The "Oopps... software bug, nothing we could have done." gets pretty old and it's not only facebook. How is it possible that a system that is build to reduce harm and protect your own community can run haywire for over two years. Is there no oversight or at least a check every month, it's always companies that proud themselves with their data analysis capabilities.
Where did I compare myself to Joan of Arc? He said that there are probably only bad con artists and I told him with an example that there are not. Are you so full of bias and prejudice that you lost the ability for reading comprehension? The funniest thing is we know each other IRL Andreas and I would have expected more but alas. That's why you can't tell people in OSS and in CCC circles what you are really doing... can be the most intelligent people around as soon as they hear advertising they tilt.
Yes, there are good and bad con artists. Do you believe woman like Joan of Arc or similar stories are no con artists? You probably are some sort of con artist yourself without you even recognizing it but I get it ignorance really is bliss and the world is so much easier to understand when everything is just black and white.
No, it's because I know there can be different versions of something. There can be good movies, there can be shit movies. There can be good apps, there can be shit apps. The same goes for advertising pretending that it doesn't is hybris.
Most normal people and junior devs would get a red head when reading it, techies and seniors would nod along and sometimes say "uh... so that's how it really works". It's in between but a good primer on the essentials.
Creative advertising like the Burger King ad from the post above are ads people want to interact with because they are fun or if you are really good get people to think. Stuff you would share on your own instead of getting it artificially pushed into your feed. The kind of ads you describe are called "prokbelly ads" because you would find them on the flyers of your favorite supermarket. No creative wants to touch them with a poking stick.
Speaking as a creative working with clients up and down the S&P500 in the last years there was a feeling that Facebook got more and more restrictive with creative advertising. In the beginning you could integrate your own apps and interact with pretty much the whole Facebook api you had creative freedom and you could track the effectiveness yourself. After Burger Kings "Sacrifice a friend for a whopper campaign" [0] everything changed. Year after year it got more restrictive even now in their newer offerings you are more and more restricted (Not more than 20% text in ads, no static animations in sparkAR filters the list goes on and on.) AND they are basically just asset flips from other social media or ad networks. Carousel Ads, Stories, SparkAR everything is already there but better from other providers creatives don't like to work on Facebook ads anymore and media companies don't like that they can't sell more adaptions because Facebook Ads are just resells.
There was a lot of hype about the metaverse because everyone hoped that there will be creative freedom again but when talking to their agency representatives it looks like it's even more restrictive. At the moment Facebook is basically the garbage dump for assets you already created for other networks, there is no creative freedom and their AR offerings are lacking behind snap and TikTok. In the 2000s and 2010s you sold whole campaigns because of Facebook, now Facebook Ads are just a chart you spend 1 second in a presentation. I believe it's dying and it can't come soon enough for the creative industry. For us, Facebook is now a waste of time and energy.
handling bots is just not worth it. if there is a discussion happening on hackernews i usually add a link to the article. i also like the way lowtechmagazine handles comments but some could also argue that it builds an echo chamber if you are handling the moderation of your own content but that would also be happening on a normal blog.
The bigger problems for me would be the appstores because they could implement a mitm. Telegram and Signal have their client sources open so you at least can check and compile them yourself but if I would handle data that was so sensitive that I can't trust any other entity I would just self host matrix or xmpp and chat with myself...
Telegram is fine if you just use it for 1on1 conversation with encryption enabled. The same goes for whatsapp (encryption is enabled by default). If you are looking for secure group chats signal would be my choice because it skips the server (WhatsApp sends all group messages to a server before distributing it). There are also more exotic providers like threema, matrix and many others but the onboarding for non technical users is harder, though they also have advantages like not needing a telephone number to sign up. For the general public I would use Signal mainly because it’s directly in the middle of security and ease of use.
I found it always fishy that telegram applauds itself for being a secure messenger but decided against encryption by default. With the flick of a switch every doubt would go away but alas.
Sorry but it's the exact same sentiment of the 50s and 60s something disruptive happens people have a new way to attend work. Tada suburb/country culture. It's not that cities are obsolete it's just that cities are no longer as convenient for a big part of the working population as they were before.
At this point in time it really is a gamble if Actions work or not. Even if there is no “Incident” the success rate is probably at 70-80% in the last three weeks.
You have to look at geo political implications if China or Russia wouldn’t help theses poorer countries they lose all the impact they made over the last decade by providing infrastructure to these countries. It’s not the clear cut case you make it out to be. The whole fertilizer production problem is also more of a logistical problem because fertilizer production is easy and there are a lot of countries with natural gas reserves. Russia on the other hand can’t produce tech or seeds for secondary fruits needed for a proper soil rotation. You can easily kickstart fertilizer production. Tech and seed not so much especially when you take into account that Russia optimized their agriculture for modern single use seeds.
They are exporters but to countries that they mostly have good relationships with. There is little to no export into Europe or the US BUT Russia imports most of it's seeds from Europe. These seeds are one time seeds that means you are not able to seed again from the upspring of them. The seeds for this years seeding have not yet been provided. They will suffer even harder because they will compromise their soil by simply not being able to provide a proper rotation. For the west this is more a logistics problem than anything else other countries can and will pick up the pace on fertilizer and grain production. Russia can not yet provide enough seeds on their own and they will still export grain to their allies as they did before the sanctions. China has build up a pretty big reserve on grain and corn over the last past years and they will have to provide poor countries that would be hit by the production shortages to prevent their investment ie. in Africa in the last decade getting nullified. It's really not that big of a problem everyone wants to make it out to be and it will be worse for Russia than for the rest of the world. Russia will have the biggest problem on secondary fruits like potatoes and sugar beet that they will have to import in exchange for a higher export of an increased grain production. We will see an increase in prizes but there will be no shortages of oil or flour in your grocery shop next door except through the influence of hoarding in the beginning.
These are good articles about their problems with producing seeds
Seems like you really thought hard about the subject and provided us with the information we needed to asses the situation in your threat environment. Based on the information you provided it's a clear "How the hell should we know?"
If there are shortages and people in developed countries will hunger it’s for government to step in with regulations about wasting food. Last year we had 40% of food in America thrown away. There won’t be a drop of 40% in food production because of the war in Ukraine not even close to it.
We have the biggest independent European seed manufacturer as client and they shipped more this year than ever before and see no stagnation in orders even after the war started this is all anecdotal evidence and jumping to conclusion in the twitter thread.
Nothing and they won't because bitcoin is not stable enough it can still be manipulated you still don't know if a giant amount of bitcoins are lost or just held by an unknown entity. No, sane central bank would ever adopt bitcoin. It might be a cryptocurrency in the future but it will not be bitcoin.