@AltStore was rickety to install, and it only has two apps, neither of which I want.
However. Apple's line is that "no-one really wants an alternative app store". This app store costs under €2/year. Proving Apple wrong is never not worth two euros.
https://fosstodon.org/users/altstore/statuses/112287538562764439
DELIGHTED to say that my latest tech history column is live on Every and they've made this one free-to-read.
Because it covers one of the most overlooked founders of the golden age of computing: Lore Harp McGovern, founder of Vector Graphic who pioneered small/medium business computing.
She deserves to be better known. Certainly deserves more than a single paragraph on Wikipedia. Read and spread the word #computing #history https://every.to/the-crazy-ones/the-woman-that-tech-history-forgot
She Built a Microcomputer Empire From Her Suburban Home
The untold story of Lore Harp McGovernevery.to
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If there's a kind of cringe porn I can enjoy, the Horizon scandal is it. I'm seeing a bunch of little crimes and sorta-kinda engineering all stacking up to produce catastrophes. Looking forward to the definitive pop-tech-history full-length book.
BBC News: 'Damaging' testimony withheld from pregnant postmistress trial (By Nalini Sivathasan and Lorna Acquah)
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Australia's city flags: What are they and is it time to change any of them?
From Sydney to Perth to Wagga Wagga, many of Australia's cities have flags. But they're mostly unknown and unloved. Here's why.Nick Baker (ABC News)
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now channeling memories of the intro to Australia You’re Standing in it flag scenes…
@devopscats Adelaide's flag looks a bit silly, but it was an early attempt at agricultural region branding (eg, as done well by Italy's Puglia).
So the design had to be able to be stenciled to a burlap sack.
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I think the yellow and blue combination looks terrible. Brisbane's flag is a real shemozzle.
Though looking at other cities' flags for the first time... Brisbane's is about on par.
Weird to recognise myself in the first part of a "history of" video 🧓 So glad to see 春游 only going from strength to strength!
https://www.youtube.com/embed/0O9UDQKpH_c
YouTube: History of Chun You Festival(春游历史短片)
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THREAD: 7 months of work later, my Globe & Mail investigation into an Ethiopian state Facebook campaign reveals that at least 200 Ethiopian state institutions, from town administrations to ministries & even academic institutions, are using their Facebook pages to misinform & lure vulnerable women into being recruited for domestic worker jobs in Saudi Arabia, despite the grave dangers that enable human trafficking.
Another example of Meta platforms causing real life harm.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-ethiopia-domestic-work-saudi-arabia-facebook/
Ethiopian Facebook campaign for migrant workers enables human trafficking, forced labour in Saudia Arabia, advocates say
Human rights researchers have condemned Ethiopia’s domestic work program, citing exploitation and rampant abuse of migrant workers in Saudi ArabiaZecharias Zelalem (The Globe and Mail)
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AI models found to show language bias by recommending Black defendents be 'sentenced to death'
— The thing about this that terrifies me is the implication that lethal racism is embedded pervasively in our written culture at so deep a level that simple attempts to sanitize the LLM input data corpus doesn't even scratch the surface of the problem. https://www.euronews.com/next/2024/03/09/ai-models-found-to-show-language-bias-by-recommending-black-defendents-be-sentenced-to-dea
AI models found to show language bias by recommending Black defendents be 'sentenced to death'
Large language models (LLMs) are more likely to criminalise users that use African American English, the results of a new Cornell University study show.Anna Desmarais (Euronews.com)
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Tipoff from @kw217: Kazakhstan, which has not observed daylight saving for 20 years, is turning the clocks back at 0:00 on 1 March 2024, to 23:00 on leap day February 29 2024.
Definitely playing time zones on Hard Mode, Kazakhstan. Thanks for doing some QA on stacked edge cases for us all!
https://www.timeanddate.com/time/change/kazakhstan
Daylight Saving Time 2024 in Kazakhstan
When do the clocks spring forward or fall back in Kazakhstan? Daylight Saving Time for 2024 and other years.www.timeanddate.com
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this has been public for about a month, though!
https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz-announce/2024-February/000081.html
Author:
Perrin pressed forward through the beech woodlands. Where an oak or a larch broke through the tree cover he enjoyed the cool breeze. At a creek he could pick a few hawthorne berries. But as he rested under an old willow, he wondered if he could reach the pine forest before nightfall.
My brain:
Dude is in trees. There are trees and also trees and trees. There was wind. At a water he ate tree fruit. He sat under a tree. He wants to get out of the trees and into different trees.
Iver likes this.
I've never had any accountancy training. But at one point zaomengshe.com needed financial reports, and I said "How hard can it be? I'll write some Python scripts." So the one thing I do know about accountancy, is that it is FUCKING HARD with financial partners who are incapable of attaching unique IDs to transactions. Which is all of them.
That's why, although I barely dare to say it, I kinda have some sympathy for Fujitsu here.
Woah! I did not expect this to go through at all. I had fully expected to begin the process of giving up my existing citizenships this year.
https://ard.social/users/tagesschau/statuses/111781537631783164
The Wandering Shop: Charlie Stross (@cstross@wandering.shop)
This seems like the perfect chance to pitch my phone OS based on neoliberal orthodoxy. Instead of calling malloc() like godless communists, apps bid for memory in an on-device currency. And not just memory! CPU time, network connectivity, storage. Programs can trade off space/time performance based on the device's current market conditions. As the consumer, you can mint as much currency as you like, and allocate it to apps according to how much you value their use. Preorders will open soon, as soon as I get my Bahamas bank account set up.
(Not a reply because I believe Charlie has blocked me. And this post isn't likely to do me any favours either.)
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ActivityPub
The ActivityPub protocol is a decentralized social networking protocol based upon the ActivityStreams 2.0 data format.WordPress.org
Interesting quote from Google's #gemini team:
"LLMs also struggle with tasks requiring high-level reasoning abilities like causal understanding, logical deduction, and counterfactual reasoning even though they achieve impressive performance on exam benchmarks."
Which is another way of saying LLMs are the exact opposite of critical thinking. That could be a useful shorthand. "Is critical thinking important in this task?" "Yes" ⇒ "LLM-free zone".
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"Ford’s methods were so influential that they became known simply as Fordism (something that Google and Facebook still haven’t achieved.)"
I dearly hope "Googlism" becomes a term for something you keep vague when telling people you have a doctor's appointment.
https://crookedtimber.org/2023/11/08/silicon-valley-is-the-detroit-of-the-future/
Oh, interesting. I saw a brief popup at the station on the weekend and ignored it.
https://arstechnica.com/security/2023/11/flipper-zero-gadget-that-doses-iphones-takes-once-esoteric-attacks-mainstream/
Ars Technica: This tiny device is sending updated iPhones into a never-ending DoS loop
"We're migrating the company wiki, as part of the cleanup all pages without an edit in the last 6 months will be archived."
-- real thing said by a free-roaming employee not wearing a Hannibal Lecter muzzle.
Huge news if true. This would be a worrying escalation that could throw the whole region into chaos, with implications for the supply chain worldwide. #bbc https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-66887236
BBC News: Giggles on the sofa! Pigeon CCTV has BBC hosts in tears
Ow ow ow my eyes! Sadly, much as I'd like to blame this on ChatGPT, I'm betting a human is responsible.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/08/arts/ai-chatgpt-curators-museums.html
The New York Times: Museum Curators Evaluate A.I. Threat by Giving It the Reins (Zachary Small)
I would definitely have gone with the headline "Repair company lobbies for law change to permit expanding business into commercial machinery." Sometimes clickbait tactics are used for good, not evil. #ifixit https://youtu.be/2uCpY3tFTIA
YouTube: Why McDonald's Ice Cream Machines Are Always Broken and How To Fix Them
My reaction when Naomi Wu went offline was basically "that's a shame, but you're probably right not to make a big fuss or fight this." Guess I misinterpreted that.
"Literally the only thing that was keeping me online for the past few years was they were worried it would make China look bad if they cracked down on me. Now that they know that I could be dead in a ditch tomorrow and no one would give a shit or say a word I’m 1000x less safe here."
https://www.hackingbutlegal.com/naomi-wu-and-the-silence-that-speaks-volumes/
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I'm getting error 500 at https://git.friendi.ca/friendica/friendica, does someone need to go give it a kick?
I bumped into the name "Horatio Alger Association" but decided I couldn't be bothered following up. Slacktivist puts it in context:
Hard work and clean living were never enough for the street urchins and matchstick boys in his books. The ones who achieved success only managed to do so because they were assisted by older, wealthy, unmarried men who took those boys off the streets and into their homes.
If you think there might be a creepy subtext to that, you’re wrong. It’s not a subtext at all.
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2023/08/11/ragged-dick/
saraaaaargh
in reply to John Bull • • •Jessica S
in reply to John Bull • • •Isaac Ji Kuo
in reply to John Bull • • •Cool story!
Of course, even if Vector Graphic had made all the correct decisions, that still wouldn't have necessarily led to success. It was a tough business.
In particular, MS-DOS compatibility was a whole different ball game than CP/M compatibility. With CP/M, partial compatibility was standard.
But that's not something most business customers were eager to wade into. So, MS-DOS compatibility wasn't enough - full IBM PC compatibility was needed ... that was non-trivial ...
John Bull
in reply to Isaac Ji Kuo • • •@isaackuo yeah. it's why i don't think their decision to stick with CP/M was necessarily the wrong one AT THE TIME.
Hindsight is 20/20
I think a lot of people don't realise just how TOTAL IBM's blitz of the business computing - and then home computing markets was.
The path to survivability for Vector was very small once IBM showed up, but they definitely shot themselves in the foot a couple of times to make their chances of survival even worse.
Isaac Ji Kuo
in reply to John Bull • • •Well people sure remember how badly their home computing blitz went. It was truly ironic how the PCjr was doomed by partial PC compatibility.
Of course, LOTS of computer makers shot themselves in the foot crippling a lower price product to avoid undercutting their own higher priced product.
Adrian Hon
in reply to John Bull • • •John Bull
in reply to Adrian Hon • • •Duncan
in reply to John Bull • • •John Bull
in reply to Duncan • • •Geoff Winkless
in reply to John Bull • • •great story, brilliant and insightful.
I'm inclined to differ on your description as Jobs as one of the winners of the era - Apple in the late 80s was pretty much crippled, only saved by a tiny minority of obsessive users and enough finance to limp through the 90s and make it to the iPod boom, which IMO was what made Apple the company it is now.
John Bull
in reply to Geoff Winkless • • •@Geoff survival was a win in that era.
But I agree that the margins were so thin once IBM rolled into town.
There are definitely timelines out there where it was Apple that went under and Osborne or Vector who survived.
And it's why i get annoyed when people cast Apple's survival as inevitable. it really wasn't.
Todd Nelson
in reply to John Bull • • •Trey Roady
in reply to John Bull • • •