Facebook rolls out AI to detect suicidal posts before they’re reported | TechCrunch
This could actually increase deaths as armed police are dispatched to “check in” on reportedly suicidal people. And that’s not counting the opportunities for algorithmic cruelty, like notifying someone’s domestic abuser that they’re suicidal.
Goodbye Facebook
This was the last straw for the fediverse’s jjg, who reports on the previous techcrunch post in his goodbye letter to Facebook. He points out that the AI capability is bound to be used to bring marketing to a new level.
Facebook Knows How to Track You Using the Dust on Your Camera Lens
But they’ve still got lots of ways to track you, even if you yourself aren’t on Facebook anymore. You should still quit, though.
Politics
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s response to the Trump wall speech revealed why she threatens both Democrats and Republicans
AOC is a breath of fresh air…
Abolishing ICE by funding it
But let’s not get carried away with the hero worship just yet.
‘Bowl Patrol’: Dylann Roof Fans Hope to Inspire More Mass Shootings - UNICORN RIOT
It constantly amazes me how the fash have zero security culture, even compared to anarchists. I guess it comes from not having to worry about being targeted by the state.
ActivityPub
ActivityPub: The “Worse Is Better” Approach to Federated Social Networking — kaniini’s blog!
ActivityPub: the present state, or why saving the ‘worse is better’ virus is both possible and important — kaniini’s blog!
Pleroma’s kaniini goes into some technical details on what’s wrong with ActivityPub (the protocol Mastodon, Pleroma, and others use to federate) from a security perspective.
The Web
404 Page Not Found | Kate Wagner
The artifacts of internet life are personal—that is, not professionally or historically notable—and therefore worthless.
Stumbling blocks on the way to web performance - macwright.org
I agree that native (non-JS) lazy image loading is needed, and that service workers are a great way to stumble into the second hardest problem in computer science. The image format issue I’m less concerned with; people could do a better job optimizing their PNGs and JPGs, but the gains of webp and jpeg2000 are pretty marginal. The real problems with web performance are mostly self-owns: too much JavaScript, too much of it third-party, and just generally too heavy resources.
Ditching Medium | JJ’s JavaScript Blog
Medium is a lot like other silos — it makes money off of other people’s content, and generally doesn’t give anything back.
Misc
mathiasdahl/dotemacs: dotemacs
A minimalist emacs setup, sufficient to bootstrap you into setting up everything else you need.
How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation
While I’m not a Millennial (late GenX, child of earliest boomers), a lot of this resonated with me. Especially this:
That’s one of the most ineffable and frustrating expressions of burnout: It takes things that should be enjoyable and flattens them into a list of tasks, intermingled with other obligations that should either be easily or dutifully completed. The end result is that everything, from wedding celebrations to registering to vote, becomes tinged with resentment and anxiety and avoidance.
Good night, internet. Good night.