Tag: technology

Just Stop Already

I have less than zero interest in joining Jared Kushner’s gatekeeping site:

Former President Donald Trump said he will launch his own social media network called TRUTH Social in early 2022.

The new Trump Media & Technology Group said it will create a rival social network to the current ‘liberal media consortium’ and ‘fight back against the ‘Big Tech’ companies of Silicon Valley, which have used their unilateral power to silence opposing voices in America.’

Trump, who will serve as TMTG’s chairman, said, ‘I created TRUTH Social and TMTG to stand up to the tyranny of Big Tech. We live in a world where the Taliban has a huge presence on Twitter, yet your favorite American President has been silenced.

‘This is unacceptable. I am excited to send out my first TRUTH on TRUTH Social very soon. TMTG was founded with a mission to give a voice to all. I’m excited to soon begin sharing my thoughts on TRUTH Social and to fight back against Big Tech. Everyone asks me why doesn’t someone stand up to Big Tech? Well, we will be soon!’

While Donald Trump was unquestionably the greatest president since Andrew Jackson, I am unlikely to support any of his post-presidential efforts. The man simply can’t be trusted due to the shady figures with which he still surrounds himself. And his refusal to support his followers who were arrested on January 6th, to confront the election fraud, or to support the existing alternative platforms indicates that he is no longer much more than a figurehead for those who have hijacked the MAGA movement.

Finally, he did nothing – literally nothing – to fight back against Big Tech while he had the ability and the power to do so. While I respect him for his historically great four years in office, as far as I’m concerned, his time is past.

DISCUSS ON SG

China Refuses to Flex

The Global Times won’t even admit the existence of the hypersonic orbital glider that has been widely reported across the West:

The Financial Times (FT) quoted on Saturday several sources saying that “the Chinese military launched a rocket that carried a hypersonic glide vehicle” in August and judged it to be a “nuclear-capable hypersonic missile.” According to the FT article, the missile “flew through low-orbit space” and could help China “negate” US missile defense systems which are designed to target the fixed parabolic trajectory of a ballistic missile. The progress of the Chinese military has “caught US intelligence by surprise,” the report said.

The US generally has the ability to monitor global missile launches. If the FT report is to be believed, it means that there is a key new member in China’s nuclear deterrence system, which is a new blow to the US’ mentality of strategic superiority over China. According to the FT, the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology announced the 77th and 79th launches of the Long March 2C rocket, but there was no announcement of a 78th launch. The report believes the 78th “secret launch” may be to test the above-mentioned hypersonic missile.

The FT also reported that China has tested a new space capability with a hypersonic missile, citing sources. It said the missile missed its target by about more than 30 kilometers, yet the test showed that “China had made astounding progress on hypersonic weapons.” But if Chinese authorities do not voluntarily release such top defense secrets, others can only speculate based on technical monitoring methods.

It is meaningless to discuss the credibility of the FT report. But it is important to note the unstoppable trend that China is narrowing the gap with the US in some key military technologies as China is continuously developing its economic and technological strength. China doesn’t need to engage in an “arms race” with the US – it is capable of weakening the US’ overall advantages over China by developing military power at its own pace.

China appears to be attempting to reassure the world that despite its weapons development program, its ambitions are toward regional, rather than global, dominance. I tend to believe them, simply because for over two thousand years, they have been considerably more sinned against than sinning with regards to foreign intervention. According to Lee Kuan Yew, even their invasion of Vietnam was limited to containing “the Prussians of Southeast Asia” and dissuading the Vietnamese from expanding their field of operations beyond their occupation of Cambodia.

Of course, that’s the problem with imperialism. In order to be left alone, a nation has to develop sufficient strength to impose its will upon its neighbors. The question, then, is if that nation can simultaneously develop sufficient moral strength to resist the imperialist temptation.

One has to admire the dry restraint of the Chinese foreign ministry. It’s all about space tourism, you see.

Speaking during a regular press briefing on Monday, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian was asked to comment on a report from the Financial Times that Beijing had conducted a hypersonic missile test in August, which had shocked US intelligence. The spokesman stated that China had undertaken “routine spacecraft test” to evaluate the rocket’s reusable technology. “This is of great significance for reducing the cost of the spacecraft. The peaceful use of space provides a convenient and inexpensive way to travel,” Zhao added.

DISCUSS ON SG

Republicans Play China Police

It’s infuriating how Republicans insist on trying to throw their weight around outside US borders, but don’t lift a single damn finger to prevent US-based companies from abusing, banning, and censoring Americans in the United States:

A top Republican has become the first member of Congress to call out LinkedIn, the only major American social media platform that operates in China, for censoring American users on behalf of the ruling Communist Party.

Rep. Jim Banks, chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee in Congress, sent a letter Friday to Microsoft-owned LinkedIn, criticizing them for bowing down to the Chinese government by blocking the profiles of Americans who refer to the Asian superpower in a critical fashion.

There are at least 100 Americans whose LinkedIn profiles have anecdotally been found to have been banned by China in the past few months for allegedly anti-China content in the “Education” or “Experience” sections of their LinkedIn profiles.

Who cares about China censoring foreigners? Do something about Google, and Twitter, and Apple, and Facebook censoring Americans in the United States, FFS!

Conservatives are so utterly useless as they smugly preen and posture about abstract freedoms while doing absolutely nothing of any material value, they almost annoy me more than the idiot SJWs.

UPDATE: YouTube is now censoring all anti-vaxx information.

YouTube will ban any video that claims “vaccines are ineffective or dangerous” from now on and has suspended the accounts of prominent vaccination opponents, including Joseph Mercola and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

To which, top Republicans said “well, did you know LinkedIn is censoring criticism of China?”

Get Off The Cloud

Amazon Web Services is going to start following the lead of Twitter, Youtube, and Google, and use its tech platform to play thought police:

Amazon.com plans to take a more proactive approach to determine what types of content violate its cloud service policies, such as rules against promoting violence, and enforce its removal, according to two sources, a move likely to renew debate about how much power tech companies should have to restrict free speech.

Over the coming months, Amazon will expand the Trust & Safety team at the Amazon Web Services division and hire a small group of people to develop expertise and work with outside researchers to monitor for future threats, one of the sources familiar with the matter said.

It could turn Amazon, the leading cloud service provider worldwide with 40% market share according to research firm Gartner, into one of the world’s most powerful arbiters of content allowed on the internet, experts say.

AWS does not plan to sift through the vast amounts of content that companies host on the cloud, but will aim to get ahead of future threats, such as emerging extremist groups whose content could make it onto the AWS cloud, the source added.

A day after publication of this story, an AWS spokesperson told journalists at Reuters that the news agency’s reporting “is wrong,” and added “AWS Trust & Safety has no plans to change its policies or processes, and the team has always existed.”

A spokesperson for our partner news agency Reuters said it stands by its reporting.

Amazon made headlines in the Washington Post on Aug. 27 for shutting down a website hosted on AWS that featured propaganda from Islamic State that celebrated the suicide bombing that killed an estimated 170 Afghans and 13 US troops in Kabul last Thursday. They did so after the news organization contacted Amazon, according to the Post.

The discussions of a more proactive approach to content come after Amazon kicked free speech app Parler off its cloud service shortly after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot for permitting content promoting violence.

Amazon did not immediately comment ahead of the publication of the story on Thursday. After publication, an AWS spokesperson said later that day, “AWS Trust & Safety works to protect AWS customers, partners, and internet users from bad actors attempting to use our services for abusive or illegal purposes. When AWS Trust & Safety is made aware of abusive or illegal behaviour on AWS services, they act quickly to investigate and engage with customers to take appropriate actions.”

Remember, SJWs at Amazon actually deleted Castalia’s account for about 18 hours two years ago. So what this signifies is that similarly-minded individuals have now reached positions of sufficient power to override the laissez faire attitude of the market-focused corporatists who previously ran the organization.

If you’re on the cloud, you’d better get off it and back onto your own metal as soon as possible. Putting your own data on other people’s machines and relying on the kindness of strangers was always a hideously stupid idea.

DISCUSS ON SG

Means vs Ends

A programmer rightly condemns the code-first approach to programming:

There are two kinds of programmers, generally speaking. There are programmers who care more about code, and there are programmers who care more about product. The former – I’ll call them “code-first” programmers – are obsessed with how code is architected, what tools, libraries and languages are used, how much test coverage there is – stuff like that. Code-first programmers are psyched when they check in the perfect abstraction, when they get to use the latest language-feature, when they delete dead code. That is, they love the code they write – the code is the thing.

The product-first programmer cares about that stuff too, kind of, but only as a means to an end. For product-first programmers, the code is the scaffolding, the support, the steel beams in the building, but not the end product. The end product is, well, the product, not the code, and what matters to them is how well that product actually solves the underlying problem. Does the building stay upright? Do the elevators work? Is the A/C functioning? Do people like being there? Product-first programmers love building and launching and seeing users use what they’ve built. The product is the thing.

Anyone who has worked at a place like Google has met plenty of code-first programmers. They are the teammates who are always refactoring code and nit-picking spelling in your function comments. They are in the micro-kitchen complaining about “spaghetti code,” “technical debt,” and the lack of rigor in other teams’ code review processes. They are probably not fixing bugs or launching features. You can probably tell I’m not a huge fan of the code-first approach.

When I interview programmers I’m always amazed at how many of them seem to think the code-first approach is what I’m looking for. Trying to impress me, they ask: “What’s your unit test coverage like?” Pretty close to zero; this is a startup. “Do you guys use hot new technology X.” Not yet, no, how would that help us build the right thing faster? “Is there a lot of technical debt?” We will have to rewrite everything at some point, but it doesn’t matter right now because we haven’t even figured out the right thing to build.

They have an understandable but fundamental misconception of what programming is all about. Programming is about building products that solve problems for users not about writing beautiful code for its own sake.

It can be remarkable how difficult it is to convince people, in a wide variety of activities and occupations, that it is the ends, and not the means, that are the actual objective. Whether it is businessmen planning new ventures, people getting involved in politics, or sports teams taking the field, the confusion of means with ends and process with results almost inevitably results in eventual failure.

Process is important, but only with the context of achieving the desired results. It is not important in and of itself.

DISCUSS ON SG

Why Parler Failed

It’s not a great mystery.

Is there an app to help refugees integrate with local cultures, communities and people? Maybe a couch surfing for refugees where you house, feed, teach? If there isn’t, would anyone be interested in volunteering on an open source project to build it?

Parler founder John Matze on Gab

It’s so tone-deaf at this point in history that you could easily make the mistake of thinking it’s dry humor. Is it even necessary to look up this guy’s Early Life On Wikipedia?

DISCUSS ON SG

Another day, another gatekeeper

One would think conservatives would stop falling for the traps that gatekeepers are laying for them, but then, they are conservatives. Now we’re being told Rumble is the new Parler:

Glenn Greenwald has urged internet users to leave behind YouTube’s ceaseless content-policing and migrate to Rumble, after he and a group of prominent pundits set up shop at the laissez-faire video platform. The veteran journalist, along with former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard and several other well-known commentators, have joined Rumble’s “deep pool of content talent,” the company said in a press release on Thursday. As part of the agreement, Rumble will provide the all-star content creators with resources to help them produce videos that will be exclusive to the site for a limited time.

The platform’s popularity has skyrocketed, experiencing a 25-fold increase in viewership over the past year.

Under the deal, Greenwald will continue his ‘System Update’ video program that he began while still at the Intercept and continued when he took up independent reporting at Substack. The show will appear on Rumble two hours before it is published elsewhere.

It’s not clear how much Greenwald is being compensated for the move, but he said the “ample funding package” would be used to pay for a “highly professionalized form of video.”

Translation: like Substack, Rumble is paying for “pundits” and recognizable “influencers” to use their platform. Of course, they’ll exert exactly the same content control that all the SJW-controlled platforms do, they just won’t be as obvious about it at first.

No thanks. I’ll stick with Unauthorized.

Discuss on SG.

Minimizing the digital

 Nick Krauser embraces digital minimalism:

1: “Digital minimalists recognize that cluttering their time and attention with too many devices, apps, and services creates an overall negative cost that can swamp the small benefits that each individual item provides in isolation.”

2: “Digital minimalists believe that deciding a particular technology supports something they value is only the first step. To truly extract its full potential benefit, it’s necessary to think carefully about how they’ll use the technology.”

3: “Digital minimalists derive significant satisfaction from their general commitment to being more intentional about how they engage with new technologies. This source of satisfaction is independent of the specific decisions they make and is one of the biggest reasons that minimalism tends to be immensely meaningful to its practitioners.”

I’d already pared my work down to three hours a week in a Thoreau-esque manner, figuring that what really matters is disposing of my precious life hours on things I enjoy doing. Newport advises that as a digital minimalist “you’ll take walks, talk to friends in person, engage your community, read books, and stare at the clouds.” Well, sir, I think you just described the entirety of my life. 

I’ll readily admit to wasting far too much of my time on news-surfing, although it is possible that I need to do it in order to utilize my pattern recognition and anticipate future events. I simply don’t see how one can reasonably hope to filter the useful bits of information from the mass data flow without permitting oneself to be inundated by the data. But if pattern recognition is not one of your gifts, then there really isn’t much point in permitting yourself to be showered with nonsense on a regular basis.

In any event, I’m pleased to learn that of all the sites that survived Krauser’s brutal paring down, VP was one of the two.

I only read two websites ever, being Vox every day for about ten minutes and then Anonymous Conservative twice a week or so. There’s just nothing on the internet to interest me.

However, I think I’m on track with regards to the taking walks and reading books elements. After indulging in the completion of the Discworld and Laundry novels, I’m now reading The Long Game, which is the mainstream spin on the strategic rise of China at the expense of the USA. I’m reading it for the spin rather than the information it purports to contain, because the rather glaring omission of one of the more important elements involved in the process indicates that the book is intended more as establishing the Official Story than providing substantive analysis.

Google, Facebook mandate vaccinations

These employment requirements are arguably good news, given the way in which CASE NIGHTMARE KITTY still appears to be in play.

Facebook will require U.S. workers returning to its offices to be vaccinated, the company said on Wednesday.

“As our offices reopen, we will be requiring anyone coming to work at any of our US campuses to be vaccinated,” VP of People Lori Goler said in a statement. “How we implement this policy will depend on local conditions and regulations.”

Facebook will create processes for those who can’t be vaccinated for medical or other reasons, Goler said. The company will continue to evaluate its approach outside the U.S., Goler added….

The news comes after Google CEO Sundar Pichai told employees earlier the same day that Google would delay its return to office plans by one month, citing the fast-spreading delta variant. Pichai also said returning workers would have to be vaccinated.

As iron sharpens iron, evil devours evil. 

Another retreat from arbitration

Now it’s Amazon that is deciding to run away from arbitration:

We wanted to let you know that we recently updated our Conditions of Use.

One of our updates involves how disputes are resolved between you and Amazon. Previously, our Conditions of Use set out an arbitration process for those disputes. Our updated Conditions of Use provides for dispute resolution by the courts.

Please visit https://www.amazon.com/conditionsofuse to read our updated terms in full.

As always, your use of any Amazon service constitutes your agreement to our Conditions of Use.

Thank you,

Amazon 

There are several reasons for this. One, of course, is the fact that the companies now know that arbitration can cost them tens of millions of dollars even when the arbitration companies and the arbitrators are bending over backward for them and breaking both the arbitration rules and the law in their favor. Even when they win, the state courts won’t uphold their awards because awards against consumers are egregious violations of the California law where most of them are headquartered.

The second is that California is tightening its grip on the arbitration companies. The arbitration companies keep trying to worm around the law, so the legislature keeps passing new and more rigorous laws, such as SB 762, which has been passed due to the way JAMS has repeatedly tried to wiggle around the requirements of the previous year’s SB 707. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if the California legislature eventually strips the arbitration companies of the legal immunity that the courts have conveyed upon them through case law.

But the third and most important reason is that the U.S. Appeals Court for the Second Circuit in New York recently agreed to review a lower court’s ruling that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects big tech companies from civil rights liability. The big tech companies lean very, very heavily on this ruling, and it’s probably not going to hold up to the Appeals Court review, being a very stupid ruling that has permitted the tech companies to play editor without being liable for an editor’s responsibilities.

The case of Domen v. Vimeo came about after Vimeo, an Internet video-hosting company, terminated Church United’s video streaming activities after it featured videos of five men and women who left the gay lifestyle to pursue their Christian faith. Vimeo claimed that its terms of service bar streaming videos that promote sexual orientation change therapy. Church United is led by Pastor Jim Domen.

A federal district court had previously held that Section 230 exempted firms such as Vimeo from civil liability and a three-judge panel of the Second Circuit upheld the lower court’s ruling.

However, as a result of the July 16 decision, the panel’s ruling will be reheard before the entire Second Circuit. The Second Circuit covers six federal district courts in three states, including New York, Connecticut, and Vermont.

“This ruling puts Section 230 immunity in the crosshairs of judicial review. We suspect that the en banc court recognizes that Big Tech is not exempt from state and federal civil rights laws,” said attorney Robert Tyler, general counsel for the California-based Advocates for Faith & Freedom. His law firm, Tyler & Bursch, represents Pastor Jim Domen and the California-based Church United nonprofit.