The National Rick Astley Hotline. A thread on how I won't give you up, but I *did* let you down.

https://twitter.com/pjf/status/949454560128524288

A lot of you had noticed that the National Rick Astley Hotline has been down, and I've been quiet on why that is.

There's three factors:

1) Like for so many people, 2020 and beyond has been exhausting on my mental health
2) It got *real* popular
3) Email and ADHD

Strap in!

I am certain that nothing could possibly go wrong by attracting flocks of screaming, pooping dinosaurs to the place where I also hang my clean laundry. So far my only visitor has been Li'l Chonk, who visits me every morning, but who is very excited there's actually food this time.

NSW police kettled a bunch of folks in Central Station, Sydney, and pepper-sprayed them in a confined space.

It's hard to imagine this happening if the police weren't there, and people could just go home.

Thread, with CW for police violence…

#blacklivesmatteraustralia #sydney Here's NSW police aggressively pushing folks back, and then forming a line so folks can't escape the station.

#blacklivesmatteraustralia #sydney

https://twitter.com/SeppuCrow621/status/1269208222608445445

CW: Loss, money

Isn't it weird funeral directors operate as for-profit businesses?

I know they only want to shoulder the burden of the grieving, but capitalism only works when participants are rational, informed, and hold equal power. I'd hate to misinterpret their motives. In other news, I'm visiting funeral directors today, who will find my business dealings dial turned up to eleven.

We'll see how things go. Last time I did this was for mum's funeral, and I remember walking out with dad and him asking how I got most of the quote to disappear.

I've got ADHD, which means I don't trust my brain to retain state. I've also got Bipolar II, which comes with depressive episodes.

These probably impact how I view and relate to possessions.

1/ For me, many possessions are a form of memory storage. They're a reminder of something that happened, and what it felt like at that time.

Not all have good memories associated with them, but saying goodbye to those possessions feels like saying goodbye to those memories. 2/

We live in a world that's enveloped by capitalism.

When we ask someone "what do you do?" it means "how do you sell your labour?", as if that's the most important thing.

We're relentlessly tracked and advertised to. We're told this is good, as we can have things for "free". So many times I've done things *for fun*, and been asked how that makes money, or been told it's so good I could sell it.

I hate this. I hate a society that forces people to always be thinking about how they can make a dollar.

I hate that we judge someone's worth by their job.

The app used to harvest facebook data for Cambridge Analytica also harvested it from the *friends* of users that authorised it.

I was talking about how dangerous this was back in 2010. It's super common, almost nobody turns off the controls which allow it. If you're a Facebook user, then going to "Settings -> Apps -> Apps Others Use" will let you disable what information your friends' applications can harvest about you.

Because of course one of the most important privacy settings is hidden under "apps" rather than "privacy".

Some of you might be hearing about #Spectre and #Meltdown today, which allow memory from other processes and the kernel itself to be read. They exploit CPU designs.

I'm still doing my reading, but a good place to start if you're technically inclined is spectreattack.com Spectre involves training the CPU to speculatively run invalid code in the victim's address space, and then using a side-channel (such as cache timings) to infer details about the victim's memory.

It affects at least AMD, Intel and ARM CPUs

The sample exploit reads 10KB/s.

Lots of people have been telling me it's great that Australia voted yes to marriage equality in the recent referendum.

I have to explain that it wasn't a referendum, is not legally binding, and was an expensive attempt to get a different result than what the public wants. 1/ Even if we ignore the fact that it's abhorrent to be asking the majority whether a minority should have basic human rights, the government has known for years that there's strong majority support for marriage equality.

Because sampling and statistics are a thing. 2/

1/This terrifies me. The researchers go on to make a 3D printed turtle that the machine classifies as a "rifle", regardless of viewing angle

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2/ Machine classification of images is a *huge* growth area, and is already seeing extensive use. You'll see even more with autonomous cars.