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  • 🔗 Living Like It's 99: No Social Media, No Smartphone

    At the time of writing this article, I’ve been living without social media for 3 years and without a smartphone for 2 years. Everything started as an experiment motivated by my privacy concerns.
    Not such a bad idea...he says after having just purchase an iPhone 14 😬

  • 🔗 Free is a Lie (2014)

    Privacy is between me and myself. Privacy does not mean between me and Google. Privacy does not mean between me and Facebook...Violating privacy violates the United Nations of Human Rights.
    I don't have a specific quote, but I quite enjoyed this talk from Aral (of Small Tech). The premise of the talk is something that most people are familiar with, free (ala Google/Twitter/FB) silos aren't free, but you pay with your privacy. ( This blog respects your privacy and doesn't track you).

    But what really made me think was the chart quadrant chart comparing Open Systems and Closed Systems on Features and Experience. In the upper left Closed / Features you have the leader: Microsoft. Next to that is Closed / Experience, where Apple and Google lead.

    What's in the bottom half where open systems preside? Open source can compete with features, but they often can't compete on experience. Most people care about experience more than they care about features. An entire quadrant of the chart has no competition from open systems!

    And since there's no competition in from open systems on the experience front, the system is going to arch closed. In order to have an open future, open systems must compete not only on features, but also on experience as well. 

    Competing on experience is increasingly difficult as more systems have some kind of hosted server component. I think about this in regards to Tanzawa on a regular basis, but I haven't figured out a model that I think would work.

  • 🔗 STEALING UR FEELINGS

    Meet the new AI that knows you better than you know yourself
    Stealing ur feelings is a brilliant interactive video that shows the danger of facial recognition and how it's already being abused by advertisers. All the more reason to keep wearing a mask, even post-covid.

  • 🔗 Codeberg.org

    Codeberg is founded as a Non-Profit Organization, with the objective to give the Open-Source code that is running our world a safe and friendly home, and to ensure that free code remains free and secure forever.
    I haven't used Codeberg (a GitHub alternative), but their copy on front page strikes me.
    No tracking. Your data is not for sale.
All services run on servers under our control. No dependencies on external services. No third party cookies, no tracking.
Hosted in the EU, we welcome the world.
    Using external services for every last thing, you end up with your data being spread out amongst multiple (unknown to you) vendors, each with different security-implications / privacy policies / regulations all across the world. It makes your service more brittle (increased points of failure) and less secure (increased attack vectors). Seeing a service make this central to their product is refreshing.
    Focusing on privacy and hosting in non-US owned/operated datacenters in the EU will be a competitive advantage when going up against the US tech companies in the future, if it isn't already.

  • 🔗 Personal Data Warehouses: Reclaiming Your Data

    I gave a talk yesterday about personal data warehouses for GitHub’s OCTO Speaker Series, focusing on my Datasette and Dogsheep projects. The video of the talk is now available, and …
    So many good ideas in this talk.

    1. I love this idea of standardizing all of your data to sqlite databases so you can freely explore it. I also love this idea of shipping static datasets inside a sqlite db inside a Docker image so you can "scale to zero".
    One thing I've been wanting to do for a while is add some kind of public dashboard for my Airbot data. Using something like Datasette I could export subsets (or all of it) to sqlite and allow you to slice and dice the data at will.
    Also really like the idea of having automated cron/lambda jobs setup to pull your personal data off the web automatically. Right now I'm only importing my swarm checkins / interactions with my syndicated tweets. Having some automated cron jobs to just collect the data to sqlite would allow me to explore my data much easier.

    There seems to be recurring theme (maybe it's the holy grail) of nerds wanting to build their own search engines/portals for all of their data. In one sense it's a "solved" problem with Spotlight and other such tools. On the other hand Spotlight and these tools don't provide you context. 
    There was a tool that was under development in the early Mono days on (written by Nat?) that did this, at least partially. If you were chatting in Gaim it'd show you a window of your recent emails, their contact info, maybe their latest rss feeds. I've always thought a tool like this would be killer - but with so much data being up in servers and hidden behind apis and proprietary services these days it seems increasingly difficult.