• Dancing.
• Tattoos.
• Foreskins.
• Shrimp buffets.
• …

Recently our county sheriff put out an Amber Alert (a forced alert on all mobile devices) but the obfuscated link resolved to Twitter.

I wonder what portion of the public saw the Twitter login page and just closed the tab, never to see the details of the child abduction.

I rented a Bolt EV from Hertz once. The car was fine, but the charging stations in the area were mostly broken, or they required downloading an app and giving personal information to charge.

I got the feeling the charging networks are all about collecting government incentives and the sale of private information from subscribers, and not at all about service.

My new preferred rental car is no rental car at all.

I wondered if the weapon was a Taser or cattle prod… But it says “deadly weapon” so maybe it was some kind of custom supervillain lighting gun.⚡

I didn’t read it, but my first thought was they trained it to associate speech patterns with wealth and/or education, which correlates with diabetes for all the usually reasons in the US health non-care system.

Edit: I’m probably wrong:

The scientists analysed more than 18,000 recordings and 14 acoustic features for differences between those who had diabetes and those who did not.

They looked at a number of vocal features, like changes in pitch and intensity that cannot be perceived by the human ear.

I’m going to go look for an update on DeepSqueak…

Someone here is seeing this xkcd for the first time just now…

I think most computer vision cameras are fairly low resolution, so I’m not expecting the hit-and-run vehicle will be identified.

No manufacturers can make a dishwasher that lasts 18 months anymore. And they don’t make replacement parts. I’m not in any hurry to add another hunk of electronic junk to my home.

VAX.

(pun for “facts”)

I think it’s a different thing. For me, my expectation is that Threads/Meta connecting to Fediverse is more like when AOL connected to IRC (specifically EFnet) in the 90s. I wasn’t really into Usenet, but Eternal September was pretty much the same wave. AOL pushed hard in advertising and recruiting users, and IRC and Usenet were originally populated with people who got into it more organically.

I don’t remember Jabber or XMPP having any kind of discovery system. I only ever talked to people who knew already. So when Google connected Talk, it was just added convenience. I wasn’t bombarded with rude idiots like the AOL invasion of IRC. When Google ended XMPP support, I was disappointed, but I continued using XMPP with my friends.

I think Meta is spending a ton on promoting Threads, and it’s going to bring in a lot of people with different values. It’s going to be unpleasant for me, but I think that’s just the self-similar fractal that is the Internet.

I knew XMPP as Jabber, and I remember being delighted when I tested messages between my Jabber accounts and my Gmail account.

This. I think every culture has beauty standards, and some of them inspire a lot of people to do pretty drastic procedures. It’s pretty mainstream in America to covet straight, gleaming white teeth.

I’m guessing there’s some long history of orthodontics in USA that intersects with phrenology, marketing to people’s low self-esteem, and piggy-backing on government and orgs’ campaigns for dental health (extrapolating from medical necessity to aesthetics.)

Also I think there’s a weird thing where parents are paying for braces for their kids. Notionally parents want their kids to be confident, but I also sense an undercurrent of social signalling of wealth and status, along the lines of putting solar panels on the north roof of the house if that’s where the neighbors will see them.

I wonder how many scammers are using chatbots and AI to scale up their operations.

The human API has clear vulnerabilities and patching is next to impossible.

If Twitter were a person, I would think everything gets more expensive and they have to pay up front, now that they have a reputation for not paying their bills.

Or does that logic not apply to corporations?

Helicopters are too noisy and are offline a lot for maintenance. I’m yet to be convinced that any of the electric propulsion concepts will overcome their other issues for a long time.

If you drive too far forward in a parking space and grind on the parking block, or someone dings your door, do you need an A&P to repair it?

Without reading the article, this smells a lot like #enshittification

At what point do lawyers cite a SCOTUS decision as precident and their opposition is like “yeah but that’s an Alito decision” and they’re like “oh yeah, oops.”

I’m surprised this isn’t a named sort of cognitive bias. I think there’s a related thing where we humans tend to cite external causes outside our control when we are unfortunate or make mistakes, and we tend to cite our own virtues when we are fortunate and successful.