I work tech support for a company that provides emergency response software for hospitals and 911 centers. Many of my calls are ridiculous. Come with me on this journey.
in retrospect it's pretty funny that the most used computer port for many years just completely sucked shit to the point of there being normie memes about it
I mean when your biggest tech issue is "takes an extra 10 seconds (at most) to plug in if you're not paying attention" that's pretty good! Imagine if you had a printer and the printer's biggest problem was that the paper took a few tries to insert into the tray. You'd want to fuck that printer.
idk who on earth could possibly need to hear this, but do NOT, under ANY circumstances, give out your SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER to ANY SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS
Game companies hate emulation, but none of them seem to understand that a lot of us would just buy ROMs from them directly if we could. I don't want a fifth remake of Final Fantasy IV, I want to pay five bucks for the 3MB file you already made bank with thirty years ago. Nobody who wants to play something for the purpose of retro gaming is going to consider a $40 remake as the alternative option, and we're certainly not going to let the original dissappear. They're crying about opportunity cost for a product they're not even selling.
op i know you're probably talking about like, video games, etc, but this is also critical for research science - my lab has so much abandonware, either because the company's out of business, or the company decided to not maintain it, and it's a fucking nightmare. we have two windows 95 computers that are CRITICAL for performing experiments/data analysis because the software needed is abandonware. one of the main roles for a guy in my lab is to maintain these little dinosaurs because if they go out, we lose access to ~20 years of raw data for research. part of why is that these companies also make their own file types, and make it difficult-to-impossible to convert those file types without their specific software. by habit, i convert all research files to more generic versions (txt, pdf, tif, etc) so that i minimize risk of losing my shit, but some stuff can't be converted.
for example, we have a microscope that is perfectly functional, good microscope, but its software is abandonware because the company refused to maintain it. the company is still in business, still makes essentially the exact same software, but they made all of the old tech incompatible with new software to force people to buy the new microscope tech. it would cost a quarter million dollars to replace this microscope. this perfectly good microscope.
so like, i know a lot of people look at the original post here and go "well op just wants old video games to play" (which is valid! games companies should not be able to push shit to abandonware and then close it off) but also this is critical for like. biomedical research. if y'all had any idea how much basic infrastructure built on science relies on shit that is technically abandonware, you would probably be horrified.
so one of the largest open source data communities on the internet, data.world, got bought out by a company called ServiceNow, who has decided to fucking delete all of it by July 11th. they've given users barely any notice, no emails, just a fucking banner at the top and a blog post from June that gives barely a month to download your data before they fucking delete it all.
a bunch of archives of incredibly important government datasets like maternal mortality statistics are about to be deleted forever. in a regime where they're known to fudge numbers, we can't trust a lot of the data coming from them to not be altered. open source backups like those found on data.world are vital to being able to verify that the data coming from our government is still intact and not altered. and they're about to delete all of it.
i don't know if we need to start a petition or what. nobody seems to fucking care. there are millions of users on data.world and yet nobody is raising the alarm bells and it makes me feel like I'm going insane. somebody needs to do something. i don't know what to do. it feels like more and more of this world is being destroyed and dismantled. it's not only US centric data, either! it's all sorts of countries from around the world! and they're about to fucking delete everything.
the only things that won't be deleted are private companies who happen to use the paid version of their platform (which isn't accessible data to the open source community; some people have just been using their service to host their own data on privately)
and the kicker? this announcement was made... via an AI generated blog post. so not even any sort of human touch. just a generic, soulless announcement made by a soulless human about to take a wrecking ball to one of the more important websites that exists on the internet.
an example of some of the things that will be deleted on July 11th:
I haven't, I don't really have a reddit anymore. if somebody else would be willing to do that, that would be great. I'm pretty sure it only lets you post with a certain amount of karma now which is annoying
It looks like this has gotten onto Reddit and people are saving the data - but I can imagine researchers who uploaded assets won’t know this, so hopefully can reach some.
There are over 3500 respectable data repositories on one respectable global registry; to a researcher there’s no point in data existing if not findable; if you’re trying to find a new home for your dataset, start there
I’ve been emailing folks at my university about this today, and no one that I have talked to has been previously aware that this is happening.
Here are some of the scripts I’m using to email University Research Librarians and department chairs/assistant and associate deans who I know oversee faculty who use resources from data.world for their lessons:
Email for a Research Librarian: To find a research librarian try running an internet search like: “[College Name] Library Staff Directory” and see who may be a good fit.
Subject: Data.world public archive private purchase and deletion
Hi [Research Librarian or Data Preservation Specialist],
I recently ran into news that data.world has been purchased by ServiceNow, and that ServiceNow is ending public access to these archives July 11th. This is a very large public data archive that I personally used in my undergraduate work several years ago. I don't know much about digital preservation, or how it works at [College Name], but I thought it might be worthwhile to try reaching out.
I wanted to let someone in Libraries know in case current [College Name] students are using data in this archive for their research and need to be notified to save the data elsewhere, and to see if there is anything that [College Name] can do to help with greater preservation efforts.
The archive can be accessed here for now. A login is required, but it is free to set up.
https://data.world/_all/w/datasets
Here is a screenshot with the announcement of the closure of the site. Site users were not notified that access will be ending and would have to be looking at the page regularly to know that access will be terminated.
Please let anyone know who may need to use the site (or who would be interested in trying to preserve it).
Thanks,
[Your Name]
[Your Job/College Affiliation]
[Your Contact Information]
If you know a current department or school within a college that is using data.world archives, this is a template that I am using to contact department chairs or assistant/associate deans of research within specific schools.
Subject: Loss of public data.world access 7/11/26
Hi [Dr. Last Name]
I recently learned that the public data archive data.world has been purchased by ServiceNow and that they are closing public access 7/11/26. [Sentence about how the data is or was used by the department/school you are contacting].
I wanted to make sure this was on your radar in case any students are doing research with this data and need to act quickly to retrieve the data sources they need for their work, similarly for faculty using this data in their research or teaching.
The archive can be accessed here for now. A login is required, but it is free to set up.
https://data.world/_all/w/datasets
Here is a screenshot with the announcement of the closure of the site. Site users were not notified that access will be ending and would have to be looking at the page regularly to know that access will be terminated.
Please let anyone know who may need to use the site (or who would be interested in trying to preserve it).
ever since i was a little girl i knew i wanted to deny location sharing and turn off personalized ads and reject all non-essential cookies and not set up siri and face ID
hey sketchy techy side of tumblr, question: is there any way to like, FULLY de-samsung a galaxy watch? Kinda like how you can put Graphene on a Pixel?
I know they're rootable like an android phone but I don't know if it goes far enough. And I know there are ways to sideload apps and debloat some of the original proprietary bullshit but I want ALL of it gone. Just the hardware.
digital privacy PSA: If you're opening an app for the first time and it's making you go through all of the agreements and permissions and whatnot, they are designed to make you think they're mandatory. They almost always aren't
See, they're legally not allowed to tell you that it's mandatory because they're not allowed to demand access to things like your location and your microphone. They're just allowed to request it. But they'll do sneaky things like not putting (optional) beside it, or putting an asterisk beside it but not posting "*required field" anywhere on the screen. Or the one I just ran into with Samsung: a request for my precise geolocation "for weather purposes" and the only two buttons I could click were Agree and Cancel. The cancel implies that it's going to back me out of the app and I'm not going to be able to use it. The fine print says that you can opt out of this at any time. So I just hit cancel and it went away.
Always read the permissions you're granting to apps. Don't assume that you have to give them anything.
This is the concept of a MVP or prototype concept for the modern age. Where you do everything you minimally need, while throwing everything you can at the wall to see what sticks, then once you finally find something that works, you rework it all from scratch from everything you've learned. That's engineering, it's an iterative process, it's fun. Everyone should do it more (myself included). LLM's can be a valuable tool for this if used properly and responsibly. Knowing the limits of the tools, and knowing that you will be be reworking and needing to understand how it works on a deeper level for that later rework once you find something meaningful and useful.
Or, counterpoint: don't use morally compromised tools that were built using stolen code. Tools that surely will get too expensive to use once the party's over and AI companies start charging what they really cost.
Using LLMs to write software is like hiring the most junior level dev out there, then having to watch everything they do to make sure they don't fuck everything up. Then, even if they turn in a working project, you'll have no idea what's going on inside the box.
Oh and occasionally that junior dev just straight up lies to your face.
“Because the truth is, tech doesn’t have an image problem. It doesn’t have a message problem. It has an intention problem. What’s wrong with the axe murderer who broke into my house is not that he hasn’t successfully persuaded me to buy into his narrative. What’s wrong is that he’s trying to kill me with an axe. Similarly, when you launch a product that’s designed to put millions of people out of work, block access to sources of verifiable truth, replace human creativity with slop, and lower the barriers to every sort of atrocity, the problem isn’t that you haven’t told the public a good story about those things. The problem is that you are trying to do them.”
Visa is embedding its payment network into ChatGPT, allowing the chatbot to shop and complete transactions for users.
Visa said Wednesday that it has embedded its payment network inside of ChatGPT, empowering the chatbot to independently shop and complete transactions on behalf of its user.
It means AI agents can not only recommend products but complete the purchase on the user’s behalf, at potentially any merchant that accepts Visa. The payment network’s previous attempts at this technological leap were confined to a single retailer or a small set of enrolled merchants.
To be clear: simply having a Visa card isn't a risk for you. Not yet, anyway. You'll have to intentionally link your account to ChatGPT, then go shopping with the chatbot. If you don't do that, you're safe.
Dunno what stupidity they're planning next, but for now? ChatGPT isn't going to rack up $1000 of cat toys without your knowledge unless you're an active ChatGPT user.
We don't work directly with many billionaires but the ones that we do are uniformly whiny pissbabies who throw tantrums about totally normal tech stuff and try wheedle their way into free services by threatening to fire us if we don't give them free shit.
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