deathmtn

10-4-4-4-4-4. Not too big of a struggle. I may be actually stronger than I was a month ago. Maybe it's all this yogurt I'm eating!

Oh, yeah, sets today were 10-4-4-4-4-4, my old standard from last summer. That 50% humidity seems to make for perfect grip conditions.

The right wing's free speech seems to include weapons. Whereas:

Samee Siddiqui, a global history graduate student, called these situations “ridiculous” in comparison to UNC Police’s treatment of anti-Silent Sam students and activists.

He referenced a rally last September where police confiscated a bin full of donated canned goods from activists due to the possibility the cans would be used to harm others.

“There’s no other purpose of a gun aside from threatening or using violence,” Siddiqui said. “That’s the whole point of a gun. So how is it that a weapon like a gun doesn’t get treated in the same way that a canned good would?”

There was a lot of hot dog talk today at work, and it reminded me: Christopher Walken's column about hot dogs is still as good today as it was 20 years ago.

The Hate-Industrial Complex via
John Naughton. I'll excerpt the same part he did:

Sensible people these days abjure Fox News. But the truth is that YouTube and Facebook and Twitter are much, much worse. As far as radicalizing people goes, Fox News basically tells your racist grandpa he’s right. It’s YouTube and Facebook (and Twitter and Reddit and so on) which turn lonely teenage losers into vengeful supremacist shooters. Which show no interest whatsoever in being decent members of a civilized society. So what reason do we have to let them go on being part of one?

I've been doing well at things like programming lately, but bad at basic life things, like making your FSA claims on time. I feel the forgetter's remorse.

Oh, also from that article:

Paul Covington, a senior Google engineer who coauthored the 2016 recommendation engine research, presented the findings at a conference the following March. He was asked how the engineers decide what outcome to aim for with their algorithms. “It’s kind of a product decision,” Covington said at the conference, referring to a separate YouTube division. “Product tells us that we want to increase this metric, and then we go and increase it. So it’s not really left up to us.” Covington did not respond to an email requesting comment.

Engineers like this should be ashamed of themselves. You have a responsibility as a human being to not harm people. Spending most of your time building software does not absolve you from this.

2-4-6-8-5-5 today.

YouTube Executives Ignored Warnings, Letting Toxic Videos Run Rampant

YouTube’s inertia was illuminated again after a deadly measles outbreak drew public attention to vaccinations conspiracies on social media several weeks ago. New data from Moonshot CVE, a London-based firm that studies extremism, found that fewer than twenty YouTube channels that have spread these lies reached over 170 million viewers, many who where then recommended other videos laden with conspiracy theories.

…

Yonatan Zunger, a privacy engineer at Google, recalled a suggestion he made to YouTube staff before he left the company in 2016. He proposed a third tier: Videos that were allowed to stay on YouTube, but, because they were “close to the line” of the takedown policy, would be removed from recommendations. “Bad actors quickly get very good at understanding where the bright lines are and skating as close to those lines as possible,” Zunger said.

His proposal, which went to the head of YouTube policy, was turned down.

Taking harmful content out of recommendations should be a no-brainer for a company like this. It is where I work. Disgusting.

Unsurprisingly, including a Twitter widget on your site lets Twitter phone home about visitors to a site (that they thought had nothing to do with Twitter).

Remy ends up constructing his own non-spying Twitter widget. I'd actually recommend not promoting organizations that do this at all.

The whole site has well-stated ideas, but I think the finite principle is my favorite one.

I'm gradually breaking the habit of constantly checking things. I'm at the point at which I do not look at my phone in my bed when I'm going to sleep. I'm also coincidentally able to sleep better more coincidentally.

A big help is that when I do check my phone, there's not that much there. If it's one of those days when I'm checking each hour, there's like one email and five RSS posts for each check. I read those, then I can stop.

Twitter, et al, basically make sure that you never stop, that there is always more shit for the lizard brain part of your brain to seek.

This is a good April Fool's joke, but I think these are genuinely good works of art. Art is weird like that. I feel those are as worthy of being worth a million dollars as real works that are worth a million dollars, and not necessarily because the million-dollar works are bad.

This project is intended to protest against the police in Japan

In Japan, a schoolgirl was caught by the police for putting a link to a website with an endless loop of alert in JavaScript like this:

while (1) {
alert("!");
}

So this is regarded as a "crime" in Japan. So let's be criminals and get arrested!

Enjoy criminal life!

Here's my crime. Pretty fucked up that that'll get you arrested but they won't say shit to Google for tracking you across the web without your consent. Though, in Firefox, I'm allowed to just say "prevent this page from creating additional dialogs". Maybe the police just need better browsers?

I've been putting off setting up a camera my dad asked me to get for an entire month.

Yeah, so, I feel hypocritical about getting frustrated about my son not responding to me today.