen play out over and over in our information privacy work is that people are like "you can't stop the future! we will build the thing and deploy it no matter what, so it has to be done ASAP and we can solve any problems later"

people argue that very seriously and with clear heartfelt emotion. also, it's a line which happens to serve the interests of for-profit corporations, so there's that.

and it's like.. we just want some forethought please.

@bennomatic we don't happen to agree with techno-solutionism, we think there should be solutions for the safety issues BEFORE deploying the thing, but it's important to understand what he was saying and criticize it accurately, in our view.

also, if Asimov's robots are sentient, the three laws are slavery, and it's hard to argue that they're not in light of the later books. so there's that.

@bennomatic we don't want to stop progress, we want progress to be done in a way that respects human life and happiness.

@BethanyBlack "let us stand, and breathe together"

@timnitGebru yes, exactly. it's not that this stuff is pleasant, it's that people who care about computing as a tool to expand the human potential for creation and connection can't afford to ignore it.

@emilygorcenski @beka_valentine yes, absolutely

from a cybernetic perspective we really don't care whether that's the intent of any specific person; it's the "intent" of various oppressive social systems, and it needs to be opposed

@emilygorcenski @beka_valentine this kind of flattening badness is so annoying, not just because it's self-centered and appropriative and an obstacle to any real solutions

but because there's important things to say about these various bad things that are not genocide. there is substance that needs to be conveyed, and when the extreme responses, and discourse around them, become the conversation, the substantive discussion never happens. it's a DoS.

@emilygorcenski @beka_valentine our hypothesis is that this is the result of US schools not teaching history

we're not sure if that's, like... how common that really is. so we're curious what y'all think about it