I had to look that up, but that’s a top quality reference.

I know it’s a bishop, but I also can’t stop envisioning it as having thrown its head back dramatically while wailing about their woes.

Helpful Tip: in a pinch, other predators will do, but they should be spec’d up for lethality if facing larger prey.

Source: Fox that attacked congressman and others near Capitol had rabies, officials say

Oof. That hurts to hear.

What happened to his feet?

This is my semi-lazy approach. I’m sure someone is going to tell me all the ways that I’m falling down on this front, but…

I switched over to iPhone in like 2019. I started getting ‘stealth’ ads in google maps while driving, and I just could not deal with it. It made me reconsider all of Google’s products, and I made an effort to get away from them. (The stealth ads were like “In a quarter mile, continue past the [name of store] on your right” on a perfectly straight road. At the time I was giving a lot of thought to dark patterns and how they influence our behavior, and I just could not see that occurrence as anything other than manipulation. Ironically, I’ve since learned it may have actually been due to GIS errors thinking the road curved when it didn’t, and Google not having a nearby street to use for reference, but like… I don’t know, and I don’t care.)
On my iPhone I set it up to never send advertising ID/opt out of ad personalization.
I don’t give apps permissions they don’t have a clear reason for needing - Your camera can give away your location because of photo geotagging. Network access can report on what devices you have on your network as well as your network information, which is something that’s trackable and geolocatable. In an extreme edge case, network access could be used to find file shares on your network and use those to gather information about you. Bluetooth for same reasons. There are advertising networks based on Bluetooth, since your hardware MAC is not changeable and is freely shared. It can be used to track your location within a store, or figure out where you’ve been. A device that connects your identity (email login or something) to your bluetooth MAC can be used to build profiles on where you’ve shop and what sections you loiter in stores. And obviously, location access. I semi-routinely audit which apps are on my phone, and remove ones I don’t use and restrict permissions that I may have granted for a good reason but no longer need the app to have.
I don’t use the same email for anything anymore. I use an email masking service to generate emails for different services.
I never give my last name to any site unless it’s for billing. And I often don’t give my real first name. I never give my real birthday to any site that isn’t engaged with money or the law. I’ve removed or made ambiguous my profile on almost all social media. I no longer post my face to the internet.
I have used (but am not currently using) a service to request to remove me from online marketing/info sites like spokeo or whatever.
I also use a network-wide advertising blocker on my home network, and while I do have smart devices, they are blocked from internet access, with an upcoming plan to completely put them on an offline and isolated network.
The other thing that I did (accidentally) was to buy a new car that does not share data with advertisers or insurance companies. (Yet/to the best of my knowledge.) I’ve also gone through and audited my old accounts and requested not just account deletions, but data deletions. This is especially important for services that may have health, financial, or purchasing data. When I move, I never file a change of address with USPS. First - I just know what’s important to me and update those addresses. But second, the USPS maintains a database of everyone in the U.S. called the National Change of Address (NCOA) Database, and that is more or less monitored by junk mail advertisers to track where people physically are and to send them junk mail. The only time I get junk mail that’s addressed to me is when my information is shared against my will from financial institutions under this stupid exception.

My next thing that I may wind up doing is seeing if I can start acquiring throwaway phone numbers to forward to my real number, so online services that require a phone number for delivery or whatever cannot use that piece of information consistently or well.

That all does sound like a lot, I guess. But it doesn’t feel like a lot. I just live my life and try not to leak my data.
Most of that (and the issue this article is about) would be moot if the U.S. would just pass consumer privacy protections, but noooo, we can’t have that. Instead they’re going to theatrically whine about other countries and pass laws to help Facebook and bolster U.S. controlled propaganda-outlets while not doing anything to actually solve the problem(s).

Yeah, I know. And I know there’s way more market demand for mirrorless, as well as simpler mechanicals, so they have less failure points, but do I ever love the sound and that subtle feeling of a mirror slapping up and the shutter flicking out of place.
The feedback that offers when you capture a photo feels like you’re doing something ‘real’ when you take a photo. Everyone knows that you captured that moment. Those photons are yours forever, trapped in your little art-making box.

It’s kind of romantic, in a way. I feel like modern tech is great, but tends to be inscrutable.

I have such fond memories of shooting on my old Canon DSLR.
It’s been 20 years since I bought my last DSLR (life, you know?) and I recently started thinking that maybe I should buy another before they close out the DSLR product line.

A huge disappointment to see this enshitification.

I’m sorry this is going to be such a shit comment, but I worked with a guy that had a fitness watch of some stripe.

He was a heavier guy and well, that plasticy band was pressed tight against his skin. One day he came in with this nasty looking ring of red and peeling skin around his wrist. Said he got a rash from the watch. (It’s very possible it was an allergic reaction to something in the band.)

This is a shit comment because I don’t know the brand, and I’m totally saying “trust me, bro.” But like, trust me, bro, it apparently happens?

I think specifically they are referencing this:

In heavily Arab-American areas of Michigan, where disfavor with Biden’s handling with the war is at its highest, purportedly pro-Israel billboards have for weeks trumpeted Harris’s commitment to Israel and featured her Jewish husband Doug Emhoff; online ads with the same message have also targeted these constituencies. Meanwhile, the same PAC has also funded mailers sent to Jewish households in Pennsylvania declaring that Harris not pro-Israel enough.

Pro-Trump PACs back more misleading ads about Harris and Israel in final bid for swing-state voters - Jewish Telegraphic Agency

The above article also discusses how this was not merely the effort of one PAC, but that multiple PACs were engaged in this sort of disinformation.

However - I think I understand what you mean, and Harris should have immediately broken with Biden on Palestine. Make no mistake, I’m not thinking of this as some sort of dispassionate politics-as-baseball strategy.
The right thing to do was and always will be to stop a genocide.

That’s sort of a blanket statement, and I don’t think it really applies about Warren and Sanders.

My sense is that most folks feel that Bernie is too old. And I didn’t realize EW was 75, but in contrast to both Biden and Trump, I haven’t seen Sanders or Warren randomly zone out and have an ‘old person’ moment on camera.
They both still seem mentally sharp. Whether or not that’s a function of having less press exposure and a greater ability to choose when they appear before the cameras is an unknown.

Not advocating for them, mind you, because I do think they’re too old. Just adding that I think their perceived sharpness allows them to avoid those criticisms.

So for $200 USD they’re selling an 80’s retro version of a GameboyPi case ($50 on amazon, includes battery) with a slightly larger screen and fewer buttons. For $10 more, they’ll add in a keyboard that they haven’t developed yet.

Seems like an overpriced stepping stone between a flipper and a steam deck.

Fine. I’m calling it Gulf of the Americas and reminding everyone that the Americas are the continents, not the country.
A visionary and inclusive move!

—

^{the increasingly loud hum of cognitive dissonance in the face of a nonsensical reality grows slightly higher pitched}

God‘s Gonna Cut You Down, by Johnny Cash

I mean, look — If your kid can’t tell the difference between a merlot and a malbec by the time they’re ready to order from the adult menu, can you say you’ve succeeded in preparing them for adulthood?

I thought it was an Adidas reference, based on the logo.

I did that once and cost someone their job.

Back in the bad old days of 2009, the company I apprenticed at furloughed the secretary and made me enter in job tickets. We had a special relationship with one client and they used us like one would use a drop shipping company – they sent us their customer orders and we fulfilled them. It was low volume (per job), high frequency work. About 80% of our tickets originated from PDFs that always followed the same pattern. As my first serious foray into programming, I automated the ticket intake for just their tickets so I didn’t have to type them up manually. At the time, I did not realize reducing a 10 minute task to 10 seconds (repeated about 15 times a day) would mean they never brought her back to work full time.

I don’t feel that bad about it: In the 5 years there she’d never been given a raise, the healthcare plan was atrocious, and she found out she was pregnant during the furlough. However, she decided to look for another job, and found one as a secretary at a school just down the street from her house. It was a dramatic pay increase, much better benefits, and better job security.
I left a few months later, and a year or so after, the business folded.

In 2019, a guy at my work told me that his cousin, who was significantly more rural than him, was working on plotting all his fields with drones so he could could largely automate harvesting as well as engage in targeted fertilizing, pesticide and herbicide application. Same person also apparently was running a (legal) grow operation out of a big barn that they were trying to make carbon neutral with on-site renewables.

Folks in ‘rural’ trades can be very high tech if they know how it’ll make them money.

This is a bit of a left turn, but I’ve started to note random articles like this when I see them.

This might sound a little tin-foil hat~ish, but I think that some of Ukraine’s intelligence and war efforts are informed by the media. Starting back with the NordStream pipeline sabotage, which happened just after the media began covering how Russia could use the threat of shutting down the pipeline to hold Europe hostage, I’ve noticed that there’s sort of a back and forth. The media will focus on something as being a resource or asset to Russia, and Ukraine will target it. Right now it’s Russia’s ‘shadow fleet’ - the merchant marine fleet that only travels between Russian allied countries, so the ships do not have to undergo international inspections. Not only have 3 of those ships recently sank due to weather (They were 50+ year-old river tankers that had undergone substantial modification, being used as transfer vessels to move oil for the military and were operating in the Black Sea - well outside the conditions they were built for due to threat of Ukrainian attack.), but the 4th was a newer vessel operating in conditions it was built for and it sank due to an explosion in its engine room. That last one really complicates some things for Russia - it had vital parts to another ship (a nuclear-powered icebreaker), as well as cranes from their Syrian Port (that they might be losing?) that were going to be repurposed at their Vladivostok Port.

Anyway, I guess all that is to say, I’m sort of expecting to hear within a few weeks that the factories that make these chemicals have been bombed.

While I was standing there in the kitchen, the smart TV started playing an old movie randomly, blasting the audio through all the smart speakers in the house. The Roomba hit me right in the ankle, just as the door to the stove fell open and the speakers yelled “Feed me Seymour!”
But I mean. It’s a Roomba, and the stove takes time to preheat, even if I had fallen in. The cat helped to blind the Roomba while I unplugged everything. Now I’m huddled in the dark, fighting against the cold, wondering if I should chance the thermostat.