snthd

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg

Zuckerberg: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard

Zuckerberg: Just ask

Zuckerberg: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS

[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?

Zuckerberg: People just submitted it.

Zuckerberg: I don't know why.

Zuckerberg: They "trust me"

Zuckerberg: Dumb fucks

    Instant messages sent by Zuckerberg during Facebook's early days, reported by Business Insider (May 13, 2010)

The product is you?

https://youtube.com/watch?v=FQbW31Fa4SM

"Quality fade".

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/quality_fade

https://xkcd.com/862/

[Reddit page.]

Luke (thinking): I shouldn't be looking at Reddit. Why can't I stop?

After years of trying various methods, I broke this habit by pitting my impatience against my laziness. I decoupled the action and the neurological reward by setting up a simple 30-second delay I had to wait through, in which I couldn't do anything else, before any new page or chat client would load (and only allowed one to run at once). The urge to check all those sites magically vanished--and my 'productive' computer use was unaffected.

https://blog.xkcd.com/2011/02/18/distraction-affliction-corr...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_support_for_Hamas#Use_... (Revision https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Israeli_support_f...)

Debates

Use of Hamas to undermine the Palestinian Authority

In an interview with Israeli journalist, Dan Margalit in December 2012, Netanyahu told Margalit that it was important to keep Hamas strong, as a counterweight to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Netanyahu also added that having two strong rivals, this would lessen pressure on him to negotiate towards a Palestinian state.[10] In an interview with the Israeli Army Radio in August 2019, Ehud Barak, the former Prime Minister of Israel from 1999 to 2001, said that Netanyahu's main strategy is to keep Hamas "alive and kicking" in order to weaken the Palestinian Authority, even at the expense of "abandoning the citizens [of the south]."[41] In an interview with Politico in 2023, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said, "In the last 15 years, Israel did everything to downgrade the Palestinian Authority and to boost Hamas", before adding that "Gaza was on the brink of collapse because they had no resources, they had no money, and the PA refused to give Hamas any money. Bibi saved them. Bibi made a deal with Qatar and they started to move millions and millions of dollars to Gaza."[42]

At a Likud party conference in 2019, Netanyahu said: "Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas ... This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank."[43][44] Netanyahu responded to the accusations of funding and strengthening Hamas by calling them "ridiculous".[45] In an interview with Time in 2024, he denied of giving support to Hamas and said that it was one of "many misquotes" attributed to him.[46]

Gershon Hacohen, former commander of the 7th Armored Brigade and an associate of Netanyahu, said in 2019 in an interview: "Netanyahu's strategy is to prevent the option of two states, so he is turning Hamas into his closest partner. Openly Hamas is an enemy. Covertly, it's an ally."[47][48] Bezalel Smotrich, a far-right lawmaker and finance minister under the Netanyahu government, called the Palestinian Authority a "burden" and Hamas an "asset".[49][50] Allegations of Israeli support for the creation of Hamas

Yuval Diskin, former director of Shin Bet from 2005 to 2011, told Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth in 2013, that "if we look at it over the years, one of the main people contributing to Hamas's strengthening has been Bibi (Benjamin) Netanyahu, since his first term as prime minister."[41][51] In October 2023, former Intelligence Chief of Saudi Arabia, Prince Turki Al-Faisal, accused Israel of "funnelling Qatari money" to Hamas.[52]

On 19 January 2024, Reuters reported that Josep Borrell, the EU foreign policy chief, said while receiving an honorary doctorate from the University of Valladolid that "Israel had financed the creation of Palestinian militant group Hamas, publicly contradicting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who has denied such allegations." and that "Borrell added the only peaceful solution included the creation of a Palestinian state. 'We only believe a two-state solution imposed from the outside would bring peace even though Israel insists on the negative,' he said."[53][54][55] Borrell also described Israel as having "created Hamas", but immediately continued saying that "yes, Hamas was financed by Israel to weaken the Palestinian Authority".[b]

Professor Avner Cohen, publicly acknowledged that "Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel's creation" and that Israel had "encouraged them as a counterweight to ... Palestine Liberation Organization and its dominant faction, Yasser Arafat's Fatah."[61] David Hacham, who worked in Gaza as an Arab affairs expert in the Israeli military in the late 1980s and early 1990s stated, "When I look back at the chain of events, I think we made a mistake. But at the time, nobody thought about the possible results."[62] Similar statements have been made by Yasser Arafat. For example, in an interview with Italian newspaper, Corriere della Sera in December 2001, he referred to Hamas as a "creature of Israel".[63][64] Use of Hamas as a tool to disengage from peace talks

Shlomo Brom [he], retired general and former deputy to Israel's national security adviser, believes that an empowered Hamas helps Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu avoid negotiating over a Palestinian state, suggesting that there is no viable partner for peace talks.[10]

Microtonal guitar/bass and drums.

Could floss.fund reach an agreement with foreign orgs with similar goals, and let them to the disbursement to individuals?

eg https://www.spi-inc.org/ https://nlnet.nl/

https://gpsjam.org/

Related - "The UK is wasting a lot of wind power" from 2023. https://archy.deberker.com/the-uk-is-wasting-a-lot-of-wind-p...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34358795

But what happens when authoritarianism does not come from the right, but from the left or center? (Not a contradiction:

That's the whole thing of the "political compass" both a left-to-right wing axis and a perpendicular authoritarian-libertarian axis:

https://www.politicalcompass.org/analysis2

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-segregation

It's good to have real feeling behind the "abstract" incompatibility of EU data rights and US law.

"EU-US Privacy Shield" and similar are a crock of shit.

Facebook & Yandex used apps to correlate browsing sessions to the app user.

https://localmess.github.io/

The idea that ecosystems naturally balance themselves is a pervasive myth.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/balan...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_nature

It’s much older than you and you are not its legal guardian.

A fair few cultures believe they are. NZ recognises the Whanganui River as having legal personhood.

Bright VPN

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bright_Data

Despite the title, there's a windows build:

https://github.com/IsmaelMartinez/teams-for-linux/releases

Archive.is have previously blocked cloudflare DNS because it was anonymizing requests. It could be either.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317

The archive.is owner has explained that he returns bad results to us because we don’t pass along the EDNS subnet information. This information leaks information about a requester’s IP and, in turn, sacrifices the privacy of users.

Musicbrainz can do events

https://musicbrainz.org/search?query=glastonbury&type=event&...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_telephone_number

Don't smoke.

Fixed in "Remove custom keepalive intervals" merged 12 Aug 2024

https://invent.kde.org/network/kdeconnect-kde/-/merge_reques...

Maybe they're called parental controls because they control the parents (by limiting and bundling choices).

Chroma 4:4:4 support is supposed to be important for viewing text.

https://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/best/by-usage/pc-monitor

Data protection by design and by default.

Started googling and found this:

https://www.newsweek.com/americas-new-police-cars-are-taxpay...

...features specifically designed for policing come standard including Police Perimeter Alert, a technology that detects moving treats around a vehicle and automatically activates the rear camera, sounds a chime...

Anyway...

Similar data on police vehicles could be interesting.

Now, by default Mastodon follows your browser's light/dark theme preference.

Mathstodon must have it's setting configured as dark, overriding the default.

Maybe email them and ask for it to be fixed?

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/29748/commits/9ece...

A good reminder that what we do can change - we need to instill our values into the basics of everything we build, otherwise we'll just be building the next TicketMaster, Oracle, or Meta.

Both Ellison and Zuckerberg still control their respective companies. The problem is not that they didn't instill their values.

In the case of ticketmaster, they just plain sold out.

https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences-and-law/economi...

Ticketmaster's fate was changed in 1982, when Chicago investor Jay Pritzker purchased it. Pritzker, the wealthy owner of the Hyatt Hotel chain, paid $4 million for the entire company.

if the grandma's secret receipe is industrial cake mix, I don't know how much of a secret receipe it is

There are a few interesting paragraphs on it in the book "On Food And Cooking: The Science And Lore Of The Kitchen" (2004) by Harold McGee[0]. (p555)

Modern American Cakes: Help from Modified Fats and Flours Beginning around 1910, several innovations in oil and flour processing led to major changes in American cakes. The first innovation made it possible to leaven cakes with much less work. The hydrogenation of liquid vegetable oils to make solid fats allowed manufacturers to produce specialized shortenings with the ideal properties for incorporating air quickly at room temperature (p. 557). Modern cake shortenings also contain tiny bubbles of nitrogen that provide preformed gas cells for leavening, and emulsifiers that help stabilize the gas cells during mixing and baking, and disperse the fat in droplets that won’t deflate the gas cells.

The second major innovation was the development of specialized cake flour, a soft, low-protein flour that is very finely milled and strongly bleached with chlorine dioxide or chlorine gas. The chlorine treatment turns out to cause the starch granules to absorb water and swell more readily in high-sugar batters, and produce a stronger starch gel. It also causes fats to bind more readily to the starch granule surface, which may help disperse the fat phase more evenly. In combination with the new shortening and with double-acting baking powders, cake flour allowed U.S. food manufacturers to develop “high-ratio” packaged cake mixes, in which the sugar can outweigh the flour by as much as 40%. The texture of the cakes they make is distinctively light and moist, fine and velvety.

Thanks to these qualities and to the convenience of premeasured ingredients, packaged cake mixes were a great success: just 10 years after their major introduction following World War II, they accounted for half of all cakes baked in U.S. homes. The very sweet, tender, moist, light cake became the American standard; and hydrogenated shortening and chlorinated flour became standard kitchen supplies for cakes made “from scratch.”

The Disadvantages of Modified Fats and Flours Hydrogenated vegetable shortenings and chlorinated flour are very useful, but have drawbacks that lead some bakers to avoid them. Hydrogenated shortening does not have the flavor that butter does, and has the more serious disadvantage of containing high levels of trans fatty acids (10-35% compared to butter’s 3-4%; see p. 38). Chlorinated flour has a distinctive taste that some bakers dislike (others find that it enhances cake aroma). And the chlorine ends up in fat-like flour molecules that accumulate in animal bodies. There’s no evidence that this accumulation is harmful, but the European Union and the United Kingdom consider the safety of chlorinated flour unproven, and forbid its use. The U.S. FDA and the World Health Organization consider chlorinated flour a safe ingredient for human consumption.

Manufacturers are addressing some of these problems and uncertainties. For example, the effects of flour chlorination can be approximated by heat treatment, and vegetable oils can be hardened without the production of trans fatty acids. So it’s likely that cooks will eventually be able to make high-ratio cakes with less questionable ingredients.

[0] https://openlibrary.org/works/OL4110479W/On_food_and_cooking...

How does it work if you want a steam train?