Brinens and Things &#8211; Tumblr Mirror

Anyone else unable to turn on their Christmas lights because of the AWS outage?

oh boy.

Tags:

#today (well‚ last fortnight) in ”fuck cloud dependence” #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #disappointed permanent resident of The Future

August 14, 2020October 27, 2020 ~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

rustingbridges:

not a big fan of that captcha thing where you gotta wait 30 minutes for google to decide if it wants to show you another bus

and that captcha thing where it never explicitly tells you if you succeeded or not, so you’re never sure if it’s making you do it like six times because you suck or because it’s just Like That

rustingbridges:

it reliably makes me do more on my browser With Adblock And Shit, whereas my chrome sellout browser just lets me press the button, so I figure it’s just like that

anyway with the fade out / in buses I think I noticed it doesn’t start the fade in until you focus the tab again, which is Hell

Yeah, in some ways having to do it like six times is a sign that I’ve *succeeded*: not at finding buses, but at preventing Google from tracking my identity.

I don’t think I’ve ever unfocused the tab, so I hadn’t noticed that part.

Update: on multiple occasions reCAPTCHA *has* now explicitly claimed that I failed to find all the crosswalks, and refused to let me through until I agreed to lie and say that those pictures that were clearly *rumble strips* were actually crosswalks. There was likewise an occasion where it wouldn’t let me through until I agreed to claim that an RV was a bus.

(if they’re using this as some kind of self-driving-car training program I shudder to think how that’s going)

rustingbridges:

to be honest I’m getting pretty annoyed that recaptcha now seems to be the only captcha service in use

It is awfully pervasive, yeah, though I still see a *few* others.

(The update post was inspired by me changing my email addresses to custom domains this week: the “telling all my various accounts to use the new email” process involved filling out a *lot* of captchas.)

Tags:

#disappointed permanent resident of The Future #reply via reblog #I’m increasingly sick of Google’s shit #for my next smartphone I’m getting a fucking Lineage #(I don’t think I’m *quite* hardcore enough for Replicant or /e/ but ask me again in a few years)

August 11, 2020August 18, 2020 ~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

rustingbridges:

brin-bellway:

rustingbridges:

not a big fan of that captcha thing where you gotta wait 30 minutes for google to decide if it wants to show you another bus

and that captcha thing where it never explicitly tells you if you succeeded or not, so you’re never sure if it’s making you do it like six times because you suck or because it’s just Like That

it reliably makes me do more on my browser With Adblock And Shit, whereas my chrome sellout browser just lets me press the button, so I figure it’s just like that

anyway with the fade out / in buses I think I noticed it doesn’t start the fade in until you focus the tab again, which is Hell

Yeah, in some ways having to do it like six times is a sign that I’ve *succeeded*: not at finding buses, but at preventing Google from tracking my identity.

I don’t think I’ve ever unfocused the tab, so I hadn’t noticed that part.

Update: on multiple occasions reCAPTCHA *has* now explicitly claimed that I failed to find all the crosswalks, and refused to let me through until I agreed to lie and say that those pictures that were clearly *rumble strips* were actually crosswalks. There was likewise an occasion where it wouldn’t let me through until I agreed to claim that an RV was a bus.

(if they’re using this as some kind of self-driving-car training program I shudder to think how that’s going)

Tags:

#AIs being Wrong on the Internet #oh look an update #reply via reblog #disappointed permanent resident of The Future

April 12, 2017June 21, 2020 ~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

No joke, companies working on facial recognition software should be destroyed. There’s literally no possible ethical use of that kind of technology.

I disagree, but would say that it’s complicated.

I mean i could foresee some silly app-based games coming out of it but like I’d gladly deprive the world of those games if it means preventing the ever strengthening of the surveillance state.

Fire to their offices, smash their computers.

Can’t put the genie back into the bottle; need to plan for a world where everyone’s activities are tracked basically all of the time, or could be.

Alright then I’m a primitivist now

Luckily in small primitive communities you’re not continually watched and judged every waking moment wait what the heck am I saying

*grumble grumble Google Glass grumble*

I mean you can be alone all the time as a hunter-gatherer.

But I was being facetious anyway

misanthropymademe:

The problem with facial recognition software is that it will finally settle the question if there truly is a difference between one’s face and ass.

ilzolende:

As an autistic, it would be nice to augment with software to get up to baseline, as people have taken advantage of my impairment before and it sucked a lot.

Agreed (with ilzolende, not with OP).

It’s perfectly technologically feasible to give me assistive tech for my disability. We have wearable HUDs. We have software that can beat me in facial-recognition tests. The reason I don’t have assistive tech right now is because of neurotypicals whining that it would be an “invasion of privacy” to let me do to them in software what they’ve been doing to me in wetware for their entire fucking lives.

—

…okay, I see I do still have that berserk button, it’s just that nobody’s pushed it in a while. I guess that’s useful to know.

(Well, I suppose I would still have it, since it’s a subcategory of the always-terrible “person [sacrifices/attempts to sacrifice/advocates sacrificing] my well-being for the Greater Good, not because they’ve weighed the pros and cons and decided the greater good was worth the harm it would cause me, but because it literally never occurred to them to factor it into the decision”.)

Look, I don’t know whether facial-recognition tech is worth it overall. I’m willing to believe that it isn’t. But we-as-a-society can’t have that discussion properly until the pro-privacy folks recognise that seeing-eye computers for prosopagnosics would, all else equal, be a good thing, and that “if we do X, such computers will exist” deserves to be added in as one of the factors when deciding whether to do X.

Tags:

#prosopagnosia #reply via reblog #raw nerves #discourse cw #disappointed permanent resident of The Future

May 17, 2015June 23, 2020 ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

ilzolende:

Training Photos with a set of my current photos to recognize faces is kind of relaxing.

It still has way fewer images of faces than I can and have viewed in a 5-minute period.

Let’s watch it inevitably end up beating me at face recognition with a smaller training set than I have!

It is interesting that it can catch cartoon faces, annoying that it caught every single face my Effulgence screenshots, and amusing that it can catch “faces” such as my ear, the Raikothi priest’s spiral in slatestarscratchpad’s avatar, and a few other similar images.

Apple default image organizers: beating autistics at face recognition since iPhoto first got the feature (before 2010).

Tags:

#prosopagnosia #in which Brin is predictable #it occurs to me that this post qualifies for the tag #transhumanism #for the same reasons as the previous post did

Image ~ June 30, 2014July 17, 2019 ~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

prostheticknowledge:

GLASSHOLE.SH

Code script put together by Julian Oliver which detects Google Glass devices on a WiFi network and blocks them:

This script is a response to a comment by Omer Shapira that the presence of Google Glass worn by audience at an ITP graduate exhibition left him feeling understandably uneasy; it was not possible to know whether they were recording, or even streaming what they were recording to a remote service over WiFi.

The … script will find and detect Google Glass on the local network and kick them off.

More Here

Still bitter about how the obsession with privacy concerns of Google Glass has completely ruined the device’s potential.

There is always the possibility that someone is secretly recording you. That MP3 player I appear to be absent-mindedly holding in my lap? Totally has an audio-recording function, and you have no way of knowing whether I’m using it. Just because people tend to forget the recording possibilities of smartphones unless they come in Glass form, doesn’t mean those possibilities aren’t there. They’re always there.

Using a facial recognition app that scans the faces of everyone you pass by and compares them to a database (a mixture of owner-taken photos and photos copied from Facebook) of people you know to check for matches is perfectly legal and polite and all those other ways of saying “permitted”, but only if you’re running it on a carbon-based computer. People whose carbon-based computers can’t run the app (or can technically run it, but can’t do anything with it due to problems with their on-board cameras) can go fuck themselves.

(It does kind of fascinate me how thoroughly the ban on facial recognition has been spun as “yay privacy” rather than “Google spitting in the faces (so to speak) of disabled people”.)

Tags:

#Google Glass #prosopagnosia #my usual tag for high-tech stuff is #proud citizen of The Future #but in this case it’s more like #disappointed permanent resident of The Future #currently in the stage of citizenship application where #they bog you down in red tape forever

Someone meme this, this shit is fucking priceless

April 14, 2014June 23, 2020 ~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

lennat:

IF WE’RE NOT ASHAMED OF OUR NEUROLOGICAL DIFFERENCES THEN WE DON’T’ REALLY HAVE THEM, GASP!

WE DON’T HAVE A RIGHT TO REACH OUT TO OTHER PEOPLE WITH THE SAME DISABILITIES THAT JUST MEANS WE WANT ATTENTION, OH NO!

WE’RE FAKE IF WE TALK ABOUT IT SO WE CAN’T MENTION IT EVER!

WE SHOULD ALL JUST HIDE AWAY AND WALLOW IN SHAME BECAUSE THAT’S THE ONLY WAY WE’RE ACTUALLY REAL

IF YOU DON’T THEN WE WILL GET TALKED DOWN TO YOU USING DEMEANING AND SEXIST LANGUAGE LIKE ‘DARLING’

I shudder to think what would happen if I dared express an opinion on the explicit denial of technologically-assisted facial recognition to the general public (read: us) due to privacy concerns.

(It was bad enough when I thought they were just dancing around the edge, but no, now they’re dancing away from the edge. And where Google goes, the world follows.)

Tags:

#prosopagnosia #tales from the prosopagnosia tag #(I’d make an analogy here about hearing aids and eavesdropping) #(but I can never tell which analogies about this sort of thing you’re allowed to make and which will get you yelled at) #(and anyway turns out the people who make those hearing aid commercials that *advertise* the potential for eavesdropping) #(are commonly considered terrible people) #(so that’d probably backfire) #proud citizen of The Future #but only by birth #not by residency #next year in Waterloo

Just Curious…

April 10, 2014June 23, 2020 ~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

where-am-i-and-do-i-know-you:

Ok so how many of you out there with Prosopagnosia also have other issues like synesthesia or no sense of direction or other? The 2 specific examples are additional issues/quirks I have. I don’t recall the source but remember reading somewhere that this was common with Prosopagnosia? Also does anyone else also have social anxiety either aggravated by or as a direct affect of Prosopagnosia?

Thanks!