Notices by Proto Himbo European (guyjantic@infosec.exchange)

@hellomiakoda Is it Depends? It's Depends, right?

Pretty sure LibreOffice help-folks in forums are gaslighting the users saying that #LibreOffice Write style application problems are user error. I've got the same problems as several help-seekers in forums as recently as a few months ago, and the "helpful" forum replies just keep insisting that what the user is saying they did or didn't do is false.

I'm convinced LO Write has some bugs in this department, so it feels borderline aggressive for the help-folks to keep insisting that there can't possibly be bugs; it must be the user.

Edit: A less serious but still frustrating thing: LO helpers online repeatedly state the precedence rules for formatting text (paragraph style, character style, direct formatting, etc.) and simply lament that users can't handle such an advanced and user-friendly system.

Then they tell someone with a 400-page novel including thousands of paragraphs that, instead of suggesting LO adopt a system where styles might (if users choose) override direct and paragraph formatting, this person should quadruple-click each of their thousands of paragraphs, one by one, then press CTRL+M to remove all formatting, and finally apply the LO style.

If you have to work this hard to ignore a repeated feature request, there is something wrong.

#ui #ux #design #foss

@ryanc Exposure and Response Prevention?

@hellomiakoda oh, I misunderstood. And I strongly support all things Tomb Raider.

@hellomiakoda would it be easier to run Kodi on a raspberry pin linked to the tv?

@hellomiakoda For three small payments of $19.95 (USD) and a large dose of lowered expectations, I can fix that for you.

The Hat Man. I saw the tumblr meme a few years ago (already a few years after it was made). It's funny. Telling Mary about it, I did a quick online search.

Our #culture apparently can't leave anything alone. Maybe, with the death of the monoculture, we're all desperate for some shared references. Maybe some Very Online People have made little micro-cultural groups that spread through larger cultures like mycelia.

There is now a little subgenre of Hat Man merch (t-shirts, etc.) and at least one low-budget horror movie titled The Hat Man, so #capitalism had to get its hand in, too.

This makes me simultaneously more and less interested in The Hat Man as a phenomenon.

#cryptids #memes #TheHatMan

@aral @staff I think I understand (?): the account is quoting your posts and disingenuously using the "antisemitism" hashtag?

Registered for a class action against Meta for stealing my shit (i.e., at least 5 scholarly articles). Fuck them up, lawyers.

Remembering that, for most or all of those articles I refused to sign my copyright over to Taylor & Francis or Springer or whoever; Instead, I retained copyright and gave them a license. I wonder if that will ever be an interesting issue.

If LLMs can't exist without copyright violations and IP theft, they don't deserve to exist.

#llm #copyright #theft #lawsuit #professor

Thoughts about #ICE / #CBP

1. The media needs to stop saying people were "arrested" or "detained." They are being kidnapped, abducted, assaulted.

2. The media needs to stop assuming anyone abducting random people while wearing ski masks is an ICE agent.

3. We need to start identifying individual ICE agents, somehow, naming and shaming them.

#uspol #fuckthis

@kaia He'll be fine. He's up at all hours, anyway, from what I'm told.

I have a friend who works in a US state government role. While auditing service provider records for medical and related services to citizens, she and some of her colleagues just saw potential evidence of AI being used to summarize client reports from a state database. The database is highly sensitive, covered by HIPAA and other laws, and contains some very personal info like (I think this is right) medical & psychiatric diagnoses, interactions with law enforcement, medical procedures, psychological treatment, etc.

My guess: someone is dumping protected information into chatGPT to get summaries so they don't have to do the work. Meanwhile, they just gave vulnerable people's data to openAI (or Google or Microsoft et al.). And they are apparently submitting these summaries as "hard facts" data, despite errors in the summaries, so the individuals being served (or not) might get flagged for the wrong things, put in the wrong treatment categories, denied services, etc.

Probably not an AI scraper let loose on the database, but insidious and awful in plenty of other ways.

#ai #llm #government #clusterfuck

RE: #Firefox / #Mozilla #TOS / #AI drama

I see this a lot: "Don't you know you're the last semi-open, semi-free, mostly non-extractive, non-enshittified browser we have left? How could you do this?!"

I suspect the reality from Mozilla's (CEO's) point of view is: "Don't you know we're the last semi-open, semi-free, mostly non-extractive, non-enshittified browser you have left? That's why we're doing this."

#corporate #latestagecapitalism #enshittification #BecauseWeCan

@selzero This is the best thing I've read all day. I think Snoop probably has a softer side, too, but IDK.

@selzero I want to hear about rappers learning to felt, taking up gardening, or curating abandoned media.

@cwebber @pluralistic @jeremiah @jorgecandeias @mlemweb Oops! Sorry. Um... just refer to you by your handle? As Christine Lemmer-Webber?

@jorgecandeias @pluralistic @cwebber I clearly missed @cwebber's writing; I have enjoyed reading her essays/threads, though I don't always understand the details, not being a coder or true tech person.

In honor of the excellent discussion started by @TheBreadmonkey about whether it is okay to swear on #mastodon

#swearing #fediverse #profanity #cursewords #tiktokrefugee #welcome

"Smart leftism pays attention to these differences [in flavors of capitalism], because they represent the potential fault lines in capitalism's coalition..."

"I'm saying that it's good praxis to understand these divisions in capitalism, because then we can exploit those differences to make real, material gains for human thriving and worker rights. Lumping all for-profit businesses together as identical and irredeemable is bad tactics."

@pluralistic politely but firmly calling the purity-testing, gatekeeping leftists on the carpet and it's a discussion that is always timely. I am here for it.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/20/capitalist-unrealism/

#doctorow #enshittification #leftism #progressive #liberal #corporate #socialmedia

#Mastodon and #Fedierse coders: how hard would it be for a semi-techy person like me (barely know any languages but could put together something in Python) to create a bot that scrapes toots with certain hashtags? Also, I'm concerned about violating TOS or #privacy...

All these awesome song-related events like #ThursdayFiveList, #JukeboxFridayNight, #tunetuesday, etc. generate beautiful, borderline unusable lists of fascinating songs. It would be cool to make a bot that scraped all the titles from, say, #thursdayfivelist, and put them in a playlist. Or just a big document/web page with song.link URLs.

How much pain and frustration would I be bringing on myself?

#programming #bot #scraping #ethics #suggestions #recommendations