The Doctor

Not in California. Been trying since I moved out here, and so far both landlords (the house we rent got sold to another investor when our original landlord retired) categorically refused the solar power upgrade. Fought that battle for two years with the first landlord, about a year with the second one. Both times it came down to “shut up or move out.”

I don’t think JWICS is DoD only. In theory, any TLA or FLA that handles TS material, has a SCIF and a local JWICS LAN can’t be hooked into the rest of the JWICS network.

I was writing code for Google Glass that implemented facial recognition. A friend of mine suffered a TBI in an automobile wreck and developed partial facial prosopagnosia as a result. I was basically writing software that would recognize faces within 15 feet of the wearer and compare it to images of their contacts in their Google account, and would throw up an AR subtitle identifying the person on a match. Not too long after I filed the developer applications and outlined my project, the Glass project flatlined.

A thousand dollar filter mask. Not difficult to see who the intended market segment is.

They’ve already fucked the RSS feeds.

Yep. And, as it turned out, lots of folks* thought that was a funny thing and loved it. This is the guy who GG’d himself into the CEO position.

• Probably sock puppets, tbh.

He’s the CEO, though. Kinda hard not to because he sets policy.

I still don’t think I should have told them I was working on a software prosthetic for it.

It would be significantly cheaper than the cost of power in a lot of places. PG&E is fucking us over out here but because nobody around here owns their own house, we can’t go PV. I’ve been talking to my neighbors about it because they’re getting screwed too. Legally speaking, though, we’re tied up.

They can vote against the ammosexuals all they want. Many politicians get money from firearms companies, though, on both sides of the fence, and they all know which side their bread is buttered on.

Not owning where one lives makes it highly difficult to migrate to solar power because landlords often don’t let you set it up. Definitely the case out here in the Bay Area.

Not having them pretty much makes Debian a non-starter for many home users. It’s a thing that one really only runs into when they get serious about using Linux.

NSA? Yes. CIA? Probably not. They don’t have that kind of imagination. c.f., the internal parody of The Hunt for Red October they declassified about a decade ago.

As BBSes go (because that’s how the WELL started), 2700 active users is “holy shit” levels of success. That it’s still online nearly 40 years later is unheard of.

And/or, private equity is revving up the bulldozers to strip mine each and every last bit of value out of it before they let it collapse.

I got to try messing around with a Hololens a couple of years back. The hand tracking wasn’t perfect but it was pretty cool. It read my “typing in the air” gestures to set a WPA2 key very accurately (much to my surprise). The parameters of the demo I was playing around in (picking up and moving virtual packages around in a model city to control drones flying around that part of the convention center) was pretty cool.

Several such solutions already exist. Problem is, only folks like us mess around with it. Non-geeks, not so much.

Google happened to it. Right when some of us started doing practical things with it. Still haven’t forgiven them for that.

I think you’re missing a blocklist or two if you’re still getting YT ads. Hasn’t been a thing for us for at least four years now.

I have a couple of blocklists loaded into the family Pi-Hole:

• Steven Black’s master list
• Ad-Wars
• Ad Away
• hostsVN
• yoyo.org’s dynamic list

That seems to have knocked out maybe 94% of the ads we’d otherwise see. I can’t speak for the rest of the famiy, but I still use uBlock Origin for Firefox to handle Youtube ads.

My strategy for the medium to long term is this: Given that browser-based adblocking is more and more likely to be killed off, or at least badly nerfed, I’m pushing adblocking out to the Pi-Hole and will leave streaming service ad blocking in the browser for as long as possible. If and when that eventually goes away I already have a bot running and used somewhat heavily to download video streams to view with Kodi or VLC.