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Fedware: Government apps that spy harder than the apps they ban

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Re: Fedware: Government apps that spy harder than the apps they ban

#71

Post by SimianSci »

th0raway wrote: post #52
malfist wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's ming boggling just how....cringe... these billionaires that want to run the world are. Makes you wonder if the personas that seek billions are correlated strongly with mental illnesses.

It comes down to two things. One is the well documented issue of how, when you are that rich, you are treated differently, and how that will ultimately modify your behavior. The other is the prerequisites to get to the job. Chances are you aren't fully self-made, receiving no investment. From convincing investors, to having immense faith in a project that cannot be obviously good, as otherwise you'd be building what…

- Own a monopoly - Inherit your fortune - Run a criminal enterprise

Using just these three filters alone, you encompass more than 99% of all billionaires in existence. The amount of billionaires who do not fit into these categories can barely occupy a family sized vehicle.

The criteria here suggesting that there is a specific sociopathic personality requirement to being a billionaire as each category can be argued as harmful to societies.

Re: Fedware: Government apps that spy harder than the apps they ban

#72

Post by kmeisthax »

shevy-java wrote: post #24

There is currently an attempt going on by several governments to crack down harder against the people. While before it was "only", say, California and their age-sniffing laws infiltrating and tainting Linux - thus declaring war against the people, as revealed by Meta acting as primary lobbyist here - today I read that now that age-sniffing was also approved in some european countries (in one EU country the parents ar…

The recent spate of state-level age verification laws, while stupid, are primarily designed to insulate Facebook from lawsuits and not actually crack down on people. You can comply with them by just having a date field and an API to get bucketed age ranges out of them. The reason why they seem like a concerted crackdown is that Facebook can pay people to go to literally every legislature and bug them up and down[0] until they pass a law to make OS vendors provide age buckets.

The real shit is happening parallel to the actual legislation. Companies that need to comply with, say, the extremely onerous UK Online Services Act, are forcing everyone to use data-heavy verification paths like facial recognition age estimation or ID scanning. Newgrounds just used your account age or a credit card.

A core property of fascism is that, unlike other forms of tyranny, it is specifically a public-private joint venture. The government uses corporations to bypass its own constitutional restrictions, and those corporations then agree to follow rules that don't actually exist, specifically so that those corporations can shut down all their competition and form para-governments that supercede the democratically responsive bits. This has actually been going on for a while, but it's only now that the people are actually noticing it.

[0] Inspired by Louis Rossmann's efforts to get R2R bills passed, I've started doing amateur lobbying for the Rio Grande Plan. It's surprisingly easy, but you will almost certainly have to take off from work or sacrifice many a lunch hour to be able to actually get to talk to people.

Re: Fedware: Government apps that spy harder than the apps they ban

#73

Post by rhet0rica »

malfist wrote: post #6
john_strinlai wrote: post #5

> This thing also has a "Text the President" button that auto-fills your message with "Greatest President Ever!" and then collects your name and phone number. when is the onion going to go bankrupt? it has to be soon, i imagine. no way it can compete with reality at this point. (the rest of the article is a bit too depressing for me to comment on at the moment, other than saying "wow, gross")

It's ming boggling just how....cringe... these billionaires that want to run the world are. Makes you wonder if the personas that seek billions are correlated strongly with mental illnesses.

Trump specifically seems to hew awfully close to the symptoms of a long-term cocaine user. The hard drift into self-congratulatory vanity parallels that of Charlie Sheen during a certain infamous interview, for example, and at least two people (Howard Dean and Carrie Fisher) identified him as having compulsive sniffing reminiscent of a cocaine habit during debates prior to his first election.

Remember that Trump is not a first-generation member of the upper class; as a nepo baby, he was born out of touch and has spent his whole life falling deeper into bizarre social bubbles and media silos that were tailored by his ancestors and peers to reassure them that they're doing the right thing. In theory plutarchs should be receiving world-class education from private tutors, but being arch-Conservatives by definition, these teachers are invariably out of date on mental health, and would be forbidden from teaching it even if they had modern material.

Because of this isolation the ultra-wealthy often have certain very uneducated traits around self-esteem—which can paradoxically seem like the result of poverty. They do not have access to DARE or Sesame Street to give them the confidence not to take drugs when pressured, they've never seen Mister Rogers, their biological parents were always off running a business empire, and they have no surrogate figures because their nannies probably get fired at the drop of a hat, even for defending the child's interests.

Ironically, American republicanism makes this worse; in a planned aristocracy, parents internalize the belief that their children deserve "the best" because they are meant to be "the best", but without that noble lie, there is no pressure to create a positive environment for the next generation of tyrant. To make matters worse, these families never start off with healthy values to begin with—which produces a founder effect of regressive masculinity that magnifies everything else I've just mentioned.

Re: Fedware: Government apps that spy harder than the apps they ban

#74

Post by phatskat »

psadauskas wrote: post #32
malfist wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's ming boggling just how....cringe... these billionaires that want to run the world are. Makes you wonder if the personas that seek billions are correlated strongly with mental illnesses.

Right? If I had enough money that I could make a serious dent in local or even global poverty without noticing the change in my lifestyle, and I just... chose not to, I have no idea how I could sleep at night.

Trump has largely not had that kind of money. He’s had a _lot_ of money, many many times more than most, but by all accounts except his own, those numbers are much lower than he likes to brag about. Well, they were - there’s been a troubling amount of money going out of the federal government that isn’t well-accounted for under his reign.

He had the kind of money that can hire expensive projects on trust that payment in full will be rendered, but only kept his money by often not paying out.

As with all things Trump, even up to the new ballroom not having a front door despite the massive staircase, his wealth is more in appearance, and less in actual assets…or was. Of course, someday maybe we will know the true extent or shortfall of his bank accounts

Re: Fedware: Government apps that spy harder than the apps they ban

#75

Post by computomatic »

forgotaccount3 wrote: post #48
zdragnar wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And from a product standpoint, there's really only one reason to ship a native app I have worked on several applications where the product managers wanted to make our web app something that could be installed through the app store, because that's how users expect to get apps. I know people who don't even type search queries or URLs into a browser, they just tell the phone what they want to find and open whatever sh…

> I know people who don't even type search queries or URLs into a browser, they just tell the phone what they want to find and open whatever shows up in a search result. I don't know exactly what you are talking about here, but if I wanted to find a restaurant that is local I definitely just type 'Miguels' into the browser and then it searches google for 'Miguels' automatically and it know's my location so the first…

>I definitely just type 'Miguels' into the browser

So you open safari first. I think that’s a step further than what’s being described.

Many people it’s just “hey siri, book a table at Miguel’s.” And then click whatever app, web result, or native OS feature pops up.

It’s a chaotic crapshoot that I have never been able to stomach personally. For others, that’s just called using their phone.

Re: Fedware: Government apps that spy harder than the apps they ban

#78

Post by zdragnar »

computomatic wrote: post #75
forgotaccount3 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I know people who don't even type search queries or URLs into a browser, they just tell the phone what they want to find and open whatever shows up in a search result. I don't know exactly what you are talking about here, but if I wanted to find a restaurant that is local I definitely just type 'Miguels' into the browser and then it searches google for 'Miguels' automatically and it know's my location so the first…

>I definitely just type 'Miguels' into the browser So you open safari first. I think that’s a step further than what’s being described. Many people it’s just “hey siri, book a table at Miguel’s.” And then click whatever app, web result, or native OS feature pops up. It’s a chaotic crapshoot that I have never been able to stomach personally. For others, that’s just called using their phone.

This is pretty much what I meant. Even if the browser is what comes up, the fact is the user isn't interacting with the browser as a browser. They're interacting with their phone through an app (voice => search). They don't understand website URLs, or what search engines are doing. That makes it harder for them to return (engagement metrics!) than tapping the icon on their phone that opens up directly to the app.

It's also why so many websites try to offer push notifications or, back when it seemed like Apple wouldn't cripple it, the "add to home screen" or whatever CTA was that would set the website as an icon. Anything that gives the user a fast path back to engaging without having to deal with interacting with the browser itself is what PMs and marketing want.

Re: Fedware: Government apps that spy harder than the apps they ban

#79

Post by literalAardvark »

malfist wrote: post #6
john_strinlai wrote: post #5

> This thing also has a "Text the President" button that auto-fills your message with "Greatest President Ever!" and then collects your name and phone number. when is the onion going to go bankrupt? it has to be soon, i imagine. no way it can compete with reality at this point. (the rest of the article is a bit too depressing for me to comment on at the moment, other than saying "wow, gross")

It's ming boggling just how....cringe... these billionaires that want to run the world are. Makes you wonder if the personas that seek billions are correlated strongly with mental illnesses.

I think they are, and strongly.

The drive to achieve that level of success often comes from weaponized poor self esteem.

Well adjusted individuals just chill out after a few million and work on whatever is fun/important for them.

Only rarely does this also happen to be something that can take you from 10M to 1B. (and if it can it would take a lot of work you can't be bothered to do unless it's some core value like helping the poor beat malaria)

Re: Fedware: Government apps that spy harder than the apps they ban

#80

Post by malfist »

psadauskas wrote: post #32
malfist wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's ming boggling just how....cringe... these billionaires that want to run the world are. Makes you wonder if the personas that seek billions are correlated strongly with mental illnesses.

Right? If I had enough money that I could make a serious dent in local or even global poverty without noticing the change in my lifestyle, and I just... chose not to, I have no idea how I could sleep at night.

Elon tweeted that he'd fund ending world hunger if someone presented him with an actual plan to do that. UNESCO did. Elon did not act.
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