Kids are jumping out the windows of burning buildings, falling to their deaths. And we think the problem is that they’re jumping

from a quote in The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/mar/19/matthew-desmond-the-poverty-rate-in-america-and-the-uk-should-be-zero-and-i-think-we-can-get-there, which the author attributes to a book by the novelist Tommy Orange.

By which he means victim blaming. There’s a set of systems whereby some people in society make money from others who are poor. The example he quotes is a trailer park: there’s a slew of tenants just hanging on for one reason or another, and there’s a landlord extracting $400k a year from them. We tend to focus on the former and not the relationship between the former and the latter.

Webcurios 17/03/23 – webcurios
— Read on webcurios.co.uk/webcurios-17-03-23/

I’m sure there’s lots of these, but this guy has his finger on something. Endlessly amusing.

The US government wants to break links between Tiktok and the Chinese government, by threatening to ban the application from use in the US. From what I can divine, the concern is the sharing of private user information with the Chinese government, and that government using the service’s recommendation engine to point users at given postings (a sort of automated editorial function).

if Tiktok is a publisher, isn’t this tantamount to a First Amendment violation? otoh: perhaps Tiktok is not a publisher, in the same way that other tech companies that act as outlets for user postings are not under the Section 230 rule that’s attracted some discussion recently.

If the issue is privacy, don’t we get to prosecute the company under existing criminal law for capture and inappropriate use of user information, just like any company that abuses user privacy? If the issue is selectively pushing users to state-sponsored media, isn’t this something that any US-government publisher like Radio Free Europe does?

It sounds like the government is fine with abuse of user privacy or manipulation of the recommendation engine, but not if the Chinese government are doing it.

www.nytimes.com/2023/02/25/us/unaccompanied-migrant-child-workers-exploitation.html

It’s been a while since I read something that has really shocked me in the Times, but this one did. Maybe partially because it’s such a predictable outcome of the lack of money for oversight and the venality of some of the sponsors involved.

Maybe the attention will get Congress off it’s ass to fund some real enforcement.

Update: yup, they’re paying attention: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/27/us/biden-child-labor.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

I read that Google won’t allow other companies to install browsers other than Chrome on new Android devices. Isn’t this what Microsoft was convicted and fined for with Internet Explorer back in the day, preinstalling their own browser on Windows so that users had to jump through some hoops to use anything else?

Various ways of rendering .gpx. The first couple use the “WP GPX” plugin, which uses a shortcode that points to a media file. The plugin’s settings in WP-Admin lets you upload such a file.

This is just stock from the .gpx. Interestingly, it generates an Altitude chart by default along with the map:

Not so good with a multi-route from the driving + walking routes with WP GPX concatenated into one file; it wants to merge them into one route and go back to the start (with a straight line!):

Here’s the two source .gpx files combined and rendered with GPS Visualizer, which has a couple of nice features:

• better map tile selection (eg OS + texturing)
• a select box that lets you pick which of the multiple routes you’re viewing, and lets you set the zoom to focus on any particular one, or encompass all of them
• variable ticks en-route for, eg, km markers or …, using a selected icon
• custom icons for markers. So, for example, a custom icon for a hiking waypoint from Canva uploaded to Media Library and referenced from a .gpx element marking the entrance to the trail
• popups can also include notes, photos, … through simple .csv-based interface
• popup for waypoint can optionally include driving directions to get there, from any google-style location (eg “current location”), and we can further customize this (I think) using leaflet-routing-machine (which in turn uses OSMR by default) to make it prettier/easier

If a robot constitutes a corporation and the corporation owns land, does the robot own land? What if the robot is not owned by another (corporation/human) entity? Is a robot owned through intellectual property rights, or by virtue of its embodiment (you own the specific hardware)? How is this going to work?

A notification center for progress bars that sounds like birdsong (Interconnected)
— Read on interconnected.org/home/2023/02/10/progress

This came up at a conference I attended at Xerox Parc last century, where a sysadmin had sonified all the background processes running on his network. When everything was running as it should, it all descended into a subconscious multiphonic hum, but as soon as something changed the related sound changed proportionally, surfaced to his consciousness and thereby got his attention. This instead of a roomful of competing blinky lights that were endlessly distracting.

The other aspect of this I remember is that you could layer an infinite number of independent processes, vs the limited real estate of a screen. The hum occupied the room, not a specific device.

No notification sounds required. I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

Went to see Robert Kaplan at WICA last night. He reminds me of a 20th century Herodotus.

He kept making references to “the elites” and how they consistently get things wrong. He described his own education, at a small Connecticut public university, and his subsequent employment at a small regional paper because he couldn’t get a job with the major papers because he didn’t have the Ivy League education. I think he’s always viewed himself as an outsider, with a bit of a chip on his shoulder.

I wanted to ask him about these elites. I’ve been reading him for years in The Atlantic, itself a bit of an elite national journal, so I confess to having pictured him as a member of the elites. I’m wondering who they are, and how they work; is it like the courtiers of the Ottoman Empire, with various factions and intrigues vying for the attention of the Emperor? Are they all the people who move from faculty positions at Yale and Harvard to positions in the Federal administration to emeritus positions in think tanks like the Heritage Foundation? Who are these people?

Watch the movie “ A Man called Otto” last night. On the way home from the theater I wrote this.

There is a specific sadness to everyone’s life
A child that dies, a traumatic injury, a fractured relationship
Without which we would lose our connection to the ground and to each other
And simply float away.