always laced with a familiar taste of poison

It's never done that before so I looked it up and turns out Roku TVs have added all sorts of creepy things in the privacy section since I last checked.

One of which being they take screenshots from what you're watching and send them to third parties to identify it.

Fucking hell! Remember when every fucking device in your life wasn't a spy implanted in your home and working against your interests to try and sell your data? Remember how nice that was??

Remember when the TV was just a tool that would play the things you plugged into it?

—Did you know that Juneteenth is also celebrated in a part of Mexico? Nacimiento Mexico was once home to thousands who escaped slavery in the US. As many as 10,000 slaves followed a clandestine Southern Underground Railroad to Mexico. —To date, many Black Mexicans from the Texas area retrace a portion of the same route their African American ancestors followed in 1850 when they escaped slavery. —Descendants of slaves who escaped across the southern border observe Texas’s emancipation holiday with their own unique traditions in the village of Nacimiento. —Slave hunters would patrol the southern border for escapees, led by the Texas Rangers but the Mexican army would be there waiting for them (the slave hunters) to turn them away.

Oh boy. This will be a fast pass since I’m on my lunch break but here we go.

OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman has explicitly said you should not use ChatGPT as a therapist/friend. If the CEO is telling you “don’t do this,” don’t do this. Source

The primary reason he cites is that there’s no legal privilege. No Dr/patient confidentiality. Altman even said that, in the event of a lawsuit or legal inquiry, Open AI would produce the entirety of people’s conversations. Every word. There is zero privacy (and that’s aside from the fact that your data is being actively mined).

Most chatbots are built to encourage engagement, prolong conversation (so you give them more content to mine), and be as agreeable as possible. This means they may inadvertently encourage someone who is delusional, reaffirm incorrect assumptions/statements that a human would call out, or even agree that a person should self-harm or kill themselves with no accountability. There are multiple cases now of people who have committed suicide or were hospitalized after interacting with chatbots (and at least one legal case now related to this). source, source, source, source

Chatbots are only as good as the LLMs they’re built upon. So it’s unsurprising that they may show stigma against certain kinds of substance and/or mental health issues and may fail to recognize suicidal ideation. Source

Finally, The American Psychological Association is saying don’t do it. All chatbots are not unilaterally harmful, and there are even some studies in which folks are actively trying to create therapy bots that do not have these pitfalls with positive initial results, but ChatGPT is not one of them. Source

Like I spent years having to come up with a solution to get therapy dogs into a series of residence halls. Why years? Because we had to decide who got to stay and who got to leave: the people who needed therapy dogs or the people with severe allergies to animals. Who got the alternative housing? 

Things like fidget toys might seem great for some disabled people but having them in the room could be distracting/overstimulating for others. The same goes with stimming. It can’t be helped but neither can the anxiety that another person in the room feels as they watch/hear it. Additionally, something like a weighted blanket might immediately calm one kid down and send the other one into a panic attack due to the claustrophobia it causes. (*Points to myself*)

Every Metro bus in New York City has a series of seats at the front that can be lifted up to accommodate people in wheelchairs but if I’m in one of those spots then someone with a cane/walker has to journey even further to sit down.

The flashing lights of a fire alarm are there to help deaf/hearing impaired but if they’re not properly timed, they can also cause a person to have a seizure.

The worst part about all of these is that there is rarely a concrete solution that makes everyone happy/safe. And I’m not here to offer any because I don’t know them. I’m just here to remind you all that as you’re taking your education/health classes, as you’re reading your textbooks, as you’re preparing to go be an advocate, just remember that there is rarely ever such a thing as a one-size-fits-all solution to advocacy and that something you do that can help one disabled person might actually hinder another.

I saw this when running newpipe. But wait, it gets deeper. I clicked on the details buttons and it said as of today, we have 83 days left until Google rolls out this new requirement for apps inside and outside of the google play store. If any developer disagrees with their new terms and fees, they will be blocked!

I'll share some of the info below:

Looks like they're trying to nuke the remaining privacy and freedoms we have left on the internet.

What to do?

-Get your developer friends to not comply to their new guides

- Sign the open letter on the site and take action by checking out the full resources list on their website as well!

To summarize, this is all daunting especially when you feel all alone with unfair and inhumane regulations comming out faster than improvements but we got this working together!

Share the link with your friends, family and anyone who will listen!

If you're wondering how things are going on bluesky, this brain genius is one of the engineers holding the site together.

People are yelling at him because he admitted been vibe coding the site for months and now he's having a meltdown about it. Things are great.