The Doctor

Not in California. Been trying since I moved out here, and so far both landlords (the house we rent got sold to another investor when our original landlord retired) categorically refused the solar power upgrade. Fought that battle for two years with the first landlord, about a year with the second one. Both times it came down to “shut up or move out.”

I was writing code for Google Glass that implemented facial recognition. A friend of mine suffered a TBI in an automobile wreck and developed partial facial prosopagnosia as a result. I was basically writing software that would recognize faces within 15 feet of the wearer and compare it to images of their contacts in their Google account, and would throw up an AR subtitle identifying the person on a match. Not too long after I filed the developer applications and outlined my project, the Glass project flatlined.

Yes. And the big G doesn’t care. If they have to lie and say it’s abusive and a violation of the ToS, they’ll say it is. They’re a megacorp, while Invidious is a small open source project.

Things escalated, folks. They got a C&D:

https://torrentfreak.com/youtube-orders-invidious-privacy-software-to-shut-down-in-7-days-230609/

Start backing up the source repos now.

A thousand dollar filter mask. Not difficult to see who the intended market segment is.

They’ve already fucked the RSS feeds.

Yep. And, as it turned out, lots of folks* thought that was a funny thing and loved it. This is the guy who GG’d himself into the CEO position.

• Probably sock puppets, tbh.

He’s the CEO, though. Kinda hard not to because he sets policy.

I still don’t think I should have told them I was working on a software prosthetic for it.

It would be significantly cheaper than the cost of power in a lot of places. PG&E is fucking us over out here but because nobody around here owns their own house, we can’t go PV. I’ve been talking to my neighbors about it because they’re getting screwed too. Legally speaking, though, we’re tied up.

They can vote against the ammosexuals all they want. Many politicians get money from firearms companies, though, on both sides of the fence, and they all know which side their bread is buttered on.

Not owning where one lives makes it highly difficult to migrate to solar power because landlords often don’t let you set it up. Definitely the case out here in the Bay Area.

Not having them pretty much makes Debian a non-starter for many home users. It’s a thing that one really only runs into when they get serious about using Linux.

As BBSes go (because that’s how the WELL started), 2700 active users is “holy shit” levels of success. That it’s still online nearly 40 years later is unheard of.

And/or, private equity is revving up the bulldozers to strip mine each and every last bit of value out of it before they let it collapse.

I got to try messing around with a Hololens a couple of years back. The hand tracking wasn’t perfect but it was pretty cool. It read my “typing in the air” gestures to set a WPA2 key very accurately (much to my surprise). The parameters of the demo I was playing around in (picking up and moving virtual packages around in a model city to control drones flying around that part of the convention center) was pretty cool.

Several such solutions already exist. Problem is, only folks like us mess around with it. Non-geeks, not so much.

Google happened to it. Right when some of us started doing practical things with it. Still haven’t forgiven them for that.

Thanks for the link. I didn’t know about this. Added to my collection of resources!

Acceptable? How about necessary for most students. Books for a semester should not cost more than living on campus and a meal plan.