Spelling out all the potential consequences of an unknown party accessing your DNA is impossible, because scientists’ understanding of the genome is still evolving.

Honestly, this is something that I hadn’t actually considered before. I’m almost embarrassed, since I like to think of myself as someone who is always thinking about how my data can be misused, haha.

It’s not just about data that can currently be used unethically; there’s also the fact that someone may figure out a way in the future to use today’s data unethically. This is definitely true with something like your DNA, which is so complex that there are infinite things to learn from it. But it can be true of more simple things, too. There’s no way to predict what someone will be able to extrapolate from seemingly harmless information today.

(Disclaimer: haven’t read the article yet, definitely going to get to it later today.)

This is kind of thing where I am so torn between philosophy and pragmatism.

1. Morally, bodily autonomy is very important. Framing this as “right to repair for your own body” is a fascinating way of thinking about it, and makes a clear, ethical argument in favor or DIY medicine. And that’s on top of the fact that we shouldn’t have to rely on giant corporations for our health.
2. The potential consequences of this are terrifying, not just for misinformed people, but their children as well.

On a meta note, 404media continues to be the best subscription I’ve ever paid for.

Wow, that name is familiar! I had no idea that the maintainer of Calibre is also the maintainer of kitty (a terminal emulator). Someone is busy!

Bleh, I really hate to side with Google, especially when releasing this documentation benefits users and hiding it benefits Google.

But it seems weird for this new license to be legally binding. If someone committed this to the wrong repo, and that person didn’t have legal authority over the original content, then how can they have legally relicensed it?

Unfortunately, this seems to be the only option, besides using your own domain so that you control forwarding yourself. Basically, pay someone like Firefox Relay to do forwarding, or do your own forwarding. Firefox Relay does give you five email addresses for free, which is cool. (https://relay.firefox.com/#pricing)

I’ve noticed that the “+” sign trick with Gmail just doesn’t work at all anymore. Anyone that wants to maliciously send you emails knows to remove what comes after the + sign, so that you can’t tell which of your sub-addresses was originally used. And anyone that hacks a database to steal email addresses knows to remove it as well, to cover their tracks.

I know that Telegram has a lot of users, so I’m not describing all of them here. But I’ve noticed that it seems especially popular among people who kind of like to “play pretend” as underground hackers. You know, the kind of person who likes to imagine that the government would be after them.

This mudslinging feels like more of a marketing campaign than anything else. An info op that will work well on the Telegram users who like to imagine that they have outmaneuvered all the info ops.

Or “things you possess,” either. I remember being told (maybe in a college class, but I don’t remember exactly) that you can be compelled to give up the key to a lock, but not the combination to a lock.

I haven’t heard anything bad about Grayjay before; what’s the issue with it?

That looks cool, I hadn’t heard of Circles before. I want to check it out now. I’m curious if it somehow keeps your data private from the server owner. That feels like the missing feature in most federated, privacy-focused social networks.

Side note: looks like it’s made by Futo; I hadn’t realized they were working on something like that. I’ve been using another one of their apps, Grayjay for almost all of my mobile Youtube viewing lately. It works great.

A homemade RISC-V fightstick? This is combining all of my favorite things! I bought a leverless controller recently (an SGF Bridget).

I’m only vaguely familiar with microcontrollers, but I know there are libraries out there for using an Arduino to make a mechanical keyboard or fightstick. Is there something similar for the CH32V305?

That is very cool, I hadn’t heard of that before. I have never done anything with a microcontroller, but I’m thinking about it for RISC-V. It sounds like that might be one of the better ways of getting a RISC-V device in practical use, until more software packages become available for a full Linux machine.

Wow, thanks! That’s fantastic. I hadn’t even thought about the fact that Docker images will have to be recreated for RISC-V, but it sounds like some of the most important parts of the stack are useable already. Nice to see that nginx works – I was leaning towards moving my blog to a RISC-V SBC, and it’s just a static HTML site.

That looks so cool. I was completely unaware that there were desktop motherboards with RISC-V CPUs. I thought they were all still SBCs.

Yeah, this is a ragebait headline (and I’ll admit that it caught me). This is actually in line with what you see on Android and most Linux distros. It’s also likely that Microsoft doesn’t want you to easily change from Edge, but still. This is better than allowing an application to silently change which applications open things on your computer.

This blog post is pretty buzzword-heavy, but Penpot is a legitimately great tool. It’s used for UI design and layouts. I’ve seen a couple of open source projects use a self-hosted Penpot instance for working on and discussing new designs.

Figma would be the most popular, proprietary example of this type of tool. I’m not aware of any open source competitors besides Penpot.

edit: It’s like Google docs for web page layouts or app layouts. The animation on their homepage is probably the best way of showing what it does.

The progress bar screen during an AMD driver update. Cycles between ads for video games, ads for CPUs, and a “how are we doing” survey.

Basketball courts too, newly added in the last couple years. There’s one sponsor logo physically printed on the court, and one that’s digitally added for the TV broadcast (tailored to your location, of course).

I was watching a game a few weeks ago and the superimposed logo kept screwing up. It was moving with the camera instead of being fixed on the ground, and sometimes it wouldn’t be cropped around the players, it would just go on top of them. It was kind of amusing. They removed it after a few minutes.

I agree with your point, but I also agree with the parent post as well. Advertising and tracking can be considered separate issues while also both being bad. I’d also say tracking is almost always bad, whereas there are advertisements that I think are perfectly fine.

People have been talking about how manipulative advertising can be long before targeting individuals was possible. (Like Joe Camel.)

But I also think that there is a whole new level of maliciousness to these highly-targeted ad services that can show you specific content based on a personality profile, formed about you by aggregating data across many different areas of your life. It’s related to advertising in general, but takes it to such an invasive extreme that it’s worth singling out on its own.

When I was maybe five years old, I was with my parents at the grocery store, and there was an advertisement for Reba (a TV show starring Reba McEntire) on those little plastic sticks that you place on the conveyor belt to separate your items from the other person’s items.

I have absolutely no idea why I have remembered this fact for so long, or even why it stuck out to me as a five year old. But there was an INCH of space available, and someone had the business idea to slap an advertisement on it.