Robert Winter 
@robert@social.winter.ink
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Philosopher and historian by training, Product Manager by pay cheque. Doctoral candidate at Macquarie Business School researching Edmund Burke. Boosts/follows do not imply endorsement.
Joined Mar 2021
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Fabulous observation by the dean of counterculture comedians.
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'Road sign bungle sees Yorkshire sign erected in Lincolnshire'
EU countries pushing to label nuclear power as green energy.
Fought #OnThisDay 1805 the battle of Trafalgar.
It also happened to be Samuel Taylor Coleridge's #birthday (born #OTD 1772) #coincidence
‘Hidden’ population of pygmy blue whales found in Indian Ocean
“I find it amazing that we are still discovering populations of the largest animals that ever lived on Earth, and that we know so little of them.”
Robert Winter
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@kev I say us the FOSS crowd should actually *learn* from these guys. There are obvious benefits for a vast majority of users in having a tightly knit system like Mac's is. Yes, there's a lot of fun in your usual Linux distro... if you are into that sort of thing... But if you want usability and great UX, I'm sorry, Apple is the reference. Glad you love it!
But I guess the FOSS world is way too proud and full of themselves to understand this. #rant
Another apposite comment from the brilliant Peter Brookes. #voltaire
Robert Winter
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Entering the Matrix 👩💻
We are happy to announce an expansion of the Tor community's day-to-day conversations by bridging our IRC community the Matrix platform.
For regular Tor users, it means that you can chat with us using a friendly App like Element.
“If the ultimate beneficiary of that disenchantment with the world’s biggest social network turns out to be China, the blame will lie squarely with Mark Zuckerberg. And he can’t say I didn’t warn him.”
“Yet in one important respect I agree with Facebook’s defenders. The company’s critics have got no credible reform proposal. Breaking up FB won't solve the problems Haugen has exposed. But giving yet more power to federal regulators has rarely had the intended outcome. The irony of Haugen’s charge-sheet against Facebook is that one half alleges excessive power, while the other half alleges concealed decline. The problem is that the company eating Facebook's lunch is none other than TikTok.”
“No, Zuckerberg isn't Gutenberg 2.0. Johannes Gutenberg didn’t connect all the printing presses, harvest readers’ likes and dislikes, and then monetize them in a way that incentivized him to spread the theory that bubonic plague was airborne or that Europe was full of witches.”
“But the "whistleblower," Frances Haugen, is telling us nothing new. If you read @antoniogm’s seminal "Chaos Monkeys," you’ve known about the crazy realities of Facebook -- the power and the vainglory -- for five years. Either last week's FB outage illustrates the folly of centralizing a large part of the internet in a single company that has inadequate operating procedures, or it illustrates the folly of centralizing a large part of the internet in a single company that tells fibs.”
Fabulous analysis by Niall Ferguson:
“I tried to warn Mark Zuckerberg that he risked becoming part Rockefeller, part Hearst. But the rest of us don’t have a good solution for what his platform has become. For the past five years, raking Facebook’s muck has been a path to prominence for many an ambitious journalist, for the obvious reason that traditional media companies loathe Facebook for eating their lunches.”
Robert Winter
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Privacy or Accessibility… Most People Can’t Have Both
I spend a lot of time talking to people about two major issues in tech, accessibility and privacy. Over the years I find these conversations to be some of the saddest in all of tech as, for the most part, the most accessible solutions are not the most private solutions. This doesn't have to be.
How we got here?
For years the folks interested
https://chriswiegman.com/2021/10/privacy-or-accessibility-most-people-cant-have-both/
A beautiful short essay, “Effing the Ineffable,” by Sir Roger Scruton.
I learn today:
“The saying ‘To the bitter end’ means to see a difficult task through, however it comes from 17th C. Sailors. It was where the anchor rope (known as the cable) was connected to bollards or cleats on the deck, known as bitts. The bitter end was the end connected to the ship.”
The FB whistleblower told of "a corporate culture of growth-at-any-cost." EFF believe we need to "change that culture by restoring competition—and that means breaking up the company."
I'm not a huge fan of trying to legislate market forces as it usually has unintended consequences in which the cure is worse than the disease. But in the case of FB, I'm tempted to make an exception as it seems clear 'other' networks will never get traction because everyone is on FB...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/10/what-facebook-whistleblower-tells-us-about-big-tech
Admin
Philosopher and historian by training, Product Manager by pay cheque. Doctoral candidate at Macquarie Business School researching Edmund Burke. Boosts/follows do not imply endorsement.
Joined Mar 2021
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