dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️

Progenitor of the Weird Knife Wednesday feature column. Is “column” the right word? Anyway, apparently I also coined the Very Specific Object nomenclature now sporadically used in the 3D printing community. Yeah, that was me. This must be how Cory Doctorow feels all the time these days.

  • 0 Posts
  • 55 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 20th, 2023

help-circle

  • Probably. I have no experience with the Google Play Store end of things, but we’ve gotten non-reviews written by crackpots removed from our Google Business profile by just pointing out to Google that they were either off topic or from someone who we could not identify in any of our records as being a person who actually did business with us.

    For example, there was one guy who went around copy-pasting the same one star rant to seemingly every retail business in the city whining about mask requirements during COVID, which didn’t have jack monkey squat do to with us and was in fact a state government mandate that we did not control. As a public business we have to comply with the law. Google took that one down when we reported it, although I still see examples of the same screed from the same guy attached to other businesses who apparently didn’t have the wherewithal to complain.

    I imagine “app that serves third party content the author doesn’t control and reviewer is complaining about the content not the app” is a situation that is very well understood at Google. Whether or not you can make them give a shit is a different question…


  • The company pays for it. Not my dime. The expense doesn’t seem onerous and is just to name one example probably a small fraction of what we spend on pens in a year.

    And we get everything of that ilk from one vendor with one bill. It’s all managed in one place. The renewals all happen at the same time. They like that.

    Edit: It’s hilarious y’all are acting like you’re salty with me like this is my decision. I do what my boss tells me to do. Certainly there are better options for a lot of our business practices but at the end of the day if my recommendations are shot down it’s not my call. I hold the passwords and the keys, I do not hold the purse strings.








  • Well, kids, I can’t believe the Department of Special Corrections actually let us out to attend this one.

    It’s got a mouse drift bug that seems like a side effect of the camera pan effect that’s happening in the main menu, and the secret area added in 1.2 is missing. One of the methods for accessing secret #1 is missing, too, probably because the column with the switch on it has been replaced with an art piece, and interacting with it shows you details about the art rather than triggering the door.

    All in all a solid 6/10. Still better than the 32X version of Doom.



  • And, Pornhub can probably play the waiting game in those states as well. Enough people in those places will probably get pissed off enough eventually to pressure their legislators into walking those laws back. It might just take a year or two. I imagine everyone involved already knows, but the idiots who wrote the laws need to wait for the headlines to cool off a bit before they can backpedal, in order to save face.

    I imagine Facebook or someone of similar size could do the same in Aus. All they have to do is refuse to serve anything to Aussie IP addresses except a message that says, “Sorry, we can’t serve your country anymore because of a law passed by [legislator.] Remember, this is all his fault.”

    Politicians infamously do not give a flying fuck about the opinions of minors, but if they piss everyone else off too the people responsible will either be out on their ears next election or buried under an avalanche of nasty letters from their 40-and-up constituency.



  • Well, I know how that would go if I were a globe-spanning social media giant. Given that the entirety of the Australian market is roughly the size of New York state (~26 vs ~20 million people), I would say, “Nah mate, we just won’t do business in Oz anymore. Bye.”

    Vanishingly few business make a “New York only” version of their product because it’s simply not worth it. Australia already suffers under this problem for a great deal of physical products. Ask any computer nerd about that, when trying to source parts and often video game titles as well. Shipping things to the Antipodes and/or dealing with Antipodean regulations is expensive, for an objectively low number of potential sales.

    It would not surprise me to learn if it follows that Australia generates roughly 1.7% of the revenue for Facebook or whoever as, say, India. So in other words, bupkis.


  • It’s still not entirely clear how the Australian government thinks they’re actually going to enforce this.

    Plenty of web services already require you to state your age to use them and I believe a large majority of users just coincidentally happen to be born on January 1st, 1900 as a result.

    If they’re expecting these tech companies to be gathering and storing peoples’ government ID’s, or something, somebody needs to carefully explain to them using small words why this is a monumentally stupid idea. Does something need to be done about social media addiction and the rampant sketchy behavior of the tech giants? Yes, probably. Is a blanket ban ever the actual solution to anything? No, very rarely.

    It’s just apparently all anyone can come up with when they’ve got government-brain.