And yet?

Mastodon is full of actual conversations between people. Someone says something. Someone else replies and an actual conversation happens where people respond to each other.

Lemmy? It almost always devolves into people trying to one up each other and aggressively talk at each other. It is like we speed ran reddit and went from “How dare you have a different opinion” to “I am going to cherry pick a sentence and build a whole fucking straw city from that”.

Honestly?

I vastly prefer almost everyone I have interacted with on mastodon over basically every lemmy user. Because lemmy still thinks it is reddit but also is totally over their ex but do you think he is thinking of me and can I send him a picture of your dick to show it is bigger?

Whereas mastodon? People kind of just want to talk. We largely understand that twitter has been a shithole for… most of its existence. So rather than try to reinvent it (bsky and threads) we are learning from it in the same way cohost learned from tumblr (and died even faster…).

And the lunatics who need to scream about what federation is and why it is The Future? They aren’t talking about basically anything else. They are keeping to themselves and talking about how amazing the community can be… while the rest of us are actually being a community.

Because the mastodon evangelists are horrible.

Back when there was any question of what platform to migrate to? Threads and bluesky were “Get an invite and make an account”

Mastodon was people insisting that EVERYONE needed to understand what federation is and the underlying philosophy. When really they should have just said “Sign up for one of these instances. It is like email where it doesn’t really matter what provider you have”. Countless times I tried to explain to folk on a message board or discord and would say “Just make an account on one of these four or five instances”. And, like clockwork, someone would “well ackshually” me and insist that people can’t use Mastodon without understanding the fundamental concept of federation and how picking the right instance is important and people can just delete and remake their accounts until they are satisfied.

So when it was time for the big influencers to move? They went to where people were already congregating and where they didn’t need to host an educational seminar to tell someone how to make an account.

It’s almost like this behavior comes from the training data.

Part of it is the same “human speech” aspects that have plagued NLP work over the past few years. Nobody (except the poor postdoctoral bastard who is running the paper farm for their boss) actually speaks in the same way that scholarly articles are written because… that should be obvious.

This combines with the decades of work by right wing fascists to vilify intellectuals and academia. If you have ever seen (or written) a comment that boils down to “This youtuber sounds smug” or “They are presenting their opinion as fact” then you see why people prefer “natural human speech” over actual authoritatively researched and tested statements.

And… while not all pay to publish journals are trash, I feel confident saying that most are. And filtering those can be shockingly hard by design.

But the big one? Most of the owners of the various journals are REALLY fucking litigious and will go scorched earth on anyone who is using their work (because Elsevier et al own your work) to train a model.

… mostly the other way around?

Theoretically it is possible that a compromised machine could compromise a USB stick. If you are at the point where you are having to worry about government or corporate entities setting traps at the local library? You… kind of already lost.

Which is the thing to understand. Most of what you see on the internet is, to borrow from a phrase, Privacy Theatre. It is so that people can larp and pretend they are Steve Rogers fighting a global conspiracy while necking with a hot co-worker at an Apple store. The reality is that if you are actually in a position where this level of privacy and security matters then you need to actually change your behaviors. Which often involves keeping VERY strong disconnects between any “personal” device and any “private” device.

There have been a lot of terrible (but wonderfully written) articles about journalists needing to do this because a government or megacorporation was after them. Stuff like having a secret laptop that they never even take out of a farraday cage unless they are closer than not to an hour away from wherever they are staying that night.

I think any “privacy oriented OS” is inherently a questionable (kneejerk: Stupid and reeks of stale honey) strategy in the first place.

A very good friend of mine is a journalist. The kind of journalist where… she actually deals with the shit the average person online larps and then some. And what I and her colleagues have suggested is the following:

Two flash drives

• One that is a livecd for basically any linux distro. If you are able to reboot the machine you are using and boot to this, do it. That helps with software keyloggers but obviously not hardware
• One that is just a folder full of portable installs of the common “privacy oriented” software (like the tor browser) supporting a few different OS types.

Given the option? Boot the public computer to the live image. Regardless, use the latter to access whatever chat or email accounts (that NEVER are logged into on any machine you “own” or near your home) you need.

It isn’t about being reasonable.

If you are expected to track your time to this degree (and, to make it clear, the majority of employers actively don’t want you to), there is a reason. That reason usually being different funding sources. Generally a mix of grants and clients.

And if a client or grant source finds out you are lying about those? Maybe you only had enough work to do 34 hours instead of 40 hours in one week. Would you be cool paying extra because the guy repairing your muffler had a slow week?

And if people think being proud of a tool that openly talks about what everyone else silently does isn’t a red flag for employers? Hey, its a great job market so I am sure none of that will matter.

Tracking time is fine.

Normalizing your time to the hours you were supposed to work is a massive no no. Especially if you are expected to break down your hours per project.

I mean, you obviously do it. But you never put it in writing.

Pretending the most important use of bit torrent is Linux ISO’s is the kind of cya that people giggle at.

If a candidate I am interviewing has a tool to change their reported hours to me or clients on their public GitHub? That person is radioactive no matter how many times they say “but don’t do anything naughty wink wink”

So … it is a tool to automate time fraud?

Make sure to put this front and center on your CV

It isn’t about being “evergreen”. It is about having historical evidence.

Because maybe someone will do a study in 2030 and want to be able to compare to your UX research in the 2000s. If you wrote your paper properly they can reproduce your experiments (to the degree reasonable) and actually demonstrate progress.

Its the inherent disconnect between “News” and “Science”.

Science requires rigorous study and incremental advancement. A 2023 article based on 2022 data is inherently understood to be… 2022 data (note: I did not actually check but that is the timeline I assume. It is in the study).

But news and social media just want headlines that get people angry and reinforce whatever nonsense people want to Believe.

It is similar to explaining basic concepts. Been a minute since the last time I was properly briefed, but think stuff like “Do NOT say ‘theory’ of evolution. Instead, talk about how evolution is the only accepted justification based on evidence and research”

Not sure if google is particularly different but the way this works for the other services is basically low energy bluetooth scanning coupled with the phones providing their location*. So basically all the devices on that scanning/spy network periodically ping/listen for nearby devices/trackers. When it finds one, it sends a quick message to the servers with that phone’s location and the ID of the tracker. Get enough of those pings and you can triangulate the position of the tracker pretty precisely.

Which… is why this fundamentally does not work with “hacker” solutions that allegedly emphasize privacy. Because you just don’t have enough devices listening. This was painfully obvious with tile back in the day and is still an issue with Samsung in some countries.

*: Via a combination of gps, cell tower, and wifi network scanning. The less obvious part of that being wifi networks which is the majority of how interior positioning works.

I mean… bluetooth is literally broadcasting your position (sort of/it depends on the implementation). It is not at all a stretch that you should turn that off if you care about privacy. Same with not scanning for what wifi networks are available or even pinging GPS satellites (because that leaves a log). Hell… cell tower logs are a treat for cops/TLAs for a reason.

Aside from that? Good for you. If you actually follow through on that I can respect it. My point is more that this particular solution seems like the worst of all worlds.

Either you are demolishing your battery with regular phone homes to a server you hopefully control or you are relying on a push via SMS and the hope that you lose your phone somewhere you havea reception. And you still only have YOUR phone and YOUR network to track it which has significant drawbacks if you travel.

If people truly change their lives and focus on it, you can do a lot. But it does not take much, at all, to become compromised to one degree or another and people vastly underestimate the amount of redundancy. Or even the impact of a sibling or partner or even friend.

Instead, the common case is people will tweak one small aspect and think that does anything other than inconvenience them. Or, worse, they’ll watch a youtube and decide to put EVERYTHING through their vpn which… defeats the purpose because they are still one easily collated set of profiles/cookies that can trivially reveal that “Fred Smith in Afghanistan” is really “Fred Smith in North Carolina”

Which is why my approach is that there is data I very much want to protect and data I know I can’t. So I focus on understanding the former while doing what I can with the latter.

And something like this? There are probably specific niche use cases for this. But it is a product/service that fundamentally requires aggregated data. And, depending on the implementation, it is going to fuck with your battery hard.

I guess. But it is really going to depend on where you live and just how frequently it does dial home.

My personal use for these networks is luggage tags. But a friend lost her phone on a hike a few years back and the find my phone stuff was more or less useless due to poor reception and ever dwindling battery.

The real benefit is the low energy bluetooth magic and OTHER devices to do the phoning home. Because maybe I have shit reception but someone hiking a hundred feet away has good reception and updates the ping.

Took a bit to figure out what it was even claiming to do

When enabled your phone constantly sends e2e encrypted your location to the server where you can than access it from a webbrowser.

God no. Just take a hatchet to my battery and be done with it.

Also: Until a month or two ago, sure. But google finally got their shit together-ish and set up a tracking network the same as apple and samsung. And that is what you are sacrificing your privacy for. Yes, you give Big Tech tracking information… that they already have. In exchange you can actually have peace of mind of knowing your luggage is in the same airport or even where you parked. And you can’t really self-host a crowd-sourced network.

The list of all the horrifically shitty things LMG has done over the past few years will fill up a thread on its own and I strongly encourage you to educate yourself before even thinking of defending them for… anything.

But some highlights:

1. Over the span of a week or two went from “Companies aren’t your friend. I am not your friend” to “Written warranties are worthless and can only hurt you so you shouldn’t want them. Also, if there were a written warranty and I were to die then my wife (who just so happens to be the CFO and second biggest shareholder in the company…) would suffer from harassment. So written warranties are bad and just trust me bro”. This was bad enough that his decades long crony (Luke) even openly criticized him
2. Stole a GPU from a small company, shit on their prototype for weeks on end even after knowingly using it with the wrong card, and then sold the prototype cooler to a random third party. Proceeded to make claims (that the timeline doesn’t even work for) that they resolved this before anyone caught them and their main argument is they accidentally removed said company from those emails where they were “solving” it.
3. Have increasingly openly acknowledged they will do big pieces on products they hate if the money is right. I think the most recent shitfests are a pool cleaning robot that barely functions and now sponsorshipps from one of the shittier VPN companies because the money is really really good.
4. Responded to an “internal investigation” of sexual harassment and assault claims (where at least one perpetrator is literally recorded sexually harassing the entire company… during the all hands about sexual harassment… literally the day after his direct report left the company because of being sexually harassed) by talking about how they will sue any future whistle blowers or accusers for defamation.
5. Went full “but the white man is the real victim” after even d-brand acknowledged a fuck up where they “roasted” an Indian guy because they thought his name was funny
6. Basically turn every single accusation into “They are personally attacking Linus Sebastien because they are jealous of his success and genius” level cancel culture nonsense

They are rapidly circling the drain and I for one am waiting for the “Well, these aren’t tech so we don’t have a conflict of interest and you should buy some joe rogan branded supplements” within the next few months. Likely because more and more actual tech companies don’t even want to deal with them for the PR boost.

I mean… plenty of youtubers and channels are doing exactly that. Ian McCollum (Forgotten Weapons) and the “educational” gun youtubers have History of Weapons and War. A bunch of creators did Nebula. Corridor Digital have their channel. That comedy channel that came from college humor have their own site? Same with those two channels that pissed everyone off in the past few weeks? And Linus Media Group have been trying to add “we run a shitty version of youtube” to their grift for years now. And Rooster Teeth and Giant Bomb had their own video site for basically the entirety of their runs.

Let alone stuff like Utreon and the other one. And then there are the various successors to liveleak that are basically about spamming yu with an insane amount of spyware and ads in exchange for letting you upload faces of death.

And while I think it is a fundamentally flawed idea that mostly just does the legwork for those sites to run the software: Peertube is a thing and there are plenty of instances that exist.

So I am REALLY curious what evil organization you think is waiting to kill anything that is not made by Youtube. If you comply with DMCA requests and don’t host CSAM then it is just a function of whether you can afford it.

Which… is the real issue. There is just a ridiculous volume of storage and bandwidth required for even a “small” youtube. Which is why almost all of the successful “alternatives” only really host a very small subset of videos.