Notices by Angus McIntyre (angusm@mastodon.social), page 3

The great thing about the recent #NetNeutrality court decision is that it allows service providers to get into the #enshittification game. Now they’re no longer required to observe neutrality with respect to content sources, they can (a) deliver an inferior experience to consumers – phase 1 of enshittification, per @pluralistic – AND (b) extort more money from content providers – phase 2.

Welcome to Year 0 of the true enshittocene, when ubiquitous enshittification REALLY kicks into high gear.

Each year, I sit through a mandatory training on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, because – even though I never interact with any foreign officials and have no money to pay bribes anyway – businesses are required to let their employees know that Bribing Foreigners Is Bad.

To judge by the number of major corporations currently rushing to donate to Donald Trump’s inauguration party, however, bribing AMERICAN officials is not only entirely permissible, but even sound business practice.

This is an ad served by Google Ads. It appears superimposed on a (legitimate) web page, with the rest of the page blurred out. I didn't check to see where clicking the Open button would take me, but I doubt it's anywhere good.

Google does allow users to give feedback on this ad, but the only option is "Seen too many times”. There is no option to flag it as the blatant cross-site scripting/probable #phishing attack that it is.

#security #Google #PhishingAsAService #BadActors

@annaleen ... and also reduces the risk that some random dude in a hoodie will appear out of nowhere and put three rounds in your shortbread from close range.

@cstross Napoleon said that you should never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake. I say we let 'em try it.

(goes off to print sticky labels reading “Bird flu remedy. For rectal use only” for his next trip to the supermarket)

@georgetakei Till Darth Do Us Part

There has to be a special sub-case of Dunning-Kruger where you recognize that you're shite at everything, but you're actually even more shite than that, even when you take Dunning-Kruger into account. Put another way, the Dunning-Kruger Effect is probably recursive.

In other news, adulthood for some of us is just a long slow process of arriving at the suspicion that we might be on the wrong side of the Dunning-Kruger divide.

@pluralistic Shakespeare nods approvingly.

"God's judgment upon thee, thou slanketpilled hammockmaxer, thou electrically be-cosseted rogue, always a-dangle 'twixt earth and sky!”

(Falstaff to Ned Poins in “Richard VII, Part 3”)

@davew @cstross He'll just have to get his classified information by browsing the documents in the downstairs bathroom at Mar-a-Lago like everyone else.

It is once again #JohnMastodonDay, and so I am once again re-posting this poster for the greatest noir movie ever made.

(with apologies for the use of an "AI” image-generation tool)

O’Brien said that if we wanted a vision of the future, we should picture a boot coming down on a human face, forever, but actually I think the most realistic image of our future is Dave Bowman in "2001", desperately trying to disable all the "AI” features in his computer after each upgrade.

@RandomDamage @crankylinuxuser @pluralistic You don’t actually have to bully Democrats into doing the wrong things. You can just tell them that if they do the wrong things, then the Republicans will like them.

This is, of course, not true, but it works nonetheless.

@cstross The problem is that magical software startups need VC funding, and the dragons have all the gold.

So you have to go to them, and if they don't like your pitch deck, they char-broil you.

@pluralistic "You put the ‘nut in the overhead
And close it right up.
You put the 'nut in the overhead
And close it right up …”

There is a website that I have to use that is a world leader in bad UX. Everything about it is awful. Everything works in the stupidest possible way.

Today, they forced me to migrate to a brand new site (for about the second time in the last three years). The migration process was predictably fraught (because stupid UX) but I finally did it.

Now I can't log in.

Do you want to know why?

Because their 2FA codes are 8 digits long, but the form field to enter the code only accepts 7 digits.

Trump's plan to use tariffs to force agricultural producers to move production to the United States, while simultaneously using the army to expel the workforce they need to do so is really some next-level strategic genius thinking.

@1br0wn @pluralistic Interestingly, Gmail classifies these emails as spam, which I’m sure is totally an accident.

If you have a Gmail account and haven't received one of these messages, check your Spam folder.

@self "You will receive the feedback you so long for … from a LLM that will generate a plausible-sounding critique of a book that may or may not resemble the one you wrote.”

They should really market this as the perfect gift for the guy who already has an AI girlfriend.

Just seen a tabloid article that described Indonesia as “another small country”.

It's the fourth-largest country in the world by population, and the fourteenth-largest by surface area.

The article went on to use a quote from Sukarno as an indicator of Indonesian foreign policy. Which, given that he's been dead for over half a century, is a little like going to former Emperor Puyi for an up-to-the-minute soundbite on the state of China.

At a startup long ago I heard for the first time the names of assorted tech bro entrepreneur types (our startup was a great place with great people, but these were the gods of the startup world, success stories to emulate). I didn't know who they were, but thought they all sounded vaguely like assholes & their ‘genius insights’ seemed lame AF.

Now I'm hearing all the same names I heard back then again, as they all orbit around Elon Musk like flies on shit. And now I'm sure they're assholes.