• 4 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • Zuckerberg Did Nothing Wrong

    I’m concerned that the narrative that what Facebook was trying to achieve here was wrong or bad is itself user-hostile, and pushes in favor of the non-fiduciary model of software.

    Facebook paid people to let them have access to those people’s communications with Snap, Inc., via Snapchat’s app. This is so that Facebook could do their analytics magic and try and work out how often Snapchat users tend to do X, Y, or Z. Did they pay enough? Who knows. Would you take the deal? Maybe not. Was this a totally free choice without any influence from the creeping specter of capitalist immiseration? Of course not. But it’s not some unusually nefarious plot when a person decides to let a company watch them do stuff! Privacy isn’t about never being allowed to reveal what you are up to. Some people like to fill out those little surveys they get in the mail.

    Now, framing this as Facebook snooping on Snapchat’s data concedes that a person’s communications from their Snapchat app to Snapchat HQ are Snapchat’s data. Not that person’s data, to do with as they please. If the user interferes with the normal operation of one app at the suggestion of someone who runs a different app, this framing would see that as two apps having a fight, with user agency nowhere to be found. I think it is important to see this as a user making a choice about what their system is going to do. Snapchat on your phone is entirely your domain; none of it belongs to Snap, Inc. If you want to convince it to send all your Snapchat messages to the TV in Zuckerberg’s seventh bathroom in exchange for his toenail clippings, that’s your $DEITY-given right.

    User agency is under threat already, and we should not write it away just to try and make Facebook look bad.












  • I’m going to go with “be normal”.

    Linux is unusual in a way that Windows is not. In a lot of areas (games, interfacing with weird hardware), Linux uses up one of your three innovation tokens in a way that Windows doesn’t. You are likely to be the only person or one of a very few people trying to do what you are doing or encountering the problem you are having on Linux, whereas there is often a much larger community of like-minded people to work with who are using Windows.

    Sometimes the reverse is true: have fun being the only person trying to use a new CS algorithm released as a .c and a Makefile on Windows proper without WSL.

    But that’s kind of why we have Wine and WSL: it’s often easier to pretend to be normal than to convince people to accommodate you.