• 6 Posts
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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: January 29th, 2026

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  • I spent a couple of years doing phone support (for a Windows program, in the internet-by-modem days), and we had a paper manual that we spent a lot of effort on. I’m not sure it helped too many people. We didn’t have a way of measuring, though. We had no idea how many people were blundering through things on their own, how many people set things up on their own with the manual’s help, or how many people were chucking the whole product in a closet and forgetting about it.

    Sure, some callers definitely felt it was a waste of time to learn how to work things; they just wanted their things to work. They wanted their things to serve them, instead of the other way around, and I can’t even argue with that philosophy.

    But most callers just didn’t have the technical experience to make sense of any documentation we could write. Some didn’t know what the desktop computer they used every day even looked like, didn’t know which of the metal-and-plastic boxes around their desk was “the computer.” They didn’t know the difference between a floppy drive and a hard drive, and they’d argue with us about it. “I don’t have a floppy drive, my drive takes those hard disks.” No manual or knowledge base article was going to help these folks, no matter how much effort we made.







  • She went to the place she wanted to go, with her guests and her security detail, and she got the food she wanted to eat. She had the chance to eat it.

    Somehow even this write-up. which is not particularly sympathetic to her, is framing this as a kind of affront, a consequence, a humiliation. But she pretty much got what she came for, didn’t she? She’s facing no practical consequences at all. She lost a little face, maybe. This was a public declaration that people don’t like her, don’t like what priorities she’s chosen to serve.

    Maybe we wouldn’t be in this pickle we’re in, if this kind of getting-through-to-the-isolated-elites happened more often. If we didn’t have isolated elites in the first place.






  • “So you’re saying that the agency will buy Americans’ location data,” Wyden said. “…doing that without a warrant is an outrageous end run around the fourth amendment. It’s particularly dangerous given the use of artificial intelligence to comb through massive amounts of private information.

    “This is exhibit A for why Congress needs to pass our bipartisan, bicameral bill, the Government Surveillance Reform act,” Wyden said, referring to legislation he is working to pass to rein in surveillance.

    While law enforcement must get a judge-authorized search warrant to obtain location data directly from telecom companies, government agencies have instead been able to buy such information from private data brokers.

    I think Wyden is right, it does sound like an end run around the fourth amendment.

    If the FBI (and probably other TLAs, domestic and foreign) are willing to do this now, why would a statute addressing the practice stop them?