• 3 Posts
  • 51 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • Just built my first fully dedicated Linux machine. Still keeping my old Windows desktop around purely because I play League of Legends and they use a kernel level anticheat, so it won’t run on VM.

    Fun fact, ever since Riot made it mandatory to install their rootkit if you want to play their games, every time I try to eject a flash drive, it says it can’t eject because it’s in use - even if I just plugged it in. And that’s super comforting.



  • This is super cool. Watched the talks from Max Brunsfeld, surprised this has been around since 2018 and I haven’t heard of it.

    I actually tried some complex parsing myself lately. I had a bunch of YAML I needed to maintain for various deployments in a CI/CD system. I really wanted to have one YAML template to generate the files, plus a file for each project with unique elements to be injected into that project’s generated YAML.

    Probably was more of an indication that we needed to clean up the overrides we were putting on top of our Helm charts, but I wanted a way to generate our lengthy override files without having to manually keep track of where the differences were between projects. And maybe even stage changes to deployment files for when new product versions are released.

    This is exciting. I’m going to look into Tree Sitter more and maybe try to contact the dev. It seems like it does everything I’m looking for, just for an entirely different use case.





  • I used to work for a company that did various kinds of biometric recognition. I unfortunately was paraded past these cameras many times for testing purposes, so my face was compromised many moons ago.

    We had two kinds of products we installed in airports. When looking at large crowds most airports wanted cameras that would monitor the flow of traffic, determining if there were any bottlenecks causing people to arrive at their gate (or baggage claim) after their luggage.

    The other product was facial recognition for identification purposes. These are the machines you have to stand right next to. There are various legal reasons airports did not want to use any crowd-level cameras for identification. They hadn’t obtained consent, but also, the low resolution per face would lead to many more false positives. It was also too costly.

    But we did have high def cameras installed in strategic locations at large music halls. These private companies were less concerned with privacy and more concerned with keeping banned individuals out of their property. In those cases, we registered faces of people who were kicked out for various reasons and ignored all other faces.

    My point I guess is twofold: first, you might not be facially tracked in as many places as you think you are. Second, eventually you will be and there’s not a whole lot we can do to stop it. For many years, Target has identified people with their payment card, used facial recognition to detect when they return to the store, and used crowd tracking to see where in the store you go (and sometimes they have even changed ad displays based on the demographics of people standing nearby).

    Mostly, you will be identified and tracked when there is financial incentive to do so.