CW: nerdy observation that appeals to my inner twelve-year-old
I learned a while ago of the existence of old Soviet ternary computers and have been doing some reading about how a ternary computer would operate different from a binary one.
In a binary system, the smallest unit of data is the bit (binary digit). What would the smallest unit of data be in a ternary system?
CW: nerdy observation that appeals to my inner twelve-year-old
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A trit.
What's really a trip is balanced ternary. It's so elegant it almost hurts.
Instead of trit values being 0, 1, and 2, the trit values are -1, 0, and 1. Each range of numbers is naturally balanced around 0, and multiplying a number by -1 is simply multiplying each digit by -1.
CW: nerdy observation that appeals to my inner twelve-year-old
@Isaac Ji Kuo Yeah, while I'm still wrapping my brain around this system, I love how elegantly it handles negative numbers. Twos compliment in binary always felt a little hacky to me.
CW: nerdy observation that appeals to my inner twelve-year-old
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It works the same as in decimal, except there's no need for a sign on either the mantissa or the exponent.
Base 2 floating point is a bit different because it can skip the initial 1 on the mantissa (it's always a 1, except for the edge case of zero; there needs to be exceptions for dealing with zero).
God I hope I'm not coming down with something. I went to bed with a bit of a sore throat and woke up this mornig feelig like I'd been gargling broken glass.
Time to load up on tea with honey and lemon, I guess.
A lot of expenses are piling up and my husband and I are massively in debt. I know it's a lot to ask right before the holidays, but if you could help even a bit, it would take a lot of weight off our shoulders.
Popped into #LambdaMOO for a birthday celebration that took place inside my sushi restaurant. This got me to thinking. I wonder if it's possible to tie my restaurant's code into the birthday machine somehow so that people can get free food on their birthday.
Gotta be honest, it absolutely sucks watching the same people who call me a groomer just for being trans say that Epstein did nothing wrong because his victims were teenagers.
PEOPLE WOULD RATHER THEIR KIDS BE RAPED THAN BE TRANS.
Watching Megyn Kelly contort herself into knots to redefine child rape of 14 year olds as "adult & consensual" because Trump & Epstein "liked them young" and "barely pubescent".
This is beyond depraved. Megyn Kelly has a 14 year old daughter herself. That child needs a wellness check asap.
In a recent podcast, she & her guest absolved both men of culpability because they didn't like 5 or 8 year olds.
If these men had targeted kids under 10, Megyn Kelly would OK that too.
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#xkcd No. 3167 Date: 2025-11-12 Title: Car Size Alt text: 'They really shouldn't let those small cars drive in traffic. I worry I'm going to kill someone if I hit one! They should have to drive on the sidewalk, safely out of the way.' xkcd.com/3167/
Hooray! I finally talked my doctor into letting me go back on #ADHD meds. He pushed back, as expected, but I might actually be able to do things again.
@Patabs can be defined for the whole complex plane though (the square root of the sum of the square of the real and imaginary components) i.e.: abs(a + bi) = sqrt(a^2 + b^2)
One of the nice things about being exactly That Kind Of Open Source Nerd is every time something tries to sell me some tech product they are so desperately trying to convince me I both want and absolutely must have as a matter of utmost importance is I will then spend four hours finding a way to get precisely that but for free
That is to say, I feel like I need to do something with myself to avoid the boring and arduous task of editing email templates.
The problem with the exciting bit winding down is that my brain wants to keep going with it, particularly since I'm running on not much sleep. It's the really involved stuff that I seem capable of absorbing when I'm tired, the monotonous stuff is just hard to focus on
@me That's actually one of the things I'm umming and ahhing about my options on still, because really there aren't any good options. The entire website is entirely safe for work and so is everything that'll be in the shop, but that doesn't necessarily stop a lot of them from pulling the rug on reputation.
@me @JenJen I don't suppose you eventually landed on a good solution to the payment processor question in the end? I know you've been through the wringer with them
@tiddy roosevelt @JenJen In the past for freelance stuff, I've just used GnuCash to generate invoices, submitted them, and had the clients mail cheques. This works okay-ish for corporate clients, but even still I quickly learned that there's a big difference between an invoice and a payment.
I've also used Interac e-Transfers, but those aren't a thing that exist outside of Canada, so probably not helpful.
@me I am currently using CCBill and Elavon for my monthly studio subscriptions (patreon alternative), and WooCommerce for my regular shop and bulk buying of memberships.
I am also about to use Elavon's payment machine for my conventions this weekend and the next, so I'll find out if it works in place of Zettle/etc
I don't have Stripe so no BuyMeACoffee, and I've closed my KoFi because of their ToS. I'm also not using libera pay because of their ToS.
@JenJen @me WooCommerce is where I've landed too. I confess I had seen they have apple and google pay as options so just assumed they used stripe but I guess without t hose enabled, not so
@JenJen @me From what I can tell of a thorough read of Stripe's terms I should be ok, though with woo at least it doesn't matter much if stripe goes. It's all very neat, separate, and with an acceptable lack of nipples though
I opened a ko-fi years ago before all the *waves hands in the general direction of everything else* and it got closed the other day.
Odd blessing though, the site's banging and it's inspiring me seeing all my old photography work
@JenJen @neil @me I once worked for a major UK bank that decided it was cheaper to pay a payment processor than do PCI compliance themselves despite having all the legal, accounting and tech staff needed to do so.
So well done you for taking on something that can scare a major bank and getting it done! π
I am kinda behind schedule today because every time I looked at my tablet (where I consult my to-do list) the cat took it as a personal insult and insisted I pay attention to him instead.
Perusing the terms of service my phone is requiring me to agree to after the update.
Under the section about how they safeguard my data, it reads:
We take data protection seriously. We have put in place physical and technical safeguards to keep the information we collect secure. We also take appropriate measures, in compliance with applicable law, to ensure that the personal information collected by third parties remains secure. However, please note that although we take reasonable steps to protect your information, no website, Internet transmission, computer system, or wireless connection is completely secure.
Just signed up for DoorDash yesterday to try to diversify our income a little.
Got an email from them this morning. I opened it in neomutt to read that my account had been suspended "due to [my] repeated lateness violations", which is impressive considering I haven't even done a shift yet.
When I tried to show the email to Katy on my phone, the email instead read as a generic welcome letter.
It turns out that the plain text and and HTML parts of the email are completely different.
Yo WTF?? Don't attack mods! That's not how you make Fedi better.
I've heard folx are targeting my friend @markwyner. Don't fucking do that. He's a nice guy, and he's doing thankless work modding for a large server.
If you chase the mods off those servers, then they're going to be wide open to the same fucking Nazis that you're harassing him about. That's like shooting Fedi in the damned foot.
I *really* hope none of my followers are responsible for this. If y'all follow me, then you should know better. For real. I'm embarrassed.
Note: if you want to do something good today, shower Mark with some love for being so quick to ban this Naziβtwice. He even closed mas.to's registrations after I asked. That's an example of a good mod, and I'm glad he's here π
Yeah, a large part of the reason Iβm active on here in the first place is because the moderationβs generally both quick and good. That takes work, and Iβm glad weβve got people who care doing it. @markwyner
@gabrielesvelto I agree he doesn't deserve being attacked.
But he is not a hero either. This whole episode could have been prevented with closed registrations. Do we really have to pretend someone is a hero if they stopped something that was totally preventable, _after_ the damage was done?
@heinragas this troll was deliberately trying to sow discord between instances, I think it's important we don't play in their hands.
Not being a moderator I don't know what's the tradeoff WRT registrations and how much work does it entail to review them, so I'm not qualified to comment on that.
How much you want to bet half the people attacking him are either (tr,f)ash themselves or being egged on by one of the 'brighter' (tr,f)ash accounts that LARP left to stir the pot or fuck with people?
IMO, if you can't be civil with a mod, maybe you shouldn't be on Fedi, full stop - but I can see extending a little grace to somebody having a bad day.
@gabrielesvelto In general, I agree. But I do think it is right and necessary to encourage errant servers to improve their behaviour. Every "leak" makes every other server less safe, after all.
And yes, reviewing signup requests is super easy. With abuse reports there's a lot of context you need to investigate, and that's simply not present in a signup request. Of course, this no guarantee that there will be no more abuse, but experience learns that it does help immensely.
thank you both for leading by example what distributed, collaborative moderation looks like. There's a lot of newer fedinerds, myself included, who set up servers for their communities not fully knowing what they'd got themselves into. I think high-visibility, active folks like you are crucial to the health of the fediverse just by existing and being your good selves. I'm grateful for you.
They're parrots. They have no idea why they're saying what they're saying, they just see others like Trump and Musk say it and instinctively have to say it too.
Asking people what they mean is 75% of a software engineer's job. If commenters don't know that or can't stand the existential horror of it, they maybe should stay away from videos about computer stuff altogether.
FWIW I do occasionally ban folks from commenting on the channel, mostly when they're using violent rhetoric or objectifying me (or others). For the most part those comments get sent to the "holding area" thanks to word matches, where I can then ban folks without anyone seeing the comment.
yeah, stupid people have never been rare, but I think the contemporary firehose-of-soundbytes meme culture has engendered a vast pool of chronically overstimulated folks who honestly have *no idea* why they believe any of the things they believe, and have no tools to even begin addressing the question.
When the only cases in your switch statement are "I agree" or "I'm mad", being asked to define yourself is probably one of those divide-by-zero things that just leads to a kernel panic.
Reminds me of a Twitter exchange where a woman complained to a brand about supporting BLM and they kept asking what her issue with Bureau of Land Management was. She kept responding that they knew what she meant but refused to elaborate.
I feel reasonably confident in guessing they want a reaction (preferably a fight), not a response.
I also have to wonder if this is of a piece with those folks who regard "asking for clarification" as aggressive. An especially tedious behavior in supervisors. (I've heard two unrelated reports of this nonsense lately, & I have to wonder if it is becoming a thing.)
What I love is that there is some true honesty in asking them to elaborate. On most occasions when a person uses 'woke' to describe something, the wokeee will genuinely not really know what the person is specifically criticising. So to ask them to explain is quite honest but with a little side dish of a troll-ette which is a perfect combination.
Auf YouTube findest du die angesagtesten Videos und Tracks. AuΓerdem kannst du eigene Inhalte hochladen und mit Freunden oder gleich der ganzen Welt teilen.
one of my favorite things in all of tech is how Debian has managed to survive for so long with the very democratic style of government they have. It isnβt always perfect, but itβs a lot more like the Star Trek:TNG future I thought we were heading for.
I've been thinking and now I get it. You don't need to buy it, or subscribe to it. You don't have to have an account or give permission to share your data with our few selected partners. You don't need to repurchase it every time it's updated and you don't need a new CPU for a latest update. You don't even need to buy a special computer to run it. AND THATS WOKE!!!1!!one
@Veronica Explains @Dev Albino People can be deprogrammed. It's not easy, but it can be done.* The best way to do it is to break the thought-stopping patterns that have generally been imposed on them. This seems like a really effective way to do it.
I decided recently that arbitrarily labelling people or things as "woke" is nothing more than a modern variation on lazily throwing about a "communist" label.
As in it's not enough to just say there's people or policies they don't agree with or having preferences, it needs to sound like an "insult" either by adopting an existing word or making one up.
Along with "libtard", "leftist" and a bunch of other words they can't articulate when challenged on explaining their reasoning.
@thejikz Itβs not because theyβre cowards as much as itβs because they donβt know what they mean because they heard it from a person or organization that does their thinking for them.
many are just repeating other people's talking points, so i don't think they speak from conviction. this question can help deprogram whatever's going on there.
same thing happens to friends/acquaintances of mine who share βshockβ or βhorrorβ news items with me that have a racist or fearmongering undertone. I ask them why they are sharing this news item with me, and what their view on the story is. Usually they donβt reply backβ¦
Years ago, I got into it with someone at work for saying βAll lives matter.β I asked if, since all lives matter, doesnβt that mean that Black lives matter? He agreed but couldnβt bring himself to say it without saying ββ¦but all lives matter.β Finally I asked if he was willing to say βBlack lives matter as much as white lives.β He stammered and looked embarrassed. Waved his hand and said I was trying to make him look bad. Good illustration of what βall lives matterβ really meant, though.
They won't say, because woke means being aware of and against systematic oppression. Someone who defended their client said that was what woke meant using lots of liberty to do so.
I think everyone deserves to subscribe to the ideology, philosophy, or religion of their choice. It would be tremendously efficient if they would just plainly state in their bios which ones they subscribe to. For example, people could just state "subscriber to Critical Race Theory, adherent of Bell Hooks"
In the name of "fighting wokeness," Republicans have been banning thousands of books all over the country, including several award-winning books famous for explaining to children why the Holocaust was a bad thing.
So when they say "woke" they mean "not a Nazi."
And just like that, you know both why it makes them so mad and why they don't want to explain it.
I can see why they would delete such comments: Fox "News" seems to use "woke" as a general insult devoid of meaning. Once they realize that (a) all they meant was "I don't like it", and (b) how much effort it would take to explain why they don't like it, they delete the comment rather than spending hours trying to critique some software that they couldn't figure out how to use. Besides, maybe they don't want to admit to watching Fox News.
They want to treat registered sex offenders as outcasts forever βDid a sex offender write that code? Ew, avoid that software. Is a sex offender giving a software talk? You are unsafe in that room.
More FUD from shills of Microsoft, which is in its death throes. Trying to smear FOSS contributors. (like RMS?)
People who can't stand a bit of controversy, who are led by media, by partial quotes taken out of context, shouldn't join any movement that goes against incumbent powers. π§
Yeah, same, thank you. No sociology degree here, but I count myself reasonably well educated, & I find all those buzzwords disembodied from their practical referrents to be, shall we say, less than compelling.
@redti It is worth noting that this is a very common tactic: deliberately using opaque language to attempt to confuse one's critics into submission and then claiming victory by default.
@redti How are "cancel actions" supposed to "expose" this?
How are the people who are saying, for instance, that the LGBTQIA+ community should be allowed to exist the ones who are causing division, and not the group who are trying to exterminate them?
I think the convention is "prep time" for a recipe is before heat is applied "cook time" is after heat is applied and "total time" is the sum of both, plus any required rest time between or after cook.
But, I do agree that can be annoying, because it's not the same as my expectations.
Upgraded my Gitea* server this morning and had a moment of panic when I thought I'd lost admin access. Turns out they just changed where the admin interface lives.
* I meant to switch to Forgejo, but never got around to it and then they went hard fork, so it's more complicated now.
Some money that I was expecting a while ago finally hit our account. We can make rent after all. Finally my anxiety can start ratcheting down for a bit.
So for some reason two of my apps are suddenly switched to French. It wasn't a big deal as I can read it, but it was annoying.
I had my system languages set as follows:
English (Canada)
English (United States)
French (Canada)
I assume it was because these apps didn't have localisations for my first choice, but I don't know why they instead jumped to the third option, skipping the second.
What it's always meant. "What we don't have yet." In the 80s when we had expert systems based on knowledge representation, we called them "AI" but talked about "real AI" as "what we don't have yet." So, LLMs aren't "real AI", so we (um, some other people, not actually me) lust after the mythical beast, which may never exist.
@Judy Anderson To me, the very concept seems inescapably like an oxymoron, unless we play strange games with the definitions of the words "artificial" and "real". That said, I really wouldn't know how to define the word "intelligence" in the first place, so it may be a moot point anyway.
For the first time in a wile I've had he mental bandwidth to put a nice dent in my to-do list today. I'm very happy about this. Don't know if it'll last, but I guess I'll ride the high while I can.
5 months after escaping my abuser, I'm finally getting started w a lawyer who can help protect me & my toddler. The sliding scale fee is $200/hr, which will add up to thousands each month. We also need a car & housing support.
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I'm launching my newsletter, and you can sign up here!
https://buttondown.com/impureleftist
There will be 1 free post each week, plus 2 only for subscribersβone of which will feature the Anarchist Book Club.
No donations yet this week π DV survivor & toddler in need of help with legal fees (due every 2 weeks), housing, & moreβabout to hit the SNAP cliff w the shutdown.
Expecting my 1st legal bill to be issued on Tues 10/28 & will be due on receipt. It may be as high as $4k since we are just getting started so covers the initial stage @ 200/hr. I have about $1k on hand including this week's donations. PLEASE keep boosting & supporting so I don't have a pause in legal support!
Got my first legal bill for the DV family court lawyer. The good news is it's less than I feared, under $2k! The bad news is I'm still $522 short & it's due now. Plz donate/boost so my lawyer can keep goingβwe're making fantastic progress!!
Bad news: restraining order denied again, meaning it won't be safe to return to our apartment. $1800 needed for lawyer by Tues 11/11, and we'll need several thousand more to safely relocate.
The spoonie assistant I had lined up fell through. So looking again to hire someone with executive function and a driver's license to help me:
β’ Move - pack, organize and decide set up new place. β’ Grocery shop, food prep, life management at home. β’ Accompanying on appts so I don't get lost and confused when mentally spent. β’ Life admin - filling out forms, phone calls (visual/auditory processing issues)
$20/hr 5-10hr/wk #Guelph Boosts appreciated. Need help asap. #fediHire
βοΈ if you're interested in helping with part of this list, but not all, still hit me up. If it takes a few ppl to fill all the gaps, that works too. Maybe even better as diversity in systems also means more resilience. We're stronger when we work together. πͺ
I... didn't know this could be a job, but it makes absolutely beautiful sense that it is. In a different continent I would try to get a friend of mine in touch.
@bovaz aw thanks. Feel free to steal the idea. We desperately need to connect folks around this, both the need for a lil extra help and those needing a bit more cash.
I am not in and/or from the area so can't really help you with this but maybe someone at the uni knows of a bulletin board for just this sort of thing. Good luck
@diverdutch I am going to try and say this gently because I know your intention is kind:
Please keep in mind context, I am profoundly not ok, and have massive cognitive problems that limit my ability to chase down leads like this. In fact the role I am trying to hire would be to follow through on leads like this BECAUSE I CAN'T. And that is both terrifying and infuriating. Getting unsolicited advice on how to solve it, instead of actual help is deeply painful. So pls don't.
@diverdutch Have you had contact with the Community Living Association, the Acquired Brain Injury clinic at St Joseph's Hospital, or the Community Resource Centre? Are you good for phone conversations?
@quoidian @diverdutch I am going to point you back to the toot you replied to, where I tried to gently say how frustrating unsolicited advice is in my circumstances.
I don't need suggestions of other orgs to try, I have six orgs I am working with already. It's confusing and exhausting.
I am looking to hire a human for the things listed on the original post.
@diverdutch No problem. Those were groups that had social workers with exposure to helpers, and possibly able to suggest candidates in the Guelph area. Good luck in your search.
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Amazon has invented a new kind of labor travesty: the chickenized reverse centaur. That's a worker who has to foot the bill to outfit a work environment where they nevertheless have no autonomy (chickenization) and whose body is conscripted to act as a peripheral for a digital system (reverse centaur):
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
"Chickenization" is a term of labor economics, inspired by the brutal state of the poultry industry, where three giant processing companies have divided up the market so that every chicken farmer has just one place where they can sell their birds. To sell your birds to one of these plants, you have to give them total control over your operation. They sell you the baby chicks, they tell you what kind of coop to build and what lightbulbs to install and when they should be on.
They tell you which vet to use and which medicines can be administered to your birds. They tell you what to feed your birds and when to feed them. They design your coop and tell you who is allowed to maintain it. The one thing they don't tell you is how much you'll be paid for your birds - that's something you only discover when it's time to sell them, and the sum you're offered is based on the packer's region-wide intelligence on how you and all your competitors are faring.
It is calculated to be the smallest amount to allow you to roll over your loans and go into more debt to grow more birds for them.
At its root, "chickenization" is about de-risking, cloaked in the language of entrepreneurship. Chicken farmers assume all the risk for the poultry packers, but they're told that they're their own bosses.
The only way in which a chicken farmer resembles an entrepreneur is that they have to bear all the risk of failure - without having any upside for success. Packers can (and do) secretly decide to experiment at farmers' expense, ordering some of their farmers to vary their feeding, light and veterinary routines to see if they can eke new efficiencies out of the process.
If that works, the surplus is reaped by the packer. If that fails, the losses are borne by the farmer, who is never told that they were funding an experiment.
Amazon makes extensive use of chickenization in its many commercial arrangements, tightly defining the working conditions of many "self-employed" workers, like the clickwork "turkers" who power the Mechanical Turk service.
But the most chickenized of all the people in Amazon's network of cutouts and arm's-length arrangements are the "entrepreneurs" who are lured into starting a "Delivery Service Platform" (DSP) business.
To start a DSP, you borrow lots of money to buy vans that you outfit to Amazon's exacting specifications, filling them with interior and exterior sensors and cameras, painting them with Amazon livery.
You kit them out with shelving and other infrastructure to Amazon's exacting specification. Then, you hire workers - giving Amazon a veto over who you hire - and you train them - using Amazon's training materials. You sign them up for Amazon's platforms, which monitor and rank those workers, and then you get paid either $0.10 per parcel, or maybe $0.50 per parcel, or sometimes $0.00 per parcel, all at Amazon's sole discretion.
That's a pretty chickenized arrangement. But what about reverse centaurs?
In automation theory, a "centaur" is someone who is assisted by some automation system (they are a fragile human head being assisted by a tireless machine). Therefore, a *reverse* centaur is a person who has been conscripted to serve as a peripheral for a machine, a human body surmounted and directed by a brute and uncaring head that not only uses them, but uses them *up*.
The drivers that DSPs hire are reverse centaurs. Using various forms of automation, Amazon drives these workers to work at a dangerous, humiliating and unsustainable pace, setting and enforcing not just quotas, but also scripting where drivers' eyes must be pointed, how they must accelerate and decelerate, what routes they take, and more.
These edicts are enforced by the in-van and on-body automation systems that direct and discipline workers, tools that labor activists call "electronic whips":
The chickenized owners of DSPs *must* enforce the edicts Amazon brings down on their reverse centaur workers - Amazon can terminate any DSP, at any time, for any reason or no reason, stranding an "independent entrepreneur" with heavily mortgaged rolling stock that can only be used to deliver Amazon packages...
...Long term leases on garages and parking lots, liability for driver accidents caused by automation systems that punish drivers for e.g. braking suddenly if someone steps into the road, and massive loans.
So when Amazon directs a DSP to fire or discipline a worker, that worker is in trouble. Amazon has hybridized chickenization and reverse centaurism, creating a chickenized reverse centaur, a new kind of labor travesty never seen before.
In "Driven Down," a new report from the DAIR Institute, authors Adrienne Williams, Alex Hanna and Sandra Barcenas draw on interviews with DSP drivers and Williams's own experience driving for Amazon to document the state of the Chickenized Reverse Centaur. It's not good:
"Driven Down" vividly describes - often in drivers' own words - how the life of a chickenized reverse centaur is one of wage theft, privacy invasions, humilation and on-the-job physical risks, for drivers and the communities they drive in.
DSP drivers interact with multiple automation systems - at least *nine* apps that monitor, score and discipline them.
These apps are supposed to run on employer-supplied phones, but these phones are frequently broken, and drivers face severe punishment if these apps aren't all running during their shifts.
As a result, drivers routinely install these apps on their own phones, and must give them broad, far-reaching permissions, such that drivers' own phones are surveilling them for Amazon 24/7, whether or not they're on the clock. It's not just DSP owners who are chickenized - it's also drivers, footing the bill for their own electronic whips.
First and foremost, these apps tell the drivers where to go and how to get there. Drivers are dispatched to hundreds of stops per day, on a computer-generated route that is not vetted or sanity-checked by a human before it is non-negotiably handed to a driver. Famously, plotting an efficient route among many points is one of the most insoluble computing problems, the so-called "traveling salesman" problem:
But it turns out that there *is* an optimal solution to the traveling salesman problem: get a computer to make a bizarre and dangerous approximation of the optimal route, and then blame and fine workers when it doesn't work. This doesn't optimize the route, but it does shift all the costs of a suboptimal route to workers.
Crucially, Amazon trusts its computer-generated routes, based on map data, over the word of drivers. For example, drivers are often directed to make "group stops" - where the driver parks the van and then delivers to multiple addresses at once (for example, at an apartment complex or office block). Amazon's mapping service assumes that addresses that are in the same complex or development are close together, even when they are *very* distant.
If a driver dares to move and re-park their van to deliver parcels to distant addresses, the app punishes them for making an unauthorized positional adjustment. If a driver attempts to deliver all the parcels *without* moving the van, they are penalized for taking too long. Even if drivers report the mapping error, it persists, resulting in strings of infractions, day after day.
When drivers fail to make quota, the DSP's per-parcel payout is reduced. DSPs whose drivers perfectly obey the (irrational, impossible) orders of Amazon's apps get $0.50 per parcel delivered. If drivers fall short of the apps' expectations, the per parcel-rate can fall to $0.10, or, in some cases, zero.
This provides a powerful incentive to DSPs to pressure drivers to engage in unsafe practices if the alternative would displease the app.
Drivers are penalized for sudden braking and swerving, for example, but are also penalized for missing quota, which puts drivers in the impossible position of having to drive as quickly as possible but also not to swerve or brake if a sudden traffic hazard pops up. In one absurd tale, a driver describes how they were shifted to an electric van that did regenerative braking when they released the accelerator.
The app expected drivers to slow down by releasing the accelerator, not by touching the brakes, but this meant that the van's brake lights never switched on. When a driver slowed at a yellow light, they were badly rear-ended by a following UPS truck, whose driver had assumed the Amazon DSP driver was going to rush the light (because the van's brake lights didn't light up).
Meeting quota means that drivers are also not able to stop for bathroom breaks or to take car of other personal hygiene matters. This is bad enough when it means peeing in a bottle, but it's even worse when the only way to take care of period-related matters is to go into the back of the van - where cameras record everything you do - and manage things there.
Drivers are told many inconsistent things about those cameras. Some drivers have been told that the footage is only reviewed after an accident or complaint, but when drivers *do* get into accidents or have complaints lodged against them, they are often fired or disciplined without anyone reviewing the footage. Meanwhile, drivers are sometimes punished for things the cameras have recorded even when there was no complaint or accident.
The existence of all that empirical evidence of things happening in and outside an Amazon DSP van makes little to no difference to drivers' employment fairness. When a malfunctioning seatbelt sensor insists that a driver has removed their seatbelt while driving, 80+ times in a single shift, the driver struggled to get their docked wages or lost jobs back.
When a driver swerved to avoid an oncoming big rig whose driver had fallen asleep and drifted across the media, the driver was penalized - the driver this happened to had his score in "Mentor" (one of the many apps) docked from 850 to 650. Amazon won't tell drivers what their Mentor scores mean, but many drivers - and DSP owners - believe than anything less than a perfect score will result in punishment or termination.
Attaining and maintaining a perfect score is an impossible task, because Amazon will not disclose what drivers are expected to do - it will only penalize them when they fail to do it. Take the photos that Amazon drivers are expected to snap of parcels after they are delivered. The criteria for these photos is incredibly strict - and also not disclosed.
Drivers are penalized for having their hands or shoes or reflections in the image, for capturing customers or their pets, for capturing the house-number. They aren't allowed to photograph shoes that are left on the doormat. Drivers share tips with one another about how to take a picture without losing points, but it's a moving target.
Among drivers, there's a (likely correct) belief that Amazon will not tell them how the apps are generating their scores out of fear that if drivers knew the scoring rubric, they'd start to game it. This is a widespread practice within the world of content moderation and spamfighting, where security practitioners who would normally reject the idea of "security through obscurity" out of hand suddenly embrace secrecy-dependent security measures:
All this isn't just dangerous and dehumanizing, it's also impoverishing. Drivers who get downranked by these imperious and unaccountable and unexplained algorithms have their hours cut or get fired altogether. The apps set a quota that can't possibly be reached if drivers take their mandated (and unpaid) 30 minute lunch and two 15-minute breaks (drivers who miss quota twice are automatically terminated). This time is given over to unpaid labor.
> Drivers are not paid for their 30 minute lunch. A full-time employee working an 8 to 10 hour shift would be working either 4 or 5 days out of each week. At $20 an hour, that is two hours a week for four-day employees, resulting in $40 of unpaid labor a week, $160 a month, almost $2,000 a year.
Drivers are also assigned "homework" - videos they are required watch and simulator exercises they are required to complete as remediation for their real or imagined infractions. This, too, is unpaid, mandatory work. Drivers are required to attend "stand up" meetings at the start of their shifts, and this is also often unpaid work.
Amazon makes a big show of "listening to drivers," but they're never heard. A driver who reported being held at gunpoint by literal Nazis who objected to having their parcels delivered by a Jew had his complaints ignored, and those violent, armed Nazi customers continued to get their parcels delivered.
Even modest requests go unanswered. Drivers for one DSP begged for porta-toilets in the parking lot, rather than having to waste time (and miss quota) legging it to a distant bathroom. They were ignored, and all 50 drivers continue to share a single toilet.
But - thanks to chickenization - none of this is Amazon's problem. It's all the problem of a chickenized DSP "entrepreneur" who serves as a useful accountability sink for Amazon and who can be bankrupted at a moment's notice should they fail to do Amazon's precise bidding.
There's one bright spot here, though: the National Labor Relations Board has brought a case in California seeking to have Amazon held to be a "joint employer" of those reverse centaurs behind the wheels of those vans:
Amazon faces NLRB claims of βoverwhelming controlβ over contract drivers while Teamsters secure new wins at Whole Foods distributor UNFI, signaling union momentum and potential labor cost pressures across Amazonβs logistics ecosystem.
This is the very last residue of the NLRB's authority, the rest having been drained away by Trump as part of Project 2025. If they prevail, it will open the door to drivers suing Amazon for unfair labor practices under both federal and state law - and in California and New York, that labor law just got a *lot* tougher for Amazon:
The chickenized reverse centaur is a new circle of labor hell, a genuinely innovative way of making workers' lives worse in order to extract more billions for one of the most profitable companies in history.
@krupo The "chicken industry" in the entire civilised world is something YOU DO NOT WANT to look too closely into... ...least you intend on becoming a #vegetarian and an animal rights activist.
infosec - CW: potential malicious link (obfuscated)
So Katy got a scam text claiming to be Canada Post with an underliverable package. I'm in the process of gathering information to send a report to their registrar's abuse department, but they're doing something clever to cover their tracks that I haven't fully been able to unravel.
For context, here is the link (with spaces added to prevent it from turning into an actual link and being accidentally clicked):
When opened from Safari on her phone, it loads a realistic looking phishing site, but when opened from any other browser, it returns an empty (0 bytes) page. I assume this is to hamper attempts to investigate abuse claims (though the domain name is already pretty incriminating).
Since there doesn't appear to be any kind of unique identifier, I assumed this to be some kind of spear phishing attack that was based on her browser's User-Agent string, but when I tell curl to mimic it, I still don't get a result.
infosec - CW: potential malicious link (obfuscated)
Sensitive content
There are ways to determine what sort of browser is actually being used, even if the User-Agent string is set to pretend to be a different browser.
For a while, Disney+ was using this to make sure you weren't trying to watch it on a Linux computer.
I don't know what genius thought that was a good idea, but after some months they must have realized they were punching themselves in the nuts for no reason and stopped blocking Linux usage.
Isaac Ji Kuo
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe • • •Sensitive content
A trit.
What's really a trip is balanced ternary. It's so elegant it almost hurts.
Instead of trit values being 0, 1, and 2, the trit values are -1, 0, and 1. Each range of numbers is naturally balanced around 0, and multiplying a number by -1 is simply multiplying each digit by -1.
Jonathan Lamothe
in reply to Isaac Ji Kuo • •Jonathan Lamothe
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe • •Isaac Ji Kuo
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe • • •Sensitive content
It works the same as in decimal, except there's no need for a sign on either the mantissa or the exponent.
Base 2 floating point is a bit different because it can skip the initial 1 on the mantissa (it's always a 1, except for the edge case of zero; there needs to be exceptions for dealing with zero).
Jonathan Lamothe
in reply to Isaac Ji Kuo • •Digital Mark Ξ» βοΈ πΉ π½
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe • • •Sensitive content
A tit! Er, trit.
So instead of counting 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, like a normal person, it's 1, 3, 9, 27, 81.
I'm too binary-conditioned to use that even as a jokey thing. Making a VM to try it out would be hard.