Author: sjwillis
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Read: The Technology the Trump Administration Could Use to Hack Your Phone | the New Yorker
Trump has threatened his political enemies, reposting comments calling for a military tribunal for Liz Cheney and observing that General Mark Milley’s behavior would have once been punishable by “DEATH!” He has also demonized the free press, suggesting, for example, that he wouldn’t mind if people were to “shoot through the fake news” and that…
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Made so much progress with learning #homeassistant this weekend. Got Home Kit Bridge working after learning way too much about mdns, built some iOS notifications w/ automation options and resuscitating some forgot NFC tags. Got #solar power forecasting working, excited to start playing with “now’s a good time to run the washer” type notifications. Also…
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Aqara Hub and Home Assistant
The Aqara sensors and such have been super reliable in my HomeKit environment, highly recommend. But, as I’m currently trying to solve what should be a simple use case, I’m getting into the weeds of Home Assistant. I’ve spent a grand total of about 4 hours in Home Assistant so far and I’m sure it…
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It is apparently way too much to ask #apple #HomeKit to only run my Roborock vacuum at 10AM each morning *if* no one is home. Seems like such a trivial condition to #homeautomation but now I’m deep in the weeds of home assistant trying to Rube Goldberg my way to a solution. We were promised…
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Tech vs. Democracy
The Outsourcing of Democracy It’s not news to me that the intersection of technology, democracy, and power has reached a critical junction but I now have a much better sense of what’s at stake. Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been diving deep into Marietje Schaake’s “The Tech Coup,” watching Ronan Farrow’s “Surveilled” documentary,…
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Watched Ronan Farrow’s Surveilled last night on HBO, uncanny how well it pairs with Schaake’s The Tech Coup which I’m just finishing. If you enjoyed the documentary on spyware, definitely give Schaake’s Tech Coup a read: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691241173/the-tech-coup Also on: website
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Crossposting Mastodon->Bluesky
I found a handy node script from Alex Hyett that will grab whatever I post to my Mastodon account and post it to my bluesky account for me. The less I have to think about this stuff the better so I have the node script restart at boot up using this Seems to be working.…
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I’ve been playing in bands for 30 years and can’t imagine trying to make a living at it. Now I’ve got a kid who is an amazing songwriter/musician. It’s heartbreaking to think how undervalued his skill is in this world. Good read: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/10/28/band-people-franz-nicolay-book-review #songwriting Also on: website
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Read: Why Not Bluesky
The real problem, in my mind, isn’t in the nature of this particular Venture-Capital operation. Because the whole raison-d’etre of Venture Capital is to make money for the “Limited Partners” who provide the capital. Since VC investments are high-risk, most are expected to fail, and the ones that succeed have to exhibit exceptional revenue growth…
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I like this take from 404 media and agree w/ much of this post on Bluesky, Mastodon and threads: “..But I have been impressed with the tools that the open source development community is building to bridge the gap between the AT protocol and ActivityPub, and I’m hopeful that some mixture of Bluesky and Mastodon…