Apple Introduces New MacBook Upgrade Program for Business Partners

Posted on November 30, 2021 by David K.

 

Source: Apple Introduces New MacBook Upgrade Program for Business Partners

I called this, but I can’t find the post where I did. The comments are wondering if Apple will make this available for end-users. They will. I guarantee it. Just be patient.

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Gaming on a Mac, Update

Posted on November 30, 2021 by David K.

We’re upgrading all the main service production computers at my church. As part of this effort, I bought 3 M1-based Mac mini’s. As an experiment, I installed Elder Scrolls Online on one of them, to see how well it would run. I expected it to be at least passable. Oh how wrong I was. It ran, and at 60 fps, but I couldn’t run it at any decent resolution. The best the game offered was 1367×768 or something. Of course, this looked like pixelated garbage on a 4K monitor. So, I consider the whole thing an abysmal failure. I’m actually glad. It’s a relief to know that a stock M1-based Mac does not, in fact, run the game amazingly, and that I’m not really missing out on this single data point with my Intel-based Mac.

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The Amazon lobbyists who kill U.S. consumer privacy protections

Posted on November 29, 2021 by David K.

In Virginia, the company boosted political donations tenfold over four years before persuading lawmakers this year to pass an industry-friendly privacy bill that Amazon itself drafted. In California, the company stifled proposed restrictions on the industry’s collection and sharing of consumer voice recordings gathered by tech devices. And in its home state of Washington, Amazon won so many exemptions and amendments to a bill regulating biometric data, such as voice recordings or facial scans, that the resulting 2017 law had “little, if any” impact on its practices, according to an internal Amazon document.

The architect of this under-the-radar campaign to smother privacy protections has been Jay Carney, who previously served as communications director for Joe Biden, when Biden was vice president, and as press secretary for President Barack Obama. Hired by Amazon in 2015, Carney reported to founder Jeff Bezos and built a lobbying and public-policy juggernaut that has grown from two dozen employees to about 250, according to Amazon documents and two former employees with knowledge of recent staffing.

Source: The Amazon lobbyists who kill U.S. consumer privacy protections

Basically, this is everything you need to know about the state governance in the US. Literally all of our current national social issues take a backseat to what the Fortune 500 wants. Our governments, federal and state, do nothing but the bidding of big businesses, collectively decided by who’s in power, and which corporations are currently donating the most to campaigns. There’s nothing else to debate until Citizens United is fixed. Nothing. You can argue about gerrymandering and voting rights all you want, but personal voting does not matter in the slightest. Big business will always get what they want. If you happen to get something you want in the process, then just consider it a happy accident, and be on your way.

Nota bene, I’m NOT singling out a Democratic administration on this. There are innumerable examples of this sort of insider-turned-“lobbyist” on both sides of the aisle. Comcast, AT&T, and the FCC have had three-way incestuous relationship, stretching back for decades, across many administrations.

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Facebook declared Kyle Rittenhouse guilty from the start

Posted on November 26, 2021 by David K.

The blackout went far and wide: Facebook actively policed its users for pro-Kyle Rittenhouse posts and removed the content. It even targeted posts from legal scholars arguing the merits of his self-defense case.

Source: Facebook declared Kyle Rittenhouse guilty from the start

Whatever you think about the case, this is not the internet I signed up for.

Facebook is following the playbook for any and all companies now: monopolize a market, and then extract all of the profits from it. The problem is that Facebook has essentially monopolized online speech. Sure, they can point the FTC at other successful social media companies, in order to mitigate antitrust action, but every other company is a drop is the bucket in comparison. The most influential company besides Facebook is Twitter, and they have, like, one tenth the number of users. So, yes, there are other social media platforms, but if you want to put something “out there” for the world to see, you can’t NOT use Facebook. Is it the de facto social media platform.

Awhile back, someone pointed out the cynical interpretation of the “Facebook whistleblower,” who recently gave testimony to Congress. Rather than this being an embarrassment to Facebook, and begging for intrusive government intervention, it was, in fact, an engineered and coordinated effort to provoke Congress into creating an oversight board.  Why? Because, rather than put shackles on Facebook’s hands, it would be liberating for the officers of the company to be able to point their detractors towards the governmental body regulating social media, which would, nominally, be setting policy. Except that, as we all know full well, they would be doing so at the bidding of Facebook, for the maximization of profit, and campaign contributions.

In my opinion, the so-called “mainstream media” created Rush Limbaugh and Matt Drudge by their systemic bias. They only really achieved national success after it became clear that the entire American press was going to give Clinton an editorial pass for every one of his scandals, including (and especially) Lewinsky. After that, they remained forces that every other news commentary program had to contend with and respond to. There are conservative social media and independent journalistic platforms ramping up right now in response to Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter’s hamfisted efforts at censorship. I predict that they will achieve the same sort of niche-yet-unignorable success that Rush and Drudge had. If so, it will just prove that line in Star Wars true: “the more you tighten your grasp, the more systems will slip through your fingers.” The success of Parler and Substack, et. al., are directly tied to the tactics of Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter to control any and all important social narratives online. They more content they disallow, the more those other platforms will thrive.

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Lawn Mowing Simulator’s new expansion gets medieval on your grass

Posted on November 24, 2021 by David K.

Source: Lawn Mowing Simulator’s new expansion gets medieval on your grass

Lawn mowing — I prefer to call it “LARPing Qix” — has its own video game.

I was going to post some super-snarky comment about how much I hate  yard work, and therefore not being able to imagine either the desire to make a game about it, or the desire to play it, but then I remembered that I’ve been doing some fishing in ESO, despite hating it in real life, and I guess that would make me a hypocrite. In my defense, fishing in ESO is the only way to farm one of the most valuable commodities in the game, and, done in particular ways, can get you achievements, and any time there’s a two-for-one deal in a video game, I’m in.

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When the traffic firehose is pointed at you – by Ryan Broderick – Garbage Day

Posted on November 22, 2021 by David K.

The one mystery we weren’t able to figure out is why any sane person working at Facebook would feel comfortable publishing a content report that admitted that the most viral publisher on its platform this year was a barely active drop-shipping scam page full of stolen video content run by an LLC that doesn’t even exist anymore.

Source: When the traffic firehose is pointed at you – by Ryan Broderick – Garbage Day

I’ve seen several of these posts on my own feed, because my connections will comment on them.

This is the mechanism that’s leading society by the nose now. It’s well understood. Cambridge Analytica revealed it, and this lever is now longer, more unstable, and more susceptible to error and money than ever. And, instead dismantling Facebook, or muzzling the influence of the algorithm that can direct the attention of the entire country, Meta was allowed to be created in order to further insulate Zuckerberg and Facebook board from further journalistic scrutiny and legal oversight.

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Surprise: the Big Bang isn’t the beginning of the universe anymore

Posted on November 19, 2021 by David K.

We used to think the Big Bang meant the universe began from a singularity. Nearly 100 years later, we’re not so sure.

Source: Surprise: the Big Bang isn’t the beginning of the universe anymore

Well, well, well. How the turntables…

“Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, we can no longer speak with any sort of knowledge or confidence as to how — or even whether — the universe itself began.”

People who write about science are just certain that they know everything except what they don’t know. What I mean is that they will say we “know” this and that, but we don’t “know” this other. Right? The problem is that “this other” isn’t really in a different league of uncertainty than “this” and “that.” I’ve watched very carefully for this in articles about science for 30 years.

The truth is that “science” has many, gaping holes in various theories about the nature of the universe, but few people acknowledge them. For instance, scientists conclude not only that “dark matter” — a substance which they cannot observe or measure — not only exists, but must make up 95% of the known universe to make their current models work mathematically. The whole concept is just a total “handwave,” and the “scientific community” just pretends that it’s not a problem.

In this article, the writer lays out everything we “know” about the early origins of the universe, and then concludes that we “know” nothing about how it started. Which, coincidentally, is something I’ve been pointing out for decades. The so-called Big Bang Theory actually does nothing to explain our existence here, and this article admits it.

Scientists are forced to conclude that conditions must have been exactly perfect for the expansion of the universe to have occurred in the way we now see it, and there’s no natural explanation for that to have been the case. Just like with evolution, everything supposedly lined up perfectly, but nothing that we can observe or experience about our physical laws tells us that this would happen. (In fact, quite the opposite.) In effect, this article, while purporting to explain in better detail the origins of the universe, argues for at least a guiding hand from a higher intelligence in establishing our reality.

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SQL Is Obnoxious

Posted on November 18, 2021 by David K.

I find SQL obnoxious, due to its brevity. Getting complicated desired behavior from it sometimes requires clever understanding and combinations of very simple primitives. Because it’s taken me about 2 weeks (off and on) to work it out, I present, with no explanation, this code:

WITH vars (var) AS (
  SELECT UNNEST(string_to_array(ancestry, '/')::integer[]) FROM calibrations AS a
)
SELECT c.id AS cal_id, p.id AS param_id, t.id AS tuning_id, o.* FROM tunings t
  LEFT JOIN LATERAL json_array_elements(t.data::json) WITH ORDINALITY AS o ON TRUE
  JOIN variables v ON v.tuning_id = t.id
  JOIN calibrations c ON v.calibration_id = c.id
  JOIN parameters p ON p.label = t.label
WHERE c.id NOT IN (SELECT var FROM vars)
  AND t.data_type = 'Z_Axis'
  AND p.label = 'C_PME_GainFactor_Table'
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Ping. Ding. Chirp. Notifications Are Driving Us Crazy.

Posted on November 15, 2021 by David K.

With workplace tools multiplying and personal messages creeping in, it can be hard to get anything done.

Source: Ping. Ding. Chirp. Notifications Are Driving Us Crazy.

Ha ha.

No.

I am ruthless about silencing all notifications from almost all applications, and then I tailor the notifications from the remaining apps which I allow to bug me. I am also vigilant to either unsubscribe or make mail rules for any email I don’t want. I auto-silence any call from unknown people, and use RoboKiller to automatically redirect spammers. You can make these things work for you, but it is work. The upshot is that, if there is a red bubble somewhere in my field of view, then I work on it.

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Apple’s $64 billion-a-year App Store isn’t catching the most egregious scams – The Verge

Posted on November 5, 2021 by David K.

While it’s impossible for us to tell how many of the horoscope app’s 32,000 star-only ratings are fake, Eleftheriou says Apple should have no problem with that. “When you consider refund request rates, app usage, and other associated info that only Apple has, you could imagine a totally revamped discovery system that does away with the current crude star-rating system that hasn’t seen any innovation since Bezos pioneered it 20 years ago,” he suggests.

Eleftheriou tells me that Apple has removed over 100 apps due to his reports — and if you’re wondering whether his online crusade is personal, the answer is most definitely yes. He began digging for scams after his own app FlickType, a keyboard for Apple Watch, was overtaken by scam apps that didn’t work and charged ludicrous fees, yet prospered due to fake reviews.

By the way: you know that app that John Gruber helped draw attention to in 2019, the one that reportedly charged $10 every week for wallpaper you could find free online? It’s still on the App Store. The app never got permanently removed. It currently has a 4.1 rating, despite countless negative reviews, and SensorTower estimates the app still makes its developer $10,000 a month.

Source: Apple’s $64 billion-a-year App Store isn’t catching the most egregious scams – The Verge

There are several things that are becoming apparent to the world after 20 years of “Web 2.0.” One of those things is that the ubiquitous 5-star review system is dead on the table. Every one is being gamed to the point of unusability. I don’t even look at the review scores on Amazon or the App Store any more, as those scores are actually worse than having no score at all. Netflix got rid of their scoring system awhile ago, and I find their recommendations actually improved. The rest of the world must follow suit. The only internal review system I trust is Steam, and I wonder how long I can continue to do so.

Every time you think you can trust a rating or a ranking on the internet, remember that this is what you’re up against.

Speaking of which, maybe I should buy some Twitter followers, or some engagement on this web site…

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