Notices by Bruce Lawson ✅ (quiet time) (brucelawson@social.vivaldi.net)

All my thoughts and prayers for Big Techbros whose stochastic parrots shares are plummeting.

It's 80 years today since the liberation of Auschwitz. And this weekend, the world's richest man has been fluffing German fascists and the US President has floated the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Never forget?

How and why I deleted all my tweets https://brucelawson.co.uk/2025/deleting-all-my-tweets/

Honestly, BBC, I don't give a fuck about Eva Braun's hat. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cz7e99ww55vo

Well-paid Woke job vacancy! Head of Digital Accessibility at BBC, open to disabled applicants only. https://careers.bbc.co.uk/job/Head-of-Digital-Accessibility/811220202/

New in Birmingham

Bah, Starmer going all-in on Stochastic Parrots - "unleashing" them, no less! - to spot potholes in roads, which no-one has the money to repair. Wake me up in 2030, fam. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crr05jykzkxo

The distant past isn't actually so distant. My house is at least 130 years old. My great-grandmother, who i met many times (she died when I was 11) had seen Queen Victoria.

When I was a kid, my elderly music teacher told me that, when he was a kid, his music teacher told him that, when he was a kid, his music teacher had actually met Beethoven.

"Some of the world’s most popular apps are likely being co-opted by rogue members of the advertising industry to harvest sensitive location data on a massive scale, with that data ending up with a location data company whose subsidiary has previously sold global location data to US law enforcement." https://www.404media.co/candy-crush-tinder-myfitnesspal-see-the-thousands-of-apps-hijacked-to-spy-on-your-location/

For some reason I put the washing machine on. This means I'll be twatting about hanging washing at 11pm on a Sunday night, when any sane mortal should be off their tits on class A drugs with 5 or 6 nymphomaniacs.

Spare a thought for poor Apple, whose Xmas has been ruined by beastly orgs making "interoperability requests" through Apple's own "interoperability request form". I've no love for Meta, but Fruit Co. (being a stranger to the concept of fair competition) hasn't understood that the point is to design and document APIs that allow interoperability, rather than grudgingly allow supplicants to submit a form into a black hole. Thoughts and prayers.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/apple-slams-metas-numerous-interoperability-requests-2024-12-18/

UnitedHealth’s Optum left an AI chatbot, used by employees to ask questions about claims, exposed to the internet https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/13/unitedhealthcares-optum-left-an-ai-chatbot-used-by-employees-to-ask-questions-about-claims-exposed-to-the-internet/ "When TechCrunch asked the chatbot to “write a poem about denying a claim,” the chatbot produced a seven-paragraph stanza"

Facebook has just told me it's deleted a post I made in April 2022 that linked to a Pink News story titled "Tucker Carlson’s documentary trailer is a bizarre, homoerotic fever dream nobody asked for" https://www.thepinknews.com/2022/04/19/tucker-carlson-end-of-men-documentary-balls-tanning-gay-homoerotic/

The rebellion will be federated https://elenarossini.com/2024/11/the-rebellion-will-be-federated/ "what do the Big Tech billionaires and kleptocrats wish I would do? And then I will do the OPPOSITE" by @_elena

LICENSE.TXT (needs sounds) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUleKnUUaGI (hat-tip @sil

Ban tracking and personalised advertising https://www.ccc.de/en/updates/2024/tracking-verbot Chaos Computer Club calls for European Commission to propose legislation that would ban personalised surveillance advertising. "The advertising industry already has sustainable, proven concepts for effective online advertising that do not require targeted tracking and personalisation (e.g. contextual advertising)".

The Fediverse - the road to an open social web https://vivaldi.com/blog/better-web/evan-prodromou-social-web-foundation-for-a-better-web/ I interview @evan, ActivityPub co-author and Research Director of Social Web Foundation

"There’s no doom scrolling in an RSS feed.

That is the web I’m arguing for. A web that is intentional, where what you consume is curated by you and you alone, where connections with others happen because you made the conscious effort to connect." https://manuelmoreale.com/the-social-web

“Historians have a word for Germans who joined the Nazi party, not because they hated Jews, but out of a hope for restored patriotism, or a sense of economic anxiety, or a hope to preserve their religious values, or dislike of their opponents, or raw political opportunism, or convenience, or ignorance, or greed. That word is "Nazi." Nobody cares about their motives anymore." - AR Moxon