Mastodawn

Holy shit this is detailed. Can you believe the hubris to silently collect all this information on users?

The Attack: How it works

Every time you open LinkedIn in a Chrome-based browser, LinkedIn’s JavaScript executes a silent scan of your installed browser extensions. The scan probes for thousands of specific extensions by ID, collects the results, encrypts them, and transmits them to LinkedIn’s servers. The entire process happens in the background. There is no consent dialog, no notification, no mention of it in LinkedIn’s privacy policy. This page documents exactly how the system works, with line references and code excerpts from LinkedIn’s production JavaScript bundle.

BrowserGate

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Sam Kington 18h ago

@ovid @Aedius You’ve probably checked it out already, but just in case, my understanding is that Scrivener is good for this sort of thing?

Also:

Sam Kington 4d ago

Claude is being a tease.

(A useful example of how LLMs are still ultimately a matter of spitting out one word and then another. It's not actually thinking.)

I'm happy in using Claude for "what is the received wisdom about X?" questions, because the resolution of a paragraph or two of text is higher than Google's user interface of a short phrase, especially when I can say "no, I didn't mean that, I meant this instead". But it's still ultimately "what does the Internet think about this?"

Sam Kington 5d ago

kit Mar 27

You know that idea of a White Christmas, yeah?

That really comes from the Little Ice Age (1600 - 1800) ? Hmmm? (And Dickens remembering once upon a time.)

Well it turns out that *that* was due to the way we genocided (fancy word for murdered a whole lot of people) on both sides of the Atlantic.

So many that we decarbonised the atmosphere and triggered the cold.

We have not been good stewards of the planet

https://globalnews.ca/news/4924534/little-ice-age-death-55-million-indigenous-people-colonization-study/

h/t @jonesmurphy

‘Little Ice Age’ caused by death of 55-million Indigenous people after colonization: study

Colonization of the Americas at the end of the 15th century killed so many people, it disturbed Earth's climate, according to a new study.

Global News

Sam Kington Mar 27

Harry Sintonen Mar 25

#Microsoft sent an email to everyone saying they're listening to people now and they will definitely not pushing AI to everything anymore.

Also Microsoft enabled #github to collect all your "inputs, outputs and associated context to train and improve AI models". This new tickbox is enabled by default, even if you explicitly disabled Copilot before.

Actions speak louder than words.

You can disable the option at https://github.com/settings/copilot/features

#enshittification

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Sam Kington Mar 19

@xgranade @ireneista Any reference to the thing of replacing I, me, my etc. in sing lyrics with Greg? https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3oqj4a/which_song_is_most_improved_when_all_occurrences/

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Sam Kington Mar 17

Also: for years, I used to pay the TV licence fee, even though I didn't have a TV, because I thought the BBC was worth having. I'll grant you that that's weird, but I'd say no weirder than aggressively seeking out obscure tax avoidance schemes like the sorts Richard Tice likes.

Sam Kington Mar 17

When Reform deputy leader Richard Tice asks "How many friends and family do you have who voluntarily choose to pay more tax than they are legally obliged to do ...?" the answer is "almost all of them".

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/mar/16/britons-should-strive-to-pay-minimum-tax-legally-possible-richard-tice-reform

Maybe not by much! But we understand that taxes are there so we can all get decent public services, and constantly being a rules lawyer over taxes is a dick move. So unless something looks really off, we pay our fucking taxes.

Britons should strive to pay minimum tax legally possible, says Richard Tice

Reform UK’s deputy leader comments came as he was responding to questions raised about his own tax affairs

The Guardian

Sam Kington Mar 13

Ricky Mondello Mar 12

This is a beautiful post that I recommend reading. https://samhenri.gold/blog/20260312-this-is-not-the-computer-for-you/

“This Is Not The Computer For You” · Sam Henri Gold

Sam Henri Gold is a product design engineer building playful, useful software.

Sam Kington Mar 6

Mark Atwood Mar 5

The “human in the loop” AI job isn’t an oversight role. It’s a liability seat. The people sitting in it mostly don’t know that’s what they were hired to be. Here’s the architecture. https://markatwood.substack.com/p/the-warm-body-problem

The Warm Body Problem

You were hired to get blamed for things. Not to stop them.

Words about Thoughts