Yet another study strongly calling into question the concept of “echo chambers”. I’ve argued it here before and people pushed back, but there is growing evidence that “echo chambers” are a moral panic and not a real phenomenon that we need to worry about. It’s time to throw it out and re-think, in my opinion.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-81531-x

COVID is still a leading cause of death in the United States. This pandemic is nowhere near over no matter how many times people try to pretend it is.

@New_scientist@feeds.twtxt.net I hate to break it to you but that’s not really “A” I?

@prologic@twtxt.net @movq@www.uninformativ.de s/twitter\.com/nitter.net/

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I guess so. It’s weird and obsessive. They are compulsively monopolistic anymore.

Youtube has started to artificially slow down video load times if you use Firefox. Spoofing Chrome magically makes this problem go away. : youtube

@Phys_org@feeds.twtxt.net We’re going to be killed by these people’s excesses, almost literally. This ratio is indefensible.

@New_scientist@feeds.twtxt.net No it isn’t. The prejudice that playing board games is indicative of general intelligence is passe, outdated.

@prologic@twtxt.net I feel like my kid is a better weather predictor than most weather sites. He freaks out whenever the pressure drops and we know a storm is coming 😆

@xuu Right now they’re laying the groundwork for uncritical belief in the power of #AI, so the next step will be accepting the magical incantations as if they were real.

@prologic@twtxt.net I don’t know but I don’t want it!

@New_scientist@feeds.twtxt.net no it can’t. Your blurb is literally “if we had data we can’t have, we could predict weather better”. DeepMind is irrelevant in that statement–anyone could.

@New_scientist@feeds.twtxt.net fuck off with this nightmare.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I think we’re 90 meters above sea level or thereabouts. Pretty far north in the US though.

First snowfall of the season.

Image

@prologic@twtxt.net “who could possibly forget that” you could, apparently lol

Fuck Earth!
– Elon Musk

https://aeon.co/essays/elon-musk-puts-his-case-for-a-multi-planet-civilisation

@prologic@twtxt.net Any of these work? https://gadgetstouse.com/blog/2023/05/15/bypass-ad-blockers-not-allowed-on-youtube/

@prologic@twtxt.net Newpipe on android continues to work fine

@phoronix@feeds.twtxt.net You get what you pay for?

Six Months Ago NPR Left Twitter. The Effects Have Been Negligible - Nieman Reports

@prologic@twtxt.net iotop

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org oh wow nice autumn shot. I expected to see then silhouette of a witch flying on a broomstick

More data contradicting the existence of “echo chambers”. As I’ve argued many times before, the concept of an echo chamber or information bubble is not real. The podcast below is an interview of an author of a study where they actually intervened and changed the information diet of 20,000 people (with consent!), then surveyed them after three months. They observed essentially no changes to the study subjects’ beliefs and attitudes. They also observed that the typical person, while they tend to gravitate towards people with similar political leanings, only get about 50% of their content from such like-minded people. They get the rest from neutral sources and maybe 20% from non-like-minded people.

Varied information diet + No change in attitudes when information diet is forced to be different = no echo chamber.

Listen to the podcast episode here

EU warns Elon Musk after Twitter found to have highest rate of disinformation | X (formerly known as Twitter) | The Guardian

Not a surprise I guess.

AWS: Cannot Escape IPv4

more than 90% of all AWS service API endpoints do not support IPv6

Sounds like AWS is instituting an IPv4 tax soon.

Oops, let a SSL certificate expire.

@prologic@twtxt.net

1. It’s criminal: Copilot was only possible because of massive theft of other peoples’ work (no compensation or even acknowledgement to any of the developers whose code was used to create Copilot)
   
2. It’s positioned to put software developers out of work or so fully de-skill them that they no longer know how to code anything but prompts (after which come corporate-justified salary and benefits decreases)
   

Don’t use it. No one should ever use it. You’re destroying your own future as a software developer by leaning on and supporting these things.

How Google Authenticator made one company’s network breach much, much worse | Ars Technica

🤦‍♂

WHY are these big companies treated as though they are the be all and end all of infosec? These are rookie mistakes Google’s making, at scale.

Unfortunately Google employs dark patterns to convince you to sync your MFA codes to the cloud, and our employee had indeed activated this “feature”. If you install Google Authenticator from the app store directly, and follow the suggested instructions, your MFA codes are by default saved to the cloud. If you want to disable it, there isn’t a clear way to “disable syncing to the cloud”, instead there is just a “unlink Google account” option.

Like, never ever put your multi-factor tokens into a single cloud storage location! The whole point of this being “multi” factor is that there is a separate, independent physical factor involved in the authentication process. If the authenticator app on your phone puts the tokens in the cloud, then it reduces the security that comes from having a second factor. This is basic stuff.

Of course, never ever use Google Authenticator. All it does is generate TOTP and HOTP codes, which you can do with any OTP app, preferably an open source one that’s been vetted.

USENET, the OG social network, rises again like a text-only phoenix

The USENET management committee has reconvened and there are green shoots of growth in the original, pre-World Wide Web social network.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de oops, forgot to say thank you for the birthday wishes!

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Thank you!

@movq@www.uninformativ.de If you’ve got it, own it!

@prologic@twtxt.net thank you! Yup, a full half century. Quite weird feeling. I feel like I’ve finally earned my curmudgeonly personality 😆

@mckinley@twtxt.net I do the ls thing regularly. I even do it after I’ve already lsed the directory but have run some other command afterwards. I tend to think of it like the LOOK command in text adventures.

@ionores@twtxt.net thank you, thank you. Hoping to make it to a decent fraction of a century.

Turned half a century old today. Boy I’m tired.

#birthday

@New_scientist@feeds.twtxt.net What the flying fuck?

@New_scientist@feeds.twtxt.net GPT-4 didn’t win shit.

@Phys_org@feeds.twtxt.net Green growth was always horseshit and everyone knows it.

@prologic@twtxt.net I use the gmail webapp for work, and I have to say that over the years it’s gotten less and less usable. There are so many little usability things that it’s bad at. For instance, if you select a message and hit the Delete key nothing happens. The message is not put in the trash like you’d expect. There are issues like that scattered all over the app. I suspect they spend most of their energy on the spyware side of gmail and dedicate less to making it a useful app for end users (which seems to be true of their search engine too).

@adi@twtxt.net hahaha in some ways it sure does!

@adi@twtxt.net I think it is, and one benefit they have is that you can add third-party repositories to the F-Droid app as you discover them. So, for instance, if you know of a developer who pushes builds to an F-Droid compatible repository, you can add that to your F-Droid app and start tracking updates like you would for any other app in there. Can’t do that with Google Play!

F-Droid tends to focus on open source applications that can be built in a reproducible way, which limits the inventory (though of course tends to mean the apps are safer and don’t spy on you). There are non-free apps in there as well but they come with warnings so you’re informed about what you might be sacrificing by using them.

That said if you have a favorite app you get through Google Play, there’s a decent chance it won’t be in F-Droid. Many “big corporate” apps aren’t, and vendor-specific apps tend not to be either. But for most of the major functions you might want, like email clients, calendar apps, weather apps, etc etc, there are very good substitutes now in F-Droid. You’re definitely making a trade-off though.

What I did was go through the apps I had installed on my last phone, found as many substitutes in F-Droid as I could, started using those instead to see how they worked, and bit by bit replaced as much as I could from Google Play with a comparable app from F-Droid. I still have a few apps (mostly vendor-specific things that don’t have substitutes) that come from Google Play but I’m aiming to be rid of those before I need to replace this phone.

@prologic@twtxt.net yeah, it’s true. Thing is, Linux as a desktop operating system sucked in 1996 yet I adopted it then anyway because I wanted nothing to do with MS anymore 😆 I know it’s not for everyone but I’m pretty tolerant of a less-than-stellar experience if it means I can be free of big-company garbage.

I haven’t tried a Linux-based smartphone OS in a long time so I don’t have any idea how bad/good it might be. I figure when I finally break down and get a new phone I’ll experiment on my current phone.

@prologic@twtxt.net yes, the OS is based on stock Android, so probably wouldn’t be of interest if you prefer Apple.

@adi@twtxt.net @prologic@twtxt.net F-droid. Getting APKs from developers you trust and side-loading them. Some flavor of Linux. Some distro of the open source parts of Android.

There are lots of options. Bit by bit I divest from anything that’s distributed from Google Play. With my latest phone I find and download APKs so that I could have the app without all the Google crap woven through it. By the time I need to replace this one I’ll be fully free of Google Play. Most of my apps come from F-droid now. You can a perfectly functional phone/pocket computer unless you’re addicted to installing dozens of corporate apps.

@prologic@twtxt.net I’ve had a Teracube phone for about 3 years now. Theirs comes with a guarantee of 4 years–if something that’s covered breaks, you send the phone to them and they fix it and send it back, or they send you a new one. I took advantage of that last year when the screen broke; their tech support even helped me figure out how to wipe the phone when the screen didn’t display anything. Pretty painless all around. Have to say I’ve been very happy with it. It doesn’t have the top-end features that new big company phones have, but I don’t want those features so that’s not an issue for me. I dunno if it’s available in Australia or if it’s just a US thing.

@adi@twtxt.net oh yeah, no doubt. I just like to keep an eye on these things because I hate being blindsided.

@adi@twtxt.net @prologic@twtxt.net It’s worth bearing in mind that

• Fairphone has taken a considerable amount of VC funding so, sooner or later, that bill will become due: (see: https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/31/fairphone-growth-capital-raise and https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/fairphone)
  
• Fairphone comes with Google Play apps by default, so it’s also a spyware vector (see: https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/110978014080809471)
  

I used to have a lot of hope for them but these two ingredients mean that enshittification is virtually inevitable.

@prologic@twtxt.net It really is cringeworthy