Tag: AuliaSays

San Francisco’s robot dogs won’t be equipped with guns after all. They may have explosives instead

The other day we saw news reports of San Francisco police being given authorization to deploy killer robot dogs. The city’s board of supervisors voted 8-3 in favor of the motion despite heated debates about safety and potential abuse.

The police denied claims that they will arm their robot dogs with guns but according to AP, they could be armed with explosives. How is that any better? 

the department could deploy robots equipped with explosive charges “to contact, incapacitate, or disorient violent, armed, or dangerous suspect” when lives are at stake, SFPD spokesperson Allison Maxie said in a statement.

At least they said the use will be limited to extreme situations and require authorization from high ranking officers.  We know how restraint police officers of all ranks can be in the United States, don’t we?

Supervisors amended the proposal Tuesday to specify that officers could use robots only after using alternative force or de-escalation tactics, or concluding they would not be able to subdue the suspect through those alternative means. Only a limited number of high-ranking officers could authorize use of robots as a deadly force option.

San Francisco’s authorities can’t seem to restrain themselves from being swept  along by the American trend of increased militarization of their law enforcement forces. From military grade weapons, armor, vehicles, and now exploding robot dogs.

Meanwhile across the bay in Oakland, the city’s police department backed down from a similar proposal after a massive public backlash.

That Black Mirror episode, Metalhead, from season 4, immediately comes to mind.

Of course he is guilty of the very thing he accused someone of

He lied about the death of his son for clout and got called out by his ex on his own social network. Does that mean he has no mercy for himself?

Bob Iger returns as Disney CEO, replacing Bob Chapek who took over when Iger resigned in February 2020

Chapek has been quite the controversial figure as Disney CEO, not wanting to push back against Florida Governor Ron DeSantis which threatened the company’s presence and the Disney World park in Orlando and made it untenable for non binary-confirming employees. After a bad quarter and a lousy outlook for 2023, the Disney board fired Chapek and requested Iger to return.

I may have more thoughts on this later

DISNEY SHAKEUP: Bob Iger Back as CEO, Bob Chapek Out; Board Cites ‘Complex Industry Transformation’ for Shocking C-Suite Shuffle

Dealing with Growth on Mastodon

Leaving this thread here for future reference on Mastodon’s growth and how to deal with it. People are advised to join or move to smaller servers to help manage the load and donate to their admins.

From the second post in the thread:

Start your own instance. We have 8,000 servers hosting over 7 million users on the #Fediverse. Growing by half a million a week NOW, with just today’s level of crazy.

Assume this will 4X or more after sh*t really starts going downhill at Twitter.

Got a spare computer, or a @Raspberry_Pi maybe? Want to use a good managed host to set one up? Put it to use.

Tim Chambers (@tchambers@indieweb.social)

The rejection of breaking news and other journalistic content on Mastodon

Twitter had been the place to go for breaking news and live reports and reactions of events, incidents, accidents, and pretty much anything else of interest. It’s heaven for news junkies, reporters, and anyone interested with finding out what’s happening. Mastodon hasn’t been it, isn’t it, and most people who have been here for a while don’t want it to be it.

On the other hand, it’s a federated network in which anything and everything can be accommodated. Some server admins and members will block other servers that hosts content they find objectionable simply out of preference, others would love to have such content hosted or shared to theirs.

Mastodon may have been around for six years but it hasn’t gone anywhere near the maturity phase involving massive influx of people with varying expectations like what’s happening now, so a lot of the existing members are trying to protect and defend the Mastodon they know.

Twitter’s own transformation may or may not end up depriving the public of that real time news update so it’s only natural it’s what people are looking for when they seek a replacement. The federated nature of Mastodon shouldn’t be a hindrance to that. 

Server admins who share the same views could even advertise that as their primary selling point. Right now it’s already happening with journa.host and newsie.social but some server admins are blocking journa.host for insisting on taking the standard approach they’re used to on Twitter. So anyone who want to connect to anyone on that server must make sure they’re not on a server that blocks it.

This can make things seem more complicated than they ought to be, but also means it can still work for those who want it and not for those who don’t, at the same time.

Twitter is going really great

As I keep saying, the company is not compatible at all with how Elon Musk thinks how a company should be run. In fact, it’s likely the complete opposite is true, which is why there’s far fewer than 50% of the company’s staff remains. 

Originally Twitter wanted to shave 25% of their headcount even without Elon, because they were painfully aware the company was bloated. Elon boasted about wanting to cut 75% of the staff, but when he came in, he ended up Thanosing the company instead.

What he probably wasn’t counting on (or maybe he did to an extent) were the culture clash and staff solidarity so now Twitter ends up with fewer than 3000 employees and that number is likely going to go down even further by the day. Apparently 75% of the remaining staff opt out of the “extremely hardcore” conditions.

From the looks of it, Twitter could break next week with nobody available to fix things. People are already seeing glitches and things not working on the site.

He boasted about cutting 80% of the micro services that he deemed inessential to running Twitter which ended up disabling two factor authentication via SMS and now it looks like his 75% layoff plan is working, albeit perhaps slightly differently than he intended.

Musk is fucking around and finding out.

I was going to post the article about the latest round of resignations but this Techmeme page is more relevant with all the live tweets included 

Hundreds of Twitter employees post farewell messages and salute emojis in Slack and tweets, announcing their resignations after Elon Musk’s

Verifying Identity on Mastodon

Here’s a thread on Mastodon about the debate over the use of third party verification services.

The fediverse is what they call the federated universe, the part of the Internet that’s run by multiple individuals across multiple independent servers but interconnected as a larger network. A network whose existence is not dependent on a single corporation.

Anyway, here it is. Tap on “show more” to read the posts.

Aulia Masna :verified: (@aulia@octodon.social)

Aulia Masna :verified: (@aulia@octodon.social)

Kicking off blogging again

Sup? Now that I’ve decided to step away from posting on Twitter, I’m exploring different outlets and platforms to publish my thoughts. 

These days video seems to be the prevailing media that people chose to express their thoughts, opinions, and creativity, but I’m first and foremost a writer, so it makes more sense to me to publish primarily on a text-based platform. 

I’m a person with many interests, from politics to tech to entertainment and even sports, maybe to a lesser extent but still within my scope.

Having looked at my options, I’m thinking this would be a hub for all my writing and creative outlets. Anything of note of my own judgment that I publish anywhere on the web would be linked here. Not sure if I’ll link to absolutely everything, probably not, I mean I feel like it’s gonna be more like a blog repository after all.

It’s an experiment, so we’ll see where this is going.