Category: .

The new bill to make app-based employers like Uber treat gig workers like employees has a workaround for employers: devices which can be remote-controlled by out of state operators.

Instead of UberEats having drivers deliver, they can use delivery robots. These bots are perceived as  autonomous, but in reality they are often remote controlled by workers in low-wage areas.

Trump has privately said that foreign spies can damage relations with their host countries and undermine his personal relationships with their leaders, the sources said. The President “believes we shouldn’t be doing that to each other,” one former Trump administration official told CNN.

In addition to his fear such foreign intelligence sources will damage his relationship with foreign leaders, Trump has expressed doubts about the credibility of the information they provide. Another former senior intelligence official told CNN that Trump “believes they’re people who are selling out their country.”

Even in public, Trump has looked down on these foreign assets, as they are known in the intelligence community. Responding to reports that the CIA recruited Kim Jong Un’s brother as a spy, Trump said he “wouldn’t let that happen under my auspices.”

https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/10/politics/donald-trump-foreign-spies-skeptical/

As an act of seeding the open web, I created a blogroll of friends with blogs. Blogrolls are good for all blogs. Interconnectedness makes every blog more valuable.

It wasn’t easy to find living blogs. I had to web stalk a bunch of people. I went through my Feedly subscriptions to find real people. I also combed my Twitter follows.

The blogroll will only be useful on-site at some.gonze.com, and not in RSS. For the sake of inclusion in RSS (just once), here is the list:

• Andrew Sempere
• Andy Weissman
• Ben Werdmüller
• Brett Singer
• Brian Dear
• Dan Lyke
• David Galbraith
• Ethan Hein
• Gurdonark
• Jon Udell
• M Donaldson
• Marc Weidenbaum
• Mark Baker
• Michael Good
• Mike Linksvayer
• Ms Jen
• Paul Morriss
• Richard MacManus
• Scott Aaronson

(Vice) Personal websites and email can replace most of what people like about Facebook—namely the urge to post about their lives online.

Facebook isn’t really all that much better or more convenient than having your own website, or sending emails or chats. But for some reason, Facebook (and Instagram) are where we post now.

I don’t think personal websites are for the same purpose. Personal sites like this blog will never be the best place to distribute your thoughts to the biggest readership possible.

A personal site is a Moleskine, not a book.

 

A quiet sad playlist for the last day before Fall: Tombeau Boy (Spotify)

It is fine to email me.

I would like to have an RSS reader built into my blog. It would be integrated with a blogroll.

I’d come here to read and reblog-with-comments, and friends who stop by could use the blogroll to branch off to friends-of-friends.

This would stand in for much of the feature set in decentralized social networks like Mastodon. There must have been many experiments in augmenting WordPress to act as a decentralized social network, but I haven’t seen any.

Here are two versions of the same song. One is plain, one has sprinkles. Does the extra stuff make it better or worse?

Posts in wide-open social media like a blog go to everybody, regardless of their relationships. Church friends and drinking buddies get the same blend of pieties and dirty jokes.

The expected readership for my little blog here is myself, a few friends who use RSS, and search engines. Those are incredibly dissimilar. Search engines will be used by work connections, and I need to use the same formalities as in a meeting. Friends who use RSS will be interested in technology. Between me and myself I am interested in my internal monologue.

Yet on a day to day basis nobody reads this but me, so my internal monologue is all that matters. There’s a mismatch when it comes to search engines and friends who use RSS. It’s a form of context collapse.

This is not a private journal. It’s not secret. It’s not encrypted.

This is not publishing. It is not a place to make my thoughts known. What I write here is for myself.

This is not personal marketing. It is not to make myself known.

Writing in this blog is peaceful. It’s like scribbling in a Moleskin while sitting on a rock in a park where I happen to be the only person. Others might wander by, but they would probably just glance over and go their own way, to jog or have their lunch or write in their own Moleskins.