Sasha Akhavi @sakhavi@qoto.org

The terrible events of the last 48 hours have made it clear how important social media is during fast-moving historical events.

Sadly, the destruction of the teams Twitter put in place to fight organized manipulation makes it harder for individuals to speak to a global audience as their message gets buried by troll farms, state propaganda organs and grifters.

(This video is a celebration of a football championship in Algeria in 2020)

Nothing like getting your news from objective and authoritative sources on Twitter/X. Oh…

We already had something that turned text prompts into art, it was called paying an artist.

The "New Outlook" demands that when adding your Gmail account, you also give Microsoft a copy of all your email, contacts, and calendar data.

The "Learn More" link confirms:

"Syncing your account to the Microsoft Cloud means that a copy of your email, calendar, and contacts will be synchronized between your email provider and Microsoft data centers."

WOW.

Good time to switch to @thunderbird, folks!

#Privacy #Outlook #Email

mRNA derived vaccines are indeed great (I am a beneficiary), and the researchers who did the foundational work on mRNA richly deserve the honor.

A lot of people have already weighed in on the mistreatment/shutting of one of the winners, Katalin Kariko and the brokenness of academic research, bias against women, incentive structures, awards, grants etc.,

However, there is myopia/distortion/rank hypocrisy on other fronts that deserves ridicule as well.

This sentence in the citation, to put it mildly, is preposterous:

" ... contributed to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times."

In a world of roughly 8 billion people, roughly 13.5 billion doses of Covid19 vaccines have been administered so far. About 3 billion of those are mRNA vaccines (you can guess who got them). So, what do they mean when they say "human" health? Which humans are they talking about? Who do they think vaccinated the world?

This has to be either the greatest sleight of hand or complete ignorance/denial of how and what kind of Covid-19 vaccines were rolled out to save the world. It's as if the rest of the world doesn't exist or didn't as well develop vaccines quickly and save themselves.

What we witnessed the last three years was not "unprecedented ... development" using mRNA techniques to counter "one of the greatest threats to human health" as the citation points out, instead it was how the entire rich world failed so completely and spectacularly to see itself as part of a common humanity even after it had the means to do so.

#Vaccines #mRNA #NobelPrizeMedicine #Research #Covid19 #Inequality #Health

@Wolven I feel like that's not fair to clowns. They at least try to make children happy. Certainly no one running this particular circus is doing anything that beneficial.

Republicans should be forced to carry Kevin McCarthy to term, even if it endangers the life of the party.

ME: my mom said i can’t go trick or treating with you
DRACULA: that sucks
WOLFMAN: that bites
CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON: that stinks
DEVIL: that is so not cool
MUMMY: that’s tearable
ZOMBIE: what a rip off
GHOST: boo

Cards against DevOps

The $10,000 to $17,000 18-karat original Apple Watch is no longer supported by Apple and can no longer be repaired by them.

This was always one of the weird things about Apple’s original luxury push. At that price point, people are purchasing a family heirloom that they pass on to their kids not a device that will be obsolete next year.

The pivot to a FitBit killer was the perfect pivot for the ages. A from zero to hero move business wise.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/2/23900158/apple-watch-edition-gold-2015-obsolete-unsupported-beyonce

A new low, even for #Google. Giving Google permission to share information about you with third-party websites is being falsely advertised as an "ad privacy feature". This is privacy washing at its most extreme. But it gets even worse.

There is a dark pattern on the second screenshot. It isn't just informing you about the fake privacy features. Clicking on "Got it" actually turns on these features that allow Google to use your recent browsing history for ads on third-party websites: