Emily (she/her)

Fifth, they could simply write checks to Treasury that help us finance global public goods.

You have to be fucking kidding me.

C’mon, that’s what PR’s, RCs, and betas are for

It’s important to note that this is them moving in-development branches/features “behind closed doors”, not making Android closed source. Whenever a feature is ready they then merge it publicly. I know this community tends to be filled with purists, many of whom are well informed and reasoned, but I’m actually totally fine with this change. This kind of structure isn’t crazy uncommon, and I imagine it’s mainly an effort to stop tech journalists analysing random in-progress features for an article. Personally, I wouldn’t want to develop code with that kind of pressure.

It’s weird you think China is some kind of gotcha, because if the best the Canadian government could do in the unlikely future where “China is parked on [Australia’s] coastline” is a symbolic gesture that hurts its own citizens, I would rather you wouldn’t. So again, why do you expect us to damage our own economy for the sake of a symbolic gesture?

Trump does not understand or respect symbolic gestures in trade/deals, and you’re complaining that we won’t make one at our significant detriment. Considering you and Mexico are the biggest importers from the United States, well targeted retaliatory tariffs have a real chance of hurting the US and enacting change. We import 10 times fewer goods (20 times if you include Mexico) and have a 2:1 trade deficit, so we don’t have the power to significantly affect the US in the same way you do, and our treasury has made it pretty clear we’d probably be the only ones hurt by such a policy.

We have better, actually effective ways to enact change (i.e. threatening Pine Gap, AUKUS, etc). So why do you expect us to damage our own economy for the sake of a symbolic gesture?

It’s not our responsibility to damage our own economy for an empty symbolic gesture

We’re not retaliating with tariffs because nearly every mainstream economist has advised against it, including our own Treasury. Here’s the quote from Steven Kennedy, treasury head, at a Senate estimates hearing on 26 February:

For a medium-sized economy such as Australia, there is overwhelming evidence that the use of trade restrictions imposes costs on our consumers and businesses… If Australia were to impose tariffs, we would bear nearly all the cost, given our size and inability to affect the world prices of the goods we import.

We would be shooting ourselves in the foot for the sake of what would essentially amount to little more than a symbolic gesture. We have other, more effective cards beyond tariffs.

What about trans women who transitioned before puberty? What about cis or intersex women with elevated levels of testosterone? What about sports where it has been shown that after a long enough period of medical transition trans people have no significant advantage over their cis counterparts?

You appeal to science yet fail to cite a single source, so let me do it for you:

An individual’s sex does not determine their success or failure at any athletic event despite the high level of competition. This can be demonstrated when looking at not average outcomes, but the level of overlap among outcomes… While sex differences do develop following puberty, many of the sex differences are reduced, if not erased, over time by gender affirming hormone therapy.

I will be dead and buried in the ground before I call nginx “engine x”

I would assume you don’t want to talk to me (as in, don’t like talking to me) and are trying to end the conversation as quickly as possible. Why aren’t you asking questions? Or even writing more than one word responses? You can write formally or dry, I do, but like, you have a responsibility to uphold your end of the conversation.

Verizon sold Tumblr to WordPress in 2019

Only for the United States, I still see “Gulf of Mexico” in Australia

DKIM makes it much more difficult to spoof email addresses, assuming your email client actually supports them.

Checking various emails I’ve received from @google.com addresses, they have DKIM set up and gmail is validating using it.

You’re mostly right. Newer devices won’t share their entire app list by default, at compile time you need to enumerate every app you want to query for, or add what are essentially a list of intent filters (which are like “I want to talk to apps that take this kind of message and payload”). There is still a permission that lets you list all apps like you were able to on pre API 30 devices, but Google makes it pretty difficult to get onto the app store in that state.

You can still send intents as much as you like though (as long as you know the recipient), since they’re the basis for all inter-process communication.

My point is more that an app developer can’t and doesn’t need to use the play store to get the list of apps you have on your phone. This requirement to have the play store almost certainly isn’t malicious and I disagree with the notion that apps shouldn’t be able to use what is essentially system infrastructure to improve their apps. That said, given this is an app targeting the fediverse, it would have been nice for the developer to have made a universal APK build that didn’t require the Play Store.

If this error message is actually talking about Google Play, not Google Play Services, I would bet that it is because it employs Dynamic Feature Modules; something which can only be delivered over the Play Store infrastructure. They’re pretty common in modern Android development since they can substantially improve the user experience for users with Google Play enabled (which is most of them).

Also, I am aware this is being pedantic, but Android just straight up already has an API to get every installed app on your device and interact with it, even on a de-googled phone.

Social media is not a good replacement for real life community (look through my comment history and you’ll see me expressing exactly that repeatedly), but we can’t be oblivious to the fact that for many children their only connection to fellow queer people may be online. If you live in a small town or community where there are no other openly queer people, or if your school, peers, and parents are hostile to queer people you won’t have much choice in where you find community.

Are you Australian? That just feels like kind of a US centric lens to analyze this through, though you’re right that loss of community is a byproduct.

Like, I’m not exactly happy with the Albanese government, but I would say that most negative LGBTQ things they have said or done have been cowardly attempts to avoid drama from the Liberals, not active bigotry

I briefly worked for a company who worked on household power technology. Their product would attempt to predict energy prices, weather patterns, and usage to sell your excess energy at peak prices. Like discussed in the article, this company collected usage data and controlled the sale of energy back to the grid centrally. They did this because it meant they could better train their prediction models and run them on more powerful hardware. The controllers would have needed internet connectivity anyway to query energy prices, and putting the prediction on device would have just made them more expensive and worse. Even when I worked there (back in 2015 I think), they were already very aware of the threat vectors discussed by this article and took some measures to prevent it.

In my opinion they were (/are, still exist) a responsible company run by competent people. They did not collect the data out of “greed”, and I strongly suspect that the people in these comments implying that the data is collected to be sold have never actually worked in the industry and have very little idea of the specific value of energy usage data. I can’t really speak authoritatively for other companies, but I would guess that, like the one I worked for, their products are internet connected simply because it improves the product. For example, people expect things to be controllable or viewable from an app from anywhere, and that requires internet connectivity.

The problems in government are structural and systematic, not individual. The bureaucracy was built into what it is through the accumulation of regulations, poorly implemented policies and agendas, as well as plain mismanagement. Likewise, when the cost of a failed project is a political shitstorm and a parliamentary enquiry, and beyond that you are expected to be entirely accountable and transparent, you need to be risk averse.

You can’t just fix these issues by proclaiming to fire everyone. You need to fix structural and leadership problems.

Lots of places already exclude hate speech from free speech, for an example I am familiar with (because I live there), Australia has a right to freedom of expression and opinion but does not protect speech that incites discrimination, among other things. As far as I’m concerned that is still a right to free speech, not the least because hate speech inherently limits the voice of its victims.