As has been widely reported, Truth Social has been struggling on every vector. Their subscriber numbers are a mere shadow of predictions. Though based on the Open Source Mastodon platform, they're having massive technical issues. They reportedly owe their hosting provider over $1 million. And, as of this writing, they still haven't closed the SPAC merger.

So Nunes -- who's about as effective a CEO as he was a congressman -- has himself a problem. He also knows that, if Twitter lets The Former Guy back on to its network, Truth Social loses its only draw. So he quietly started a dialog with counterparts at Twitter to see if they could work out a deal whereby, in exchange for a fee, Twitter would keep the ocher abomination off of Twitter. He rationalized it as a marketing expense -- it would allow Benedict Donald to continue slagging on Twitter, which can be used to draw in new subscribers. Unfortunately, Twitter wanted far more than Truth Social was willing to pay.

This news item could just be a negotiating tactic to bring Nunes back to the table, but it's looking like the deal won't happen. Can't recall where I read all this, though...

...Or, just possibly, I made the whole thing up.

I've been seeing this bullshit meme going around lately. The vaguely novel twist is that they're deliberately not saying what they're really whining about:

Meanwhile, in this country at least, you pay imaginary income tax on a supposed rent you would make if you did not live in your own property...

It's called, "Property Tax." It's normal. It's to defray the costs to the community of you and your plot existing -- infrastructure costs of water, sewage, power, gas, telecom, roads, not to mention fire/police, schools, and other municipal services.

Property taxes also function as market back-pressure to slow growth of real estate values. Just look at the disaster wrought by California's Proposition 13, which capped property assessment increases to just 2% per year. As a consequence, that back-pressure effectively vanished. So not only were school budgets gutted and have never recovered, housing prices everywhere are beyond surreal. A one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco will cost you $3300/month -- if you can find it. Oh, and commercial property? Yeah, the Smart Money(TM) tranferred those properties to holding companies. When you want to sell the property, you sell the holding company instead; the property, in the eyes of tax law, never changes hands, keeps its 2% lookback to 1978, and the community that property squats on continues to be starved of tax revenue.

So quitcher bitchin'.

Adam returns to the theme of connecting people through transforming their physical spaces and building communities where people spend the most time: their homes,"

What Adam is returning to is fleecing investors with a hare-brained scam. What, was walking away from your fraud with a billion dollars not enough? This will be the 2008 mortgage crisis, except it will be your apartment that gets fscked.

This jackass is pretty much single-handedly responsible for ARM nearly being devoured by NVIDIA. ARM Holdings used to be owned by SoftBank, who bought in to Neumann's WeWork scam to the tune of roughly $17 billion. When WeWork cratered, SoftBank needed cash to cover the losses, and immediately started shopping around ARM Holdings.

With that kind of track record, what kind of imbecile would take this guy's phone call, much less drop another billion dollars on him?

Andreessen wrote. "Residential real estate -- the world's largest asset class -- is ready for exactly this change."

NO, IT ISN'T!! The housing market worldwide, and in the US in particular, are already a shambles thanks to rampant speculation, with properties being snapped up by hedge funds and being turned into "investments" which will be required to yield 8% growth year over year. And now this scam artist proposes to inject more speculation into the mix.

If this bell-end gets his way, living out of your car will become the new normal -- if you can afford even that much.

There's also the issue of what happens when the user uploads their own Ring footage to YouTube or The Tweety. Does it get ContentID'd and taken down because AMZN already swiped it and used it on their show? Does the ContentID takedown happen immediately, or months later when AMZN finally gets around to broadcasting it?

This idea is unbelievably poorly thought out. (Also: I'm disappointed Wanda Sykes would sign on to such a thing.)

...Windows phone :)

There are some jokes even the most willing shill can't tell with a straight face. :-) (See also: Zune.)

...You're only 35-ish years late figuring this out.

The mainstream press' selective blindless to anything other than x86 PCs is a phenomenon that is very familiar to enthusiasts of the Mac, Amiga, Atari-ST, Acorn Archimedes, the NeXT box, Sun workstations, DEC Alpha stations, the BeBox, and many others. And it is every bit a disservice to the public today as it was back then.

But it's nothing new.

Android Developers (@AndroidDev) on Twitter said it "heard your feedback that you find the app permissions section in Google Play useful [ ... ]

I'd like to know what this fabled feedback mechanism is, because I couldn't find one when I went looking to instruct them to reinstate the permissions list. (I wrote about this over a month ago.)

The company is still a big proponent of Playâ(TM)s new approach, but it understands why people might prefer the previous, more factual model to seeing the full list of permissions needed to use an app before downloading it.

That's because the permissions list is enforced by the OS -- you can't access, say, the microphone unless you expressly declare that you want access to the microphone.

The "Data Safety" block, however, is just a blob of assertions by the developer that can't be checked or enforced by the OS, and is therefore utterly meaningless and, as often as not, a filthy stinking lie.

One fun activity is to check out the "Data Safety" declarations for obviously bullshit apps, and compare that against the app's permissions list. As just one example, check out this flashlight app on Google Play (don't actually install it; it's an ad delivery trojan). The "Data Safety" declaration claims that it collects no data (but also claims it doesn't encrypt data in transit). However, if you actually look at the app's permissions list, it wants access to your camera and microphone -- resources a flashlight app has no business accessing (not to mention the Aurora Store app detects six trackers in it).

So, yeah. The "Data Safefy" declaration is utterly meaningless bullshit, and I'm somewhat surprised that Google backtracked on the issue.

The solution is proper permission system for each individual capability.

Well, ya say that -- and it would indeed be a big help -- but all you have to do is look at the Android ecosystem to realize that model has flaws, particularly in an environment where users either don't understand what the permissions mean, or don't bother to review them.

And so, when confronted with unknown or known-dangerous software, the responsible approach is to Fail Safe -- deny access/execution until the user has had a chance to review the operation. If Android had done this ("The application 'Super-Plus-Bright Flashlight FREE!' wants to access your microphone. [Permit] [[Deny]]"), then we might have a lot fewer pwned phones out there.

Maybe someone put a "swirly bokeh" lens on the telescope... :-)

First off, if you have anything mission-critical that's written in VBA, you did a dumb. You BASICally baked technical debt into your "solution" from the outset, and you've been getting off on the cheap all these decades. Well, that debt has come due.

Second: The idea that a security hole the size of Betelgeuse needs to remain open so that the organization can avoid the cost of re-writing its code to no longer need that hole... Well, let's just say regulators and shareholders won't be impressed when you float that excuse as to why you got pwned. That's like saying you have to keep an open telnet server running because some C-suite chowderhead can't be bothered to learn ssh.

All that said: If Micros~1 were smart -- I mean, genuinely smart, not the fake "smart" they've been making themselves out to be for the last 40 years -- they would have long ago worked out a way for Word/Office macros to run in a sandbox with fine-grained access privileges (similar to what Android does), and cobbled together a digital signing method organizations could use to authenticate embedded macros as being internal to the company and authorized as safe to run on client machines. If the macro isn't signed, or tries to do something the privilege mask hasn't allowed, then the macro isn't run.

But no. Even after 30 years of this nonsense, MS never did that.

And now we're supposed to believe that the "cost" of blocking all macros by default -- something that should have done from the outset -- is too high?

That kind of attitude is why we can't have nice things.

We have a winner.

Word macro viruses starting becoming a significant problem around 1993. Most of them just copied themselves into all the documents you opened (overwriting any other macros that might already be there). Recall that, in 1993, networking of PCs was relatively unusual, so the major path of propagation for Word viruses was the exchange of floppy disks. And even with that slow, cumbersome transmission method, Word viruses became a major problem.

The Word macro virus issue basically served as one of the earliest existence proofs that embedding a Turing-complete scripting language into what is putatively a document -- and running those scripts by default -- was a fscking stupid idea. And yet, raging idiots keep doing it.

Over the last year and a half, I've been moving from vanilla Vim to Neovim. Neovim's initial goals of shedding extremely obsolete legacy support, improving performance, adding native Lua support, and decoupling the UI from the editor backend were what first piqued my interest.

Then I discovered LSP. At the time, the Neovim ecosystem had considerably more mature support than vanilla Vim for talking to language servers which basically beat the stuffing out of ctags and cscope, whose limits I had reached long ago. Since the release of Neovim 5.x, LSP support is now integrated.

And then I discovered CoC (Conqueror of Completion), which basically trivializes plugin installation and configuration.

My only remaining complaint for Neovim is that the various GUI clients still need work, each of which having some weird quirk (neovim-qt doesn't really like fonts with ligatures (though you can force it); neovide ignores ginit.vim; goneovim makes gratuitous UI changes; and all of them seem to handle font rendering a little differently).

Neovim 0.7.2 dropped just over a week ago (as of this writing). If you're a Vim user, it definitely merits your attention.

Yes, but it's not their computer.

Yes, it is.

If you installed Windows 11, and let them take control of your TPM2 chip, then Microsoft now gets to decide what you may and may not install and run, and from there it's barely a hop for them to decide under what conditions you may run software.

You have literally handed functional ownership of your PC to Microsoft -- the organization least qualified to be given that privilege.

I'm not sure why Microsoft should have control over someone else's computer, when doing so without authorization is a federal felony.

Oh, I'm sure you "agreed" to that in the shrinkwrap EULA...

Hey, Canada! If you want more Canadian-produced content, you could try giving these guys a hefty grant. They have regularly scheduled livestreams all week long, and have been consistently producing quality material on a shoestring for 15+ years, not to mention their annual charity drive, Desert Bus for Hope, which last year cleared over $1 million in donations.

Imagine what they could do if they had a budget...

...today there's ISP costs, bandwidth limits, etc. For the advertiser, it didn't cost them that much extra, because the advertisements were broadcast, and not unicast to every person on the planet whether they watch or not. [ ... ]

So it sounds like you're advocating for greater adoption of IP multicast...