that’s what I’d hoped, and was the first thing I tried, but it just at some point figured out I was on android and redirected to a google sign-in. On desktop it was some useless link that essentially brought me back to the page where the link to add to apple wallet started on.

Thanks, that’s actually the one I’m using but I mistakenly called it “Android Pass” originally. I’ve edited my post now to reflect this correction. Unfortuantely, at least in the only 2 situations I’ve ever tried to use a wallet which was now twice in days, I was receiving emails from organisations, one with an auto club membership digital card and one with a ticket to an event, on both occasions, I was given a link to add to my google wallet or a link to add my apple wallet and neither link actually leads to a pkpass file or any downloadable file. In the case of one of them at least I saw it links to some unrelated company that I guess they teamed up with for distributing these passes called urban air ship. I assume if you go ahead an sign-in it eventually goes on to give you a pkpass file or something similar that a google wallet app deals with but I obviously wasn’t going to do that. I was wondering if there was any commonly known way to just get the pkpass file from links like those since both seemed to work in much the same way and I assume somewhere at the end of the hoops you jump through you get an actual file.

I think I’d be pretty pleased with that actually, so long as it’s on my local machine. That’s because I often find myself wanting to locate a particular email that is along certain lines, or on a certain topic, or involves an organisation’s name that kinda sounds similar to this one word but isn’t actually that word or things like “the email where they mention they’ve had a kid” but I can’t actually recall either what they called their child, or what gender they were, or when the email was received. Or actually, even better, in that last example “What’s Dave’s kid’s name again?” and just getting a 1 word, correct response, with the ability to open the email it found where this was mentioned for additional context if I want it. Or things like “how long has it been since we moved out of that house?” and instead of finding the earliest email I can on the topic of moving house and reading emails to surmise when we discussed leaving and then finding which one might have mentioned that actual date we moved out, I could just get an answer, in English again hopefully with a link to the email or emails that provided the rationale for how the answer was arrived at.

Often in those simpler search situations I mentioned where I just need to find a specific email, keyword searches don’t always cut it. I have an absolutely appalling memory so figuring out pertinent details to things happening now based on what was going on in my inbox at some point in the past are a very important way that I get by. If I could achieve this more easily by asking relatively vague, English language questions that will help direct search efforts that are being done for me would be really helpful. Sure, theoretically all existing means of filtering and searching email should eventually find me that message but they’d likely be more effort than just asking directly like you’d ask a person tasked with digging through a filing cabinet for you, and sometimes even after extensive filtering by all kinds of clues: date, senders, keywords, labels, subject lines, emails I remember around the same time that I can find; I just for whatever reason can NOT dig up that email only to discover it later when it’s too late to be useful to me anymore and get to see what obscure reason it was none of my clever search methods caught it…

I wonder what the reasoning was behind it being the 2nd place prize. Is that inherently more believable?

Or to market paid privacy focussed products towards you lol.

“You can always choose not use the street, no one forced you to sign up for an outside account”

Yeh, it’s not like virginity, the organisations chasing this data don’t live entirely off of new additions to their databases, the data is valuable to them when it’s a constant flow so if you are interested in guarding that data and stopping it from being shared too widely then there’s never a point at which it’s entirely too late. It is worth noting that it’s near impossible to maintain the type of privacy you might have expected maybe in the 90s, early 2000s but, if you succeeded in reducing how much data you give away even to some limited extent then you are successfully starving those that seek that data of something valuable. Information about you that’s years old is probably not worth very much. It all feeds in to the machinery of this surveillance economy so I’m sure it’s useful to some extent, but that machinery seems to be endlessly thirsty so it obviously needs a continuous supply.

I don’t know I thought it was pretty good.

I don’t, in general make this same bargain, and I’m not more than happy to give my data, and thus sacrifice my privacy. However, I have had to reckon, and I think many of those who value privacy must too, with the fact that it isn’t inherently valued by everyone, that simply adequately communicating this in a way that’s better understood won’t translate to people suddenly realising what they’re giving up. We aren’t always simply one great analogy away from changing every person’s world view and likely many have come to their view from a place at least as well informed as those of us who jealously guard our privacy. I also have to reckon with the fact that to some extent, my own desire to protect my privacy is at least not fully explainable by logic and rationalism, especially in light of how difficult it is to protect and how easy it is to have unwittingly ceded it. You might call that defeatism, and to simply conclude “well I lost some privacy, so I might as well give it up completely” is accepting defeat, again not something I’m yet prepared to do, but it is also perhaps important to acknowledge and factor present realities in to one’s thinking. It might sound defeatist to point out an enemy’s big guns pointed toward you from all sides, but it’s insane to ignore them. That quote that you’ve produced, while antithetical to my thinking, really isn’t irrational or illogical, and only defeatist if you were onboard with fighting to begin with. If you do not value your privacy and you get something useful in exchange for its sacrifice then it would seem obvious to part with it gladly and it’s difficult to offer a rational reason why someone shouldn’t. My strongest motivation for protecting it is more idealistic than personal and has more to do with a kind of slippery slope argument and a concern for hypothetical power grabbing and eroding of our rights and autonomy. I like to think that’s reason enough, but at least right now, for almost everyone, none of those concerns represent clear nor present dangers and I can’t prove it definitely will become such in future though I certainly feel like it has accelerated trends firmly in the direction of my fears.

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Fuck this one guy in particular.

I think you actually usually can get them to list them all, never much interested, they’re all going to be completely random names you never heard of, just so long as I can reject them all, that’s all I care about, otherwise I have to browse a different website on principle.

I’ve read that masks do not actually thwart these systems.

Didn’t know they’d taken out the storage drives but I was aware despite my general ignorance that it’s not turnkey ready to go. I guess what I’m wondering is, is there any part of the of the process involved in designing and building such a supercomputing cluster that is already taken care by buying it in the manner that it has been sold and could that in any way offset the increased costs of trying to bring such a cluster online rather than starting from scratch? I’m not saying it is the case, so much as wondering aloud for anyone with expertise to chime in, to see if that’s a way it could make sense.

I understand there’s a mountain to climb to bring this thing in to a usable state for anyone, but could it maybe get you to base camp more quickly?

Does the hardware being all so arranged as it is in this manner to create a supercomputer make any difference to that evaluation? Like does the work of putting all the outdated hardware together in the complex way needed to make it functional for supercomputing make it potentially cheaper than buying more modern hardware but having to build it all yourself?

As part of just living in… the world, I already kind of assumed it was possible for some parties, credit card companies in particular, to pry in to my financial activity and also interested governments to compel banks to hand over whatever they had, and/or possibly just hand over everything about everyone to government all the time automatically. This was bad enough, however, even I was surprised and shocked to learn how bad it was with my own bank when they sent me a letter gleefully telling me that as of the date of the letter they had now managed to sell my data to even more 3rd parties. I was not, up until that point aware that they were selling my data at all, and that 3rd parties (other than the credit card company) were getting access to it not just because of powers to compel, like people might expect of governments, but purely because the bank was literally handing it over to whoever was willing to pay for it, no consent on my part necessary. I don’t know what changed that required them to apparently have to now disclose this to me, but I assume that they were forced, hence the letter. The sneaky motherfuckers didn’t frame it that way though, not “due to recent legislation the bank is obliged to inform you blah blah blah”, no just “good news removed, we were selling your data, we still are, but we used to too, and now we’re selling it to more people, hope you like egregiously unethical behaviour because we put a travesty in to our travesty so you can experience a travesty while processing the first travesty”.

Nah they really like it, it’s making me feel like a weird uncaring sociopath that I’m just really not that interested in the multiple daily photos, but the rest of us around the person sharing can’t seem to get enough of it. I don’t know why I don’t care so much, I’ve met the kid and they’re nice enough, I hope I’m someone they’ll be glad to have in their lives and form an affection for but you can’t really convincingly fake intense interest and emotional investment and much as I’d like it to be, that just isn’t my natural reaction. I like to think if I have ever have kids it’d be different otherwise the poor kid would have to deal with someone totally uninterested for the rest of their lives.

I’m surprised it would be on the play store since presumably if you were a carrier or creditor of some kind you want this installed in a pretty clandestine way and wouldn’t want to draw attention to it by having an app store listing.

Hmm. But like there’s stuff in there that isn’t even part of the substance of what you said. Like the call to action at the end. That’s the type of thing you’d want to be pretty sure you really wanted to do in some circumstance where you want to communicate on a matter in plain sight but obscure your identity, as such a matter would presumably be pretty important and high stakes.

Hedging my bets in trying to make my statements correct. Phrasing as I did, my statements are true if it’s just a few companies under potential scrutiny or all car companies in the US so it’s the truest way to write with the facts I haven’t my disposal.