TWIG 608: Real Men Don't Use Allen Wrenches

Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…

What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!

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I only have one thing to say…
Britches :rofl:
I love it. Use it, wear them.
Oh yeah the discussion on where we get our news was good as well.
I use Twitter with some carefully curated feeds like BBC ABC (Aussie) Le Monde, NPR, Reuters, NASA and ESA to name a few.
If I need to drill down I can go via the link.

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Twitter bbc nasa spacex esa reuters and bunch of journalists.

Podcast twit+ bbc and some nerd and music stuff

Local news
YLE it’s our tax supported broadcasting company I use their app to get accurate current information.
Verde green party think Tank
If something interesting happens locally I read the local newspaper.

I get my news from NOZ (Neue osnabrücke Zeitung), ZDF and RTL/Sat.1

Tech news mainly from The Register and Thurrott.com.

I get most of my news from Twitter and a local news site here in Mongolia. I used to be a news hound, but for the past 4-5 years I’ve really focused my news consumption on things that I really care about. That generally comes from Twitter.

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Yeah I hate to admit it, but Twitter is a pretty good news signaling system.

I use Nuzzle to scrape my twitter feed and find popular stories. That works well.

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Yeah I don’t think the “southerner” in me will ever leave my heart and day-to-day vernacular. :laughing:
THANKS for watching

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I have some work to do this morning, but I’m going to fire up my new Washington Post subscription to see if I find it useful.

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I get mine from my Google news feed or my Apple news feed.

Google News feed, Twitter, Reddit.

To go into a little more depth, I read the NOZ, which is our regional newspaper, which also pulls in national and international stories from the dpa (Deutsche Presse Agentur). I watch the news in the evening either on RTL (trashy commercial network), ARD or ZDF (more conservative channels paid for by the Rundfunkbeitrag (TV license), run through Gebühreneinzugszentrale der öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunkanstalten in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland and called GEZ for short).

Interestingly, all of these channels news programmes are professional and fairly unbiased (you don’t really get any political swing to their reporting, other than they hate the Alternative für Deutschland (extreme right) and the Linke (extreme left)). Everything else gets about equal coverage, when one party makes a big blooper, it is reported more-or-less the same on all channels.

The reporters are calm sensible and, well, professional. There is no screaming, no shouting, just respectful, but often hard, debate with politicians or experts. They ask the, often, tougher questions and are respected for it. If the interviewee tries to avoid the question, they keep their calm and go back and try and herd them into giving an answer, again and again. Just like British news reporting back when I was a kid.

The rhetoric and shouting matches that seem to make up Fox and CNN wouldn’t be tolerated over here.

Interestingly, the news channels over here seem to be aimed more at business professionals and are often left running in business common areas or recreation areas (muted). Again, it is calm and professional reporting for the most part.

My Twitter feed is more aimed at tech journalists and security experts, with a few friends in the mix. I don’t use any other social network. I would say twit.community is my social network.

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Just listening to the section on ML and AI. I totally agree with @gigastacey , the law seems, at first glance, to be sane and put in some much needed controls that seem to have gone AWOL over the last 2 decades.

In fact, it isn’t really asking for much more than companies required of new computer systems in the 70s through 90s, only that was internal testing and auditing, before a product was allowed “into the wild”. When we received an update to our ERP or accounting system, the key users from each department went through a battery of tests and the system ran in parallel to the old system for a month or a quarter, until it was allowed to be used live.

These days, with many products, it seems to be throw the spaghetti against the wall and see what sticks, if it breaks, go back and change it. Gone are the days of properly testing and ensuring something works, before it goes out the door.

A possible exception, at least in Europe, is probably financial reporting and accounting software, which usually has to be certified by the national finance/treasury department, before it can be released. A previous employer worked with the US based cloud ERP supplier as they were busy getting their offering certified for use in Europe. The ERP side was fine, but the bookkeeping side of the business had to go through a whole battery of tests and certification, before it could be used in Germany.

Their developers had to put in a lot of effort to get things running to take into account local accounting practices, then to get that certified.

That was “just” a bookkeeping system (okay, the German Finanzamt is very interested that such systems are 100% accurate, for tax purposes), but for systems that affect more people, more directly, why shouldn’t there be accounts and balances in place to ensure they do no harm?

As to @JeffJarvis talking about GDPR, no, Jeff, as an EU citizen, I find it works very well. A lot of companies have been caught with their pants down and have faced fines, a vast majority of those prosecuted were “local”, i.e. EU based companies.

What is interesting is, they make little news, outside the local tech press. Why? Because they usually report responsibly, the work closely with the authorities to investigate what happened, change their practices to ensure it won’t happen again and, because they have helped and changed their ways, they get a reduced fine as a result.

Who gets reported in the press? Large, international, mainly Big-IT, companies that fail to report within the time limits, companies that throw lawyers at the problems, in the hope that the cost of the lawyers + fines is less than actually mending their ways and “doing the right thing”.

And, to FLoC, (keeping the posts deliberately separated by topic, as they are relatively long).

If FLoC is semi-anonymized and shouldn’t be used for tracking, why bother at all? Surely profiling the site I am currently viewing will provide just as accurate results as some random number that will, supposedly, keep changing.

Profile the site or the page I am visiting, the advertiser will probably give a more relevant ad than so-called personalized advertising. All I’ve seen from “personalized” advertising is ads for products that don’t interest me at all (Twitter) or for products I’ve already bought and I am unlikely to buy again in the next couple of years (Amazon: bought a dishwasher? Here are another dozen for those other kitchens in your house! Bought a high-end smartphone? Here are another dozen smartphones that won’t be of interest to you any more!).

For me, that sort of advertising is plain fraud. Amazon knows that I have bought a dishwasher and the average homeowner buys 1 dishwasher every 10 - 15 years or so, so getting advertisers to pay to show me yet more dishwashers for the 3 months after purchase is a waste of my time and pure fraud for the advertisers.

Twitter’s ads are even worse, it only shows me ads for products that even a brain-damaged amoeba would never consider!

Agreed. My background is Critical National Infrastructure, and this is what they are targeting I assume. The infrastructure that society relies on, Texas being a recent example. @Leo only really mentioned autonomous cars.

This has always necessitated strict adherence to process. My last job before I left was replacing a UK-wide CNI control system. Even with all the process, switching the old one off and turning the new one on was nail-biting :slightly_smiling_face: Many of the suppliers we used were starting to push solutions with black-box algorithms/AI.

On news, Twitter too. I’m a big user of lists, giving me info on areas that I am interested in. Watch very little TV news now. I read BBC, NYT and local Florida news, which is the local Graham Media Group TV station (lots of clickbait).

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I used to work for Plessey in the 80s.

Working with traffic control systems, radar, nuclear power plant construction and missile systems, they were very fastidious about the quality of the software and the tests it had to go through, before it could be released into production.

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Yup. I prob still have some boiler control code running in a nuclear power station somewhere :slightly_smiling_face: Big deployments was what I was doing before I retired. The full-scale test harnesses are what I liked. You could do deployment dry-runs again and again until you got it nailed.

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Good for you Ant. It’s good paper. Their editorial/opinion section carries a range of opinions.

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There are amazing online resources available in many (most?) public libraries. The Petaluma library (Sonoma County Library System) has online access to most if not all of the major US newspapers and many regional ones as well as well as papers from France, Great Britain and elsewhere in the world. Just like my home library in Illinois. It’s not always the easiest to read but it is there. Also, the library has Overdrive, which gives you access to over 3000 magazines from around the world. Ant - bet you will find some great tech, photo and health/fitness oriented magazines. Even foreign version of US magazines that are different in content and tone. My library has a similar service from a competitor. You can probably save articles for future use. Hope this helps. Maybe Twit can find space for some library related content for all the listeners/viewers that may not know what is available from their taxes. BTW Axios is a great website for news. Short and to the point.

nor should it!! BTW, I thought Stacey was gonna need medical assistance when you said Britches!!! :joy:

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Took me a second to figure out what she was laughing at :joy::man_facepalming:t5:

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