On paper, it’s an official government news app being pushed over MDM to phones that are definitionally government property. There’s not really ground to stand on here.

The fact that it’s pure propaganda rather than an actually useful source of executive branch news is more a problem of the “White House News feed” or whatever you want to call it. It’s a big fucking important problem.

But this is effectively whining that the fleet car you borrowed from work phones it’s GPS location home. Oh no, a phone your work bought and paid for runs apps your work auto installs to it? Then only use it for work shit bozo, it’s not your personal device.

There’s no hard facts about what the hell they’re actually planning, it’s just a fluff press release.

They claim that PACTs will be some sort of token that sites and services that can confirm you are a human or “trusted AI agent” can grant you to allow other sites to better identify you as good, but that these tokens will also somehow be entirely anonymous and unable to be used to track an identity across multiple sites and services. At absolute best this will create a sort of “chain of trust” hierarchy where people who use more popular services tied to their real identity would gather more PACTs or have “higher trust” ones, just consolidating digital power further.

Also, the first quote from Cloudflare’s CTO has them claiming that people are starting to use AI agents to order them meal deliveries. Lmao, in what universe?

It helped that there were used and rental markets for relatively “modern” titles that are now almost entirely non-existent.

You worked places with style guides? Did… Did you have a real testing environment that wasn’t prod too?

I got taken off a project recently for being too direct about how the rest of the team was just spray and praying entirely AI generated code with no standards or review whatsoever, and they were charging ahead like it was a race to implement features we hadn’t even discussed if we wanted/needed.

If you can’t tell me how it works, you can’t confirm that we actually need it, you can’t tell me the upstream and downstream effects (or confirm they don’t exist), and you can’t even confirm that we even want it to do the thing it only supposedly does, then we have better things to do than go on a wild goose chase trying to debug it when there’s a looming deadline for things that legitimately do not work that we need. Stop vibe coding and actually review the existing shit for fucks sake. If the requirements have never been clear, solve that instead of generating more slop. Maybe update some of the existing documentation instead of having AI wholesale hallucinate entirely new not quite right ones over and over.

Anyway, please tell me more happy development bedtime stories. I need to chase away the nightmares.

Trump’s too dumb to even consider wearing a mask to hide his racism, and his real face is far more grotesque than this drawing.

I struggle to even understand the point of this as an image, let alone as a meme. Just feels like pointless “preaching to the choir” shit to me.

Updoots on the left I guess? You’re so brave?

The eye icon in the bottom left should get you a “normal” one. The headphones get you an audio captcha.

But yeah, this is just Google trying to correlate your PC with your phone, and all the personal info across both.

Depending on the legality and safety of doing so, you may also want to look into tech for avoiding censorship and oppresive regimes.

Things like TOR, running your own DNS server, etc.

Edit: I didn’t want to just leave this vague, so I looked up the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Surveillance Self-Defense guide hoping for some better specifics, but unfortunately it looks like it’s mainly about making security plans, understanding your risk profile, using secure settings on your personal devices, using signal, using TOR, and selecting “the VPN that’s right for you”.

Like you really have a choice of “the VPN right for you” when they shut down things to only approved in/out IPs.

There might be useful info there, but it wasn’t quite what I was hoping to point you at, sorry.

Considering the risks involved with hosting something like this, I would probably start with research on how you could host this safely/anonymously. That would be my first priority. Can’t help people if they take you out.

Next step would be looking at piefed/Lemmy or whatever systems you’re thinking about hosting and identifying what features/logs/etc you would need to disable, modify, or set up to clear themselves automatically so that you wouldn’t have information worth going after in the first place.

Better dry yourself off before you start to grow mold, big boy

Entire GitHub repo is brand new. Set up 6 minutes before this post, with only one commit, uploading all the files.

Make of that what you will.

Hooray seaman! Have a se-

I did when I was younger. Had better fine motor skills with my “primary” hand. Eventually as I started playing more PC games and using computers at school more I got tired of always having to move the mouse around and having to reconfigure keybinds for every game (where it was even possible to do so). So I adapted to right handed mouse somewhere around 14 years old.

Beyond that, in my time in IT support, I think I encountered only three people who did left handed mice.

Fuck those guys for soiling the term “grand wizard”.

I’ve got the vague frame of a joke somewhere around that involving the only orbs they’ve ever pondered being their own testicles, but good wording for it isn’t coming to me.

Pfeces, purine, and ptoilet ptissue

Or just let the replies sit unopened.

Until some regulation is passed and enforced that they have to be closed loop, it’s cheaper for them to fuck up the local ecosystem by using evaporative cooling or local water sources as a heat sink.

Limited supply leading to the same stock being sold at over 300% of the MSRP five years ago. The demand is definitely there. The supply and pricing is the issue, not a lack of interested buyers.

“Market” my ass.

Don’t need classes to make functions (depending on the language of course).

I’ll openly admit that I’ve made comments that could be interpreted as this comic. That said, I don’t hate Linux or look to “dunk on” people, I just see a lot of really uninformed takes about Windows being tossed around and can’t help but try to correct people.

Like someone said something abysmally wrong and very confidently, I asked them when the last time they used Windows, and they said it had been over a decade. I get that people pull that sort of thing online all the time, but when I see it it bothers me.

So I end up making the occasional comment defending Windows from blatant misinformation in a Linux thread, or insisting that the Linux experience still isn’t as smooth as it needs to be for non-tinkerers.

Usually someone will pop up and call me uninformed or something, which is rich given I’ve been casually messing with Linux since before USB thumb drives were ubiquitous, and I have a little more than a decade of career experience in IT support and systems admin/engineering/architecture neck deep in a Microsoft environment.

I love Linux and open source software. I want it all to succeed. But Windows does have its place, it is valid for certain use cases, and is not anywhere as awful as it’s made out to be. Especially if you have the tech chops to switch to Linux, de-crappify-ing Windows is of comparable difficulty and I have not had any of the supposedly unavoidable Windows issues people regularly cite in around a decade.

Switching to Linux is a more than valid choice, but I hate to see it happen only because someone isn’t getting good troubleshooting information for a Windows issue.

I also have a seriously hard time keeping my mouth shut when Linux users claim daily driving a Linux Distro as a smooth process. It is leagues better than it used to be. Mind bogglingly so, and getting smoother every day. But it is still inevitable that you will hit a point of major friction and have to get deep into tinkering, and you will still likely need to make concessions in terms of hardware feature support.

I’m no stranger to tinkering. No stranger to compiling things myself, or even troubleshooting an error all the way down to a specific line of source code and making a PR to correct it.

But I’ve reached a point in my life where I don’t want to be spending hours troubleshooting things that in my mind should “just work”. I want more control than Apple offers, and less tinkering than Linux tends to expect.

So I keep up with the Linux space, use it on VMs personally semi-regularly, and maybe once a year give it a serious try as a daily driver. For now, stripped down/customized Windows installs on my gear is more than good enough.

Anti spam tools are pretty damn good nowadays, and then you have things like “focused inbox” features on top of that. Plus all the laws about simple unsubscribe options.

Not sure there’s much dry brush to catch on that front.

I legitimately have not had virus issues with Windows in over a decade. Using uBlock Origin for ad blocking and the built in Microsoft antivirus. Every few months for the first few years I’d put it through the wringer of a bunch of USB-bootable antivirus scanners. They kept finding nothing, so I slowed and eventually stopped bothering.

Common sense and an ad blocker do wonders.