if its harmful in some way to some person the “obvious” solution is to means test the entire population for their competency to vote or have sex? i dont own a samsung fridge, but okay sure. sign me up for some weird battery of invasive tests and write me out of life so Samsung can sell hardware and ads.
maybe samsung can even serve me some personalized ads based on my test results.
everyone in big tech is guided by “CAN we do this?” and never “SHOULD we do this?” and theyre totally unaccountable for all of it.
it doesnt matter who it hurts or how it hurts them. thats why they they do whatever they want.
and if something goes wrong, hey i know! lets just turn the screws even tighter on every man woman and child so Samsung can do whatever it wants.
Id tell you to go hell but it sounds like we’re already all in it.
im sorry if thats rude but it actually was the most polite thing i could come up with.
I'm not really talking about this fridge specifically, but generally vulnerable people making self-destructive decisions out of not understanding the world or of being manipulated.
I agree the test itself would probably be too much of a burden but it wouldn't necessarily tighten the screws. We'd have teenagers who pass and can start a business themselves or get married or whatever, along with adults who fail and are protected from fraud, sexual abuse, etc.
The way we currently do it is like apartheid. Assign rights based on some crude metric that's easy to test (race/age) instead of evaluating everyone individually.
Sounds reasonable to test them as well. You shouldn’t be allowed to build home appliances if you’re disabled to the degree you fail this test. Executives, other employees, etc.
if you think about it, the current advertising paradigm infers things about you, from cookies and trackers, from data brokers etc (to show you “relevant” ads.
and things you “like” or “follow” or comment on , or maybe even just making guesses at your race, job, income, sexual orientation, politics etc based on who youre “friends” with.
all of thats on the decline: social media engagement on legacy platforms is down, people are blocking cookies and or javascript. california is making an opt out tool for data brokers (and its going live in a month or two)
people have hours long conversations with chatgpt about things like what theyre working on. so it might know your job, talents, skills. things planning (aspirations) , things you asked it how to cook, or whats wrong with them medically. or maybe theyve dished to it about other personal stuff they thought was 100% in confidence up until now.
then now that its “private”, advertisers cant get backlash for showing ads next to controversial content, or people who are “supposed to be cancelled”. it removes a pressure point for accidentally (or deliberately) displaying their content somewhere its inappropriate or problematic for the brand— by hiding the interaction (and ads) in a “private” chat—
just for starters.
were at a point where publishers are nagging about our popup blockers and having hissy fits or refusing to load the page until their ads are whitelisted. so you know enough people are doing it to impact peoples business models now.
ill personly disable JS altogether for sites that do that but a lot of people just wont return.
its a dying media the way it exists.
so now all these ad providers (meta, google, twitter) are in on AI . and here comes openAI for all three of their lunches.
this just opened my eyes to what is at stake here and why its all being shoved down everyones throats. sure i use them, but i also have local models installed id drop them in an instant for if my chats were used to show me ads.
then just wait for ANY of these two entities to merge and overwhelm your social media feed with the next twenty years of ads full of junk the “AI” learned about you.
The people who use chatGPT or Claude are replacing Google searches with chat conversations. Google already has most of what you're talking about from queries, so they don't need to infer much.
These companies are in on AI because there was a rush to produce the first GAI, which would be immensely valuable. I think we'll see it shortly after the first fully self driving car.
tldr, it mines your public social media posts and maps your degree of connection to people who post “extremist” content (guilt by association) and then ties that to any internal private dirt the FBI has on you
evades 4th amendment, warrant, FISA types of reporting because its all stuff you chose to post publicly on one of these platforms.
I sometimes wonder the firm defintion(s) of 'public social media'
If you post a blog on blogspot or similar it seems the point is to be public.
(there could be settings there to make some things non public, I don't remember or know what is current)
If you post on a network that requires login to see the posts, is that public?
(is twitter / tumbler / fbook all indexed via google / available without login?)
If you post on a social network inside a group that requires approval to join, but is free - is that public?
If you post something behind a paywall, is that public?
If someone shares a photo of you that you DMed a person using a social network..
Snapchat makes things disappear, whatsapp advertises that even they can't see your bad behavior.
Did you have a reasonable expectation of privacy in these places?
One could argue that stolen photos, texts, books, movies that are posted on a social network are now public.
And then I think about the number of people who don't understand what is public and what can be seen by others, and I feel that our apps and hardware should bear some responsibility to remind people that tapping like or making a comment may feel intimate / 1 to 1, but you may be questioned one day very publicly about why you were voting for one kind of thing while giving thumbs up and praise comments to twinks from your official account.
Then I wonder what kind of hybrid social systems will be a thing in the future - some sort of encrypted 1 to 1 and 1 to groups thing.
It's not just stories like this, but companies scraping tinder profiles and sharing the pictures and such..
People's expectation of privacy and the horrors of that not being a thing will likely cause more and more migrations into privacy proxy identity avatar agents;
which will likely lead to less data for the big companies where the data knowledge is the gold.
great sales yeah (7bn+) but those dsp6 recalls on the fiesta cost ford about 2 billion.
id buy another one. (in manual.)
i dont know how many other gen5 fiesta owners would walk down the aisle with that car again tho
i think the dsp’s kind of cool. still have a 2011 in a barn somewhere. its on engine #2 and transmission #2 at 124,000 and thats not even counting all the bad grounds, bad caps, electrical squirrels ive been able to track down and fix. it wasnt that bad to deal with, but i totally empathize with anyone who doesnt remember theirs fondly or want to go out and get another one just like it
have a squid proxy on a $5 unmetered vps, referring to WP as a content-origin and then just use this to rewrite the image URL without using cloudflare at all?
(also possible with an apache directive but , doing it in WP could be useful)
and could you not .. just do the same for your $2.99 customers so you dont get a surprise $2000 bill or find yourself told by cloudflare that its time to pay up?
although if youre allowing uploads youre not in control of youd really need something like sightengine (or to roll your own) sooner or later to make sure no CSAM uploads and then theyll just get you in fees that way.
otherwise one person who does that might get your account canned and take every single blog using this service out
thats why id be a proponent of steering them to sign up and use their own CF R2 bucket , or self hosted minio (s3), or other s3 provider… or the squid thing for technical users who dont like cloudflare and its ilk. then theyre responsible for what they upload and host.
most wordpress static site plugins will configure the s3 hosting.
i just am not familiar with any that would easily let me plug in my own base URL for images. they probably exist… and if not then good job for tackling it. at the moment im going about this a different way and it works? but i wouldnt know how to go about packaging and shipping this up in a way thats accessible for everyone.
maybe a crude squid.conf generator you put your real wp url and your new cdn url into. but then youll want https on it too
i do know a lot of people would love to have “cdn” features without taxing the i/o and bandwidth on wordpress but who ALSO dont want to get cloudflare into their hosting for one reason or another. (im not there yet but i get it.)
the hug of death on stock wordpress is real which is why im already doing this in practice. with extra steps. (specifically a cloudflare rewrite rule for /wp-uploads/* to the alternate base URL which could also be done in vhost directives)
imo WP needs a third option under site URL and admin URL , for the base image URL.
Thanks for the detailed reply. Let me try to clear up a few things, because I think we are talking about slightly different use cases.
The plugin is not trying to replace Cloudflare, Squid, Minio, or any other origin setup. It also is not an offloader. WordPress still stores the files and keeps whatever transformation pipeline you already use. The plugin only rewrites the final image URL so the request hits a Worker that fetches the file on demand and caches it in R2. That is the entire idea.
You could absolutely build something similar with Squid or Minio or a reverse proxy. There are many valid ways to do this if you are comfortable managing the infra yourself. The plugin exists for the large group of WordPress users who are not going to set up their own proxy, or Minio, or custom rewrite rules. They just want their existing images to load faster without touching their hosting stack.
On the managed plan, you are right that I need good safeguards. I agree that self hosted R2 or self hosted S3 makes the most sense for larger or more active sites. My plan is to encourage that path when usage grows so the shared bucket does not become a liability for anyone.
The idea of WordPress having a separate “base image URL” setting would actually solve a lot of problems. Until that exists, this plugin is basically trying to fill that gap for non technical users.
If you have suggestions on how to simplify the worker pattern further, or how you would package your Squid setup so it is accessible to others, I am definitely interested in hearing more.
it was an afterthought, but doing something like rsync’ing the wp-uploads directory to a remote http folder might be the most accessible/easy way for a less technical audience.
i think thats the first tack i took.
but then just using wordpress itself as the origin server made the fetch and availability immediate.
and then yeah if youre accomplishing that thing,and filling that gap in. that would be useful and i might give it a try!
ive gone about doing this, in effect, about five or six different ways and youre on the right track for something useful that, no, nobodys (exactly) offering yet. unless you want to go all static which begets other problems like no native comment functionality.
or, use an existing “static website generator” solely to mirror your wp-uploads on publication but then not actually use a static site ;)
youre pitching an in-between for the media. and there is one other plugin that will optimize cloudflare but there was some reason i rejected it. ( i think it irreparably broke the entire site on being disabled or uninstalled so if cloudflare was down and you wanted to just point DNS at your naked IP. you were going to be restoring your database.)
it would be super nice to be able to turn this on/off at will- as others have asked “what if cloudflare is down” , or what if your account gets sanctioned by CF—
well there you go, disable this plugin for an immediate workaround . no need to log into cloudflare or a linux shell to kill or edit my rewrite rules if i can just disable a plugin from the convenience of the wp-admin UI.
you already clarified that all the content is safe and intact locally!
i am not aware of other plugins that would make that part this easy.
Thanks for sharing all this. It is clear you have gone through several versions of solving this problem, and a lot of what you described is exactly what led me to build this plugin.
The “in-between” space you mentioned is what I am trying to make simple: keep WordPress as the origin, avoid all the static-site complexity, and still get CDN-level delivery without touching DNS.
And yes, the instant on/off switch is a big part of the design. A lot of people have been burned by setups where Cloudflare goes down or an account gets flagged and suddenly the whole site is tied to that infrastructure. Being able to disable a plugin in wp-admin and immediately fall back to local files feels like the right safety valve for most WordPress users.
I appreciate you taking the time to think it through. If you try it, I would be interested to hear where it fits (or doesn’t fit) with the approaches you have used before.
yeah ill look at this , i have a wp to deploy from scratch on my to-do list and can just test it there without breaking my existing kludge.
thank you for the replies and addl’ info.
involves vascular inflammation. in the brain in the case of alzheimers. <theorized.> more readily applicable to vascular dementia.
and then, in the rest of the cardiovascular system in artherosclerosis/CVD. (reducing inflammation = reducing plaques laid down over them , that are being attracted to inflamed areas..
or piling up dead macrophages and foamy cells that went there to help.)
im not aware that either of these are totally settled at this time other than some anecdotal data on slowing down MACE and progression in the latter case (CVD). some cardiologists are believers and incorporating it in treatment now. its not an industry best practice but for those who are prescribing it for this reason, theyre citing a 20-40% reduction in events over 2-5 years.
or put another way. we know inflammation plays a role in CVD and we have a pretty reliable biomarker (CRP ) for whether this holds water and the inflammation is reduced by glp-1 agonists. not to be controversial or speak to medical matters but its my understanding that it does.
its role in dementia/alzheimers is just one of the ideas out there but the reasoning and the conclusions are kind of in the same neighborhood.
>frustrated beyond his capacity, and seemingly very high on something, went outside and started ripping infrastructure out by hand and damaging everything else he could find with a hammer
hmmmm i think i just saw that guy at the motel 6 in palm springs.
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