the platform’s collection of user data

this “oh banning TikTok is good because TikTok collects a bunch of user data” talking point has hoodwinked a whole lot of tech-savvy, generally-left-of-center people who really should know better.

thought experiment: I go out and buy a brand-new phone. Apple or Android, it doesn’t matter.

I install some apps. let’s say TikTok, Facebook, and Twitter.

all of those apps use the platform APIs published by Apple or Google respectively.

all of them are equally capable of collecting user data.

TikTok is not unique or special in any way when it comes to data harvesting.

oh, except TikTok is owned by Ghyna, and everyone knows that Ghyna is evil and scary. surely that makes it different, right? US-based companies can harvest our data all they want, and sure maybe an EU-based company too. but Ghyna harvesting our data? that’s a bridge too far!

and that’s why we need to ban companies owned by Ghyna from harvesting our data!

here’s the problem with that. I install another app. I don’t like the stock Weather app that comes with my phone, so I install Totally Trustworthy Weather from a developer named Absolutely Not Spyware LLC.

that weather app needs location permissions, obviously. and network access. and to be allowed to run in the background constantly.

because it’s given permissions to run in the background, there’s a decent chance the weather app can actually collect more info about me than TikTok/Facebook/Twitter/etc.

but, why would a weather app collect data like that? what’s it going to do with it? it’s just a weather app, surely it doesn’t care, right?

wrong - it’s going to sell all the data it collects on me to a data broker.

(read Temptations of an open-source browser extension developer if you’re skeptical of how much money is thrown around in order to collect data of this sort)

if those nefarious people in Ghyna want data about you…they’ll just buy it from a data broker, the same way everyone else (including the FBI) does.

if Congress had passed some sort of GDPR-ish law, that applied across the board to all forms of data harvesting, I’d be all in favor of it. but obviously they’re never going to do that.

instead, what started out in 2020 as a “Ghyna bad” policy from Trump now has bipartisan support and people on the left defending it on data privacy grounds. we live in the stupidest goddamn timeline.

I stocked lentils once and they sat for weeks

random idea - could you make little “meal kit” type things for the less popular ingredients like these?

if someone has never cooked lentils before, and sees them in a free pantry, I can definitely understand why they wouldn’t be inclined to take them, they can be somewhat daunting at first.

but you could do something like bundle together a bag of lentils with a can of tomato paste and a jar of curry powder, with a printout of this recipe or a similar one, and someone would only need to add a couple of fresh veggies to complete the recipe.

Nuts would be great but are pricey.

is buying them in bulk and dividing them up into smaller portions an option? one of my go-to snacks are these cashews which are still on the pricey side, but less expensive than buying them in smaller packages.

here’s the same news, from a source less likely to be (or appear to be) biased (SCOTUS Blog): Parties file final briefs before Supreme Court hears TikTok case

and for my fellow primary source nerds, you can also read all the filings in this case. the particular filing that this story is based on is “Reply of petitioners TikTok Inc. and ByteDance Ltd” from Jan 3rd.

directly from the 31 page PDF:

The Government begins by claiming the Act’s TikTok-specific provision is subject to no First Amendment scrutiny at all—a position rejected by all three judges below. It argues ByteDance Ltd. has no rights because it is foreign, and TikTok Inc. has no rights because it has no authority over the algorithm and recommendation engine used on the U.S. platform.

as I’ve posted previously - news articles about this do a very poor job of explaining that the law applies primarily to Apple and Google. it requires them to remove the TikTok app from their respective app stores, with a fine of $5000 per user if they don’t comply. so “it only applies to foreign companies and they have no rights” is complete bullshit.

the DOJ’s position that this isn’t a 1st Amendment issue is laughable. they’re trying to ban force Apple and Google not to distribute the TikTok app, because they dislike the content published via the app. there’s a specific legal term for this - viewpoint discrimination - and it’s one of the clearest examples of speech restrictions that are forbidden by the 1st Amendment.

based on the data we have now, the expected value of “pandemics per Trump presidency” is 1. so the null hypothesis is that we should expect another pandemic sometime in the next 4 years.

4 years from now, the best-case scenario is that we can revise that estimate downwards to 0.5 pandemics per Trump presidency.

I’m…not terribly optimistic about that. both because of the gutting of infectious-disease public health under White House Brainworms Czar RFK Jr, but also the chilling effect that the article mentions on immigrants, especially migrant farmworkers, who are the most likely vector for a strain of H5N1 to develop human-to-human transmission capability.

putting this in the context of other committee fights the Democrats have been having:

77-year-old Jerry Nadler was the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee (which also plays a crucial oversight role)

Nadler’s leadership was successfully challenged by 62-year-old Jamie Raskin.

so Democrats’ version of “younger blood” was to replace a baby boomer (born 1947) with…a slightly younger baby boomer (born 1962, which depending on where you draw the line is the last of the baby boom, or the very beginning of Gen X)

Raskin had previously been the top Democrat on House Oversight, so that spot became vacant.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ran for that leadership position on House Oversight. she’s 35 years old, has an excellent media presence, and is well-known nationally.

instead of AOC, Democrats chose a 74-year old, Gerry Connolly.

and not just any 74-year old…they chose a 74-year-old who has cancer

and not just any 74-year old with cancer…a 74-year-old who has an especially deadly form of cancer

and not just any 74-year old with an especially deadly form of cancer…esophageal cancer. cancer of the esophagus. you know, that thing that’s in your throat. you know what else is in your throat, right next to your esophagus? your voice box. that thing you speak with.

Democrats in a nutshell: the guy we put in charge of oversight of the Trump administration…there’s a good chance he’s going to have surgery that renders him physically incapable of speaking.

the most plausible explanation I’ve seen so far - credit to this post (from one of the hosts of the 5-4 podcast) where I saw it first:

my suspicion is that Kamala is floating a CA governor run or 2028 run not because she thinks she has a chance but because it will help convince wealthy donors that it’s still worth buying influence with her and thus help her fundraise to pay off her campaign’s debts

but also Kamala ending up as the nominee wouldn’t surprise me. if it’s not her, there’ll be a different “establishment” Democratic candidate that the DNC puts their thumb on the scale for. 2028 seems likely to be yet another “this is the most important election of our lives, it’s crucial to the future of the country that you vote for whichever Democrat we tell you to vote for, now shut the fuck up and stop complaining”.

when people say “echo chamber” with negative connotations, what they actually mean is “a place that has a consensus reality, and I disagree with that consensus reality”.

a forum for geologists bans flat-earthers. the flat-earthers will call it an “echo chamber”. they’ll ask why the geologists are so afraid to have their beliefs questioned. if they’re so sure the earth is round, shouldn’t they be willing to debate it?

having a consensus reality is good, actually. and enforcement of that consensus is usually necessary to maintain the health of the community. geologists want to talk about…actual geology stuff. if flat-earthers are allowed, they’ll turn every thread into a debate about flat vs. round earth, and it will drown out the actual more interesting conversations the geologists were there for.

when someone says “such-and-such is an echo chamber” you should look to see what the consensus reality of that place is, and what aspects of that consensus reality the complainer disagrees with.

recently, I’ve seen a lot of people calling Bluesky an echo chamber, for example. if you dig into it…usually they posted some transphobic bullshit and got blocked by half the site. Bluesky isn’t perfect, but one thing they’ve gotten right so far is “trans people exist, and have the right to exist, and to live their lives free of harassment” is a pretty strong part of their consensus reality. people who disagree with that are inevitably going to run back to Twitter and whine about Bluesky being an echo chamber.

golly, I sure do feel awful for those executives.

imagine having something happen in the world - something completely out of your control - and as a result, your cost-of-living skyrockets, in a way you have no control over, you just have to pay it. I’m sure that’s an experience that is unique to CEOs and that other people have never had to deal with.

the primary source of this is annoyingly hard to track down for legislation that passed Congress and was signed by the President.

it turns out that’s because it was part of H.R.815 - “Making emergency supplemental appropriations for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2024, and for other purposes.”

if you want to read the actual text of the law, this PDF starting on page 61.

the gist is that it’s illegal to:

Providing services to distribute, maintain, or update such foreign adversary controlled application (including any source code of such application) by means of a marketplace (including an online mobile application store) through which users within the land or maritime borders of the United States may access, maintain, or update such application.

everyone calls this a “ban on TikTok” and it kinda annoys the shit out of me, because as far as I can tell, the website tiktok.com is probably still going to be available in the US.

what this law actually does is require Google and Apple to remove TikTok from their app stores, for US-based users. and makes them subject to a fine of $5000 per user if they don’t comply.

I’m generally in favor of more regulation of tech companies…but this is a really fucking stupid way to do it.

oh golly why would anyone do such a thing

here’s a totally unrelated news article from about a year ago: UnitedHealth uses AI model with 90% error rate to deny care, lawsuit alleges

(my attorney has advised me to state that I think murdering CEOs is *checks notes* wrong)

tangentially related:

11 children worked ‘dangerous’ night shift at Iowa pork plant, investigators say

A sanitation contractor has been fined nearly $172,000

Burger King, Popeyes fined more than $2 million for violating child labor laws

poor people go to jail when they get caught committing crimes. wealthy people pay a fine and move on with their lives. usually the fine is small enough that they can just treat it as a cost of doing business.

when people can commit crimes without feeling any real consequences, vigilante justice like this is an entirely predictable outcome.

(and of course, there’s a whole additional layer to this problem, where there’s a ton of corporate malfeasance and misbehavior that harms society but technically isn’t a crime because of some loophole or another…those child labor law violations are one of the few examples where employing children is unambiguously against the law as well as being relatively easy to prove)

here in Seattle: the at-large City Council seat (district 8) between Tanya Woo and Alexis Mercedes-Rinck

Woo ran for a different city council seat a year ago, and lost. in the same election, a sitting city councilmember (Teresa Mosqueda) won an election to the King County Council, so she resigned her city council seat. to fill that vacant seat, the other newly-elected city councilmembers appointed Woo, even though she had just lost.

by the rules of the resignation and temporary appointment, the next regular election (now) elects a permanent replacement.

this leads to an unusual scenario - normally, Seattle (and all of Washington state) holds its municipal elections in odd years. the current mayor was elected in 2021, the most recent city council election was 2023. this leads predictably to much lower turnout for the municipal elections, which leads in turn to conservative business interests having an easier time buying the local elections.

Woo is aligned with the “business-friendly”, conservative (by Seattle standards) councilmembers who were elected in 2023. Mercedes-Rinck is significantly more progressive.

based on the primary results and subsequent polls, Woo winning seems pretty unlikely - but the margin of Mercedes-Rinck’s victory will still be interesting, because of what it says about Seattle politics in elections with high turnout. voter turnout in the 2023 elections was a dismal 36%. this year is likely to be in the ~80% range.

it’s also an opportunity for something very funny to happen - Tanya Woo may set a record that will likely never be broken, becoming the first candidate in city history to lose 2 elections in consecutive 2 years, for a seat that normally gets elected every 4 years.

hello Cleveland Beehaw! happy to be joining this pleasant little corner of the internet.

good news: I’m in the process of buying a house, after renting my whole life up to now. got lucky that the first home I toured in-person (after viewing probably 100+ homes on Zillow) I liked enough to put in an offer, and had the offer accepted. now I’m just going through inspection and mortgage approval crap.

bad news: I broke my big toe. not broken broken, apparently just a tiny chunk of bone flaked off where the ligament is attached. I put off going to the doctor about it, because I woke up with my toe swollen and painful, Dr. Google suggested that it was probably gout, and I didn’t want to bother with a doctor visit if it was just going to be a lecture about eating healthier. so I hobbled around on a broken toe for almost 2 weeks before going in for X-rays and getting told it was broken. now I’m crossing my fingers that it’ll heal up on its own in the Fancy Medical Shoe they gave me, and I won’t have to have surgery on it. and it’s a good reminder that sometimes I need to push past my ADHD and medical anxiety and go to the doctor anyway.

it might be more complicated than you’re looking for (requires a self-hosted server instead of just a desktop app), but take a look at the ecosystem surrounding Subsonic

Subsonic did some licensing shenanigans, but there’s an actively-maintained GPL3 fork called airsonic-advanced

there’s also alternate implementations, Gonic and Navidrome, that maintain compatibility with the original Subsonic API

because they all work with a common API, there’s a variety of clients that can work with the backend.

I’m also a big fan of Beets for music organization, it’s not tied in to the Subsonic ecosystem so you can use them completely separately if you want. it handles tagging, can fetch lyrics, and can also transcode the library (or an arbitrary subset of it) if you want to send it to a portable device. (not sure if this is what you mean by compatibility)

I currently have Beets organizing everything, run Navidrome on my server pointed at the Beets library directory, then Ultrasonic on my phone, and the Navidrome web interface on my desktop. the combo is especially nice for streaming to my phone - Navidrome will transcode FLAC to Opus on the fly, and Ultrasonic has an option to cache those files locally, and to pre-download them over wifi instead of mobile data. so I have my full collection available on my phone, can stream it from anywhere, and the songs I listen to frequently are already downloaded and I don’t have to waste mobile data, or wait for them to load if I have poor cell signal.