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The New York Times: I Used Google Ads for Social Engineering. It Worked.

I think Mr. Berlinquette make a rather accurate statement towards the end:

With the ISIS campaign, Google decided what a radical view was, who seemed to hold those views and who should be able to view them. It’s hard to be cynical about an initiative that deters extremism. But entering the domain of social engineering is a slippery slope. The standard of what needs to be deradicalized is adjustable.

Social manipulation in one form or another isn’t very new. What is new is the ease of exposure. Most people are going to see search results one way or another. The number of people using as blockers will likely remain a minority.

It’s not like you’ve got to rely on stories from the local village elders for everything. Searching the world wide web connects you to many sources of knowledge; beware the wise asses you listen to. Because we all have an agenda whether or not we realize it ourselves.

Oddly I feel a bit of temptation to watch Blade Runner….

Scrolling through old journal entries, interesting to come across A Day Made of Glass 2: Unpacked. The Story Behind Corning’s Vision. (2012) and my comments about it at the time.

In a lot of ways I still find Corning’s vision fascinating.

Something is also apparent to me in hindsight: casting. Bits like the car dashboard were still pretty foreign at the time. Approximately a year later, Google launched the first generation Chromecast. Devices like the Roku would likewise gain voice input and competitors like Fire TV weren’t far off just yet. Today in ’19 it isn’t abnormal to easily manipulate a screen but we’re nowhere near as cool as that video yet.

I don’t think any product like the Surface Hub was well known until a few years later. While iMacs and clones had already modernized by then I don’t wanna gander at history to see when more touch capable AiOs became readily available. Devices like the Surface Studio are Still. To. Damned. Expensive. Not to mention rare in people’s homes and work places.

Another thing that has changed since Corning’s video is the PC. Back in ’12 touch screen laptops were more of a novelty than an accepted thing. Hell, the modern tablet had just about come into its own, and was very unlike its PC based forebears.

A lot of things have changed in hardware and software since then and will continue to change. But I still hope the result looks more like A Day Made of Glass than 1984….hehe.

Odd thoughts: Pretzel stick for the dog, whiskey for the human.

Somehow this seems to suit all of us, lol.

Why the B-1 Bomber Is Such a Badass Plane

Growing up, I always found the B-1 a curiosity more than anything else. Here we this large, variable sweep wing bomber. It was and still is rather unique. Meanwhile most folks were mesmerised by the more modern Stealth designs.

Years later, I find it even more curious that people still talk about the Lancer, and that we’ve somehow managed to keep any in service since the cold war era drew to a close.

So far I generally find myself in a middle ground of sorts.

Diaspora* makes for a social environment that works pretty well, although I think a touch behind what G+ became. But to be fair most of the things I miss about G+, other than the people, were things that took time for the platform to develop.

Where I find myself most frustrated tends to be the software.

You see: most of my time on such things is centered around my Android tablet. Dandelion is about as much as any Diaspora client could be but I find the performance lacking, as a consequence of it being forced to function as a web based app instead of a native client.

Such that I am almost better off going back to keeping my journal on a blogger platform and automating sharing posts to Pluspora, where there is more social life. This my recent experiments doing RSS -> D*.

But of course that leaves another open loop. Before moving to G+, I had used Blogger. Before that I used Live Journal. But in the years since moving from Blogger to Google Plus not much as changed. Rather Blogger has mostly remained fixed in time and others like WordPress have marched on. Creating a sort of software want redux.

Difference is that it is easier to pull a journal migration or write a custom bot bridge than it is to pull a better Diaspora client out of my wazoo.

Using a different client app that sucks less.

Also want to see how the formatting comes through my RSS feed and into the post bots conversion.

Here’s a link to Captain’s Log Supplemental as it stood before G+.

Some bold, italic, underline, and strike through formatting.

• Bullet
• List

And

1. Numbered
2. List

Plus

A block quote.

And a little

Horizontal bar for good measure.

Quick test post #1 for my feed bot.

It looks like Google has expanded Blogger’s integration with Google+, since I made the switch.

But how well does it work now? :-).

Hmm, I wonder. There are just so many possiblities of what can be done, and my brain can baloon with ideas fed off that. In the mean time, I know it’s most important to scratch the itches with the most value, first.

Off my operating environment, the more pressing lack is notes taking. Simplenote works but via Android, I seem to be in need of writing my own client (been a while since I’ve hit that part of my GitHub). One thing that might be of interest is some client side integration, of being able to mate Simplenote, Blogger, and G+ and apply a little meta-search magic.

Hmmm.

You know, this page isn’t as slow as I thought it would be on my tablet. I’m not sure I’d prefer it over a native client option though, that does better than Google’s own offering.

At some point, I think I need to bust out AIDE :-).