Headed out early after another fitful night of sleep. I’m not going to disparage the hotel; it’s something else that got really f’d with the pandemic.
I know, I know. If I had my mask on, I wouldn’t notice the loud HVAC, or malfunctioning shower. That I expect those things is another example of my privilege. I would tell you to go check BlueSkeet for confirmation. No, I shouldn’t say that, but it’s really sad that a small fragment of smart people are retreating into their own little world. Was Reddit not enough?
So, onto the talk. I wanted to watch the one on hot dogs, but two of the three channels are cricktets. The one about MLOps is the only one with sound, so that it is. Some information about how AI models are thrown off by stuff from botnet upvotes. (And I’m thinking of the days way back when when some folks were showing off driftnet, which was a program that just displayed images from HTTP sessions. Someone, and I shan’t mention who, wrote a curl script so that it looked like people were looking at some really sick stuff. See the popular section here.)
And the video dropped on that one. Try Build It again. And there’s sound. discussion of embedded device something or the other. They destroyed a printer earlier.
Listening to the stuff about powering over USB-C, using Arduino is interesting. The collection of various RaspberryPIs kind of shows how short my attention level is lately.
I do think kids today are missing out on the elation that comes from making the magic smoke come out of hardware with software you wrote.
And that stream fell down. But now the others are back with audio. Juggle around until next ones start…
And I ended up watching the presentation by the guy from The EFF. I appreciate most of his bits about treaties, and authoritarian governments that are to those treaties.
Lots of back-and-forth with the language of the treaty that allows the signatories do actually do whatever they want despite being parties to the treaty.
Why worry about it at all, then?
That’s kind of what leads me to thinking that every law, every treaty, should have a mandatory end date. If everyone thinks that the principles are good, it shouldn’t be a big deal to pass something similar again.
Do the Russians, Norks, and Mullahs adhere to treaties ratified by previous governments?
I worry, too, about things that end up being backdoors through previously-ratified treaties. I admit that my thinking about that is heavily-influenced by what happened with the pandemic.
No. I won’t carry a vaxport. If you wanna throw me in prison because of that’s what it is. Do it. Do it publicly. Have no shame about it.
I will watch the rest, and give final thoughts as I consider things. I will miss ShmooCon, but some of the things I saw this weekend are reminiscent of some of the things I saw in about 2012/13.
I am happy that there seems to be some pushback against it, but I worry that the pushes after Trump’s election, and with the pandemic, people are getting pushed more into small walled gardens where they don’t see or hear things that they don’t like. I admit I’m kind of guilty in this sometimes, but I really would like to sample lots of different sources, and make up my own mind.
The things discussed places like The Fifth Column, Blocked and Reported, and The Free Press give me a lot of things to consider that are different than the near-uniformity in major corporate press.
*shrug*
So, off to listen to the last bits of this.