As much as I love the intimacy of a stable, healthy romantic partnership, I’ve always been wary of my need for loneliness and private time. I brandish my introvert badge with chutzpah. But, deep inside, whenever I got with someone and I needed to take time off to replenish, I always felt guilty. I felt like I wasn’t ready . That if I really, really wanted a relationship, I would not have this need to be by myself.
Tchassa Kamga, Before I Could Date Anyone, I had to Date Myself.
Author: Christopher Parsons
Policy wonk. Torontonian. Photographer. Not necessarily in that order.
From The Canadian Press:
Doctors at Royal Columbian Hospital in New Westminster have complained that local police and RCMP officers are routinely recording conversations without consent between doctors and patients who are considered a suspect in a crime.
“They will be present when we are trying to question the patients and trying to obtain a history of what happened,” said Tony Taylor, an emergency physician who practises at the hospital.
“They have now recently started recording these conversations and often they will do that unannounced, which has a number of implications around confidentiality and consent.”
…
As far as doctors at Royal Columbian are concerned, the police are getting in the way of patient care.
Patients tend to clam up when police officers are present, Dr. Taylor said. “That makes it difficult to get those kind of history details that are critically important,” he said.
The idea that the police are present, and recording interactions between a doctor and patient, is patently problematic from a procedural fairness perspective. In the past the authorities have lost Charter challenges based on their attempts to exploit Canada’s one-person consent doctrine; I’d be very curious to know the legal basis for their recording persons who may be accused of a crime, in a setting clearly designated as deserving heightened privacy protections, and the extent to which that legal theory holds up under scrutiny.
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A Past Life’s Dream Job
Per Wired:
Woods, a 30-year-old with neatly floppy hair, is dressed tonight in a black button-down shirt and jeans. His DM performances—and being a dungeon master is a kind of performance—are often marked by excitable narration and winkingly melodramatic theatrics; at one point during tonight’s game, he gleefully pounds a hand into a fist, mimicking an arrow’s impact on an opponent.
He’s spent nearly three months preparing for this showdown, even hand-building a few model towers out of scrap wood and dowels. It’s one of the most elaborate adventures he’s crafted in his four-year career as a professional DM at schools and homes in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Sometimes, like tonight, the games are run in his apartment, where the bookshelves reach high with graphic novels and board games, and where the walls are decorated with full-color maps from D&D classics like Greyhawk and Isle of Dread.
…
But while Woods is one of several DMs-for-hire out there, this isn’t his hobby or a side gig; it’s a living, and a pretty good one at that, with Woods charging anywhere from $250 to $350 for a one-off three-hour session (though he works on a sliding scale). For that price, Woods will not only research and plan out your game but also, if you become a regular, answer your occasional random text queries about wizard spells. “He’s worth the money,” says Kevin Papa, a New York City educator (and occasional DM) who’s been part of this Friday-night game for more than a year. “Being a DM requires a lot of brainshare. I don’t know how Timm absorbs it all.”
When I was in high-school or my undergrad, I can see this as the type of job that I’d have loved. Though I think that the idea of a campaign’s length and narrative being based on sessions clients are willing to pay would create some challenging conditions for planning long-term stories; it’d definitely lend itself to a serialized type of play, where each session was like a mini-TV episode, as opposed to early sessions functioning as the opening scenes of a feature film.
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Develop Your Photographer’s Brain
A great, and as always helpful, reminder that what matters most isn’t the equipment you carry but your creativity and desire to use it on a regular basis.
From the New York Times:
Mr. Snowden’s cascade of disclosures to journalists and his defiant public stance drew far more media coverage than this new breach. But Mr. Snowden released code words, while the Shadow Brokers have released the actual code; if he shared what might be described as battle plans, they have loosed the weapons themselves. Created at huge expense to American taxpayers, those cyberweapons have now been picked up by hackers from North Korea to Russia and shot back at the United States and its allies.
While the revelation of code facilitates a more immediate kind of repurposing and attack, I think that the Shadow Brokers have tended to reveal tactical information versus the strategic information released by Snowden. Few have done the requisite work to actually pull together the comprehensive narratives that emerge in the Snowden documents and, instead, have focused on specific programs or tools. Those few of us who have comprehensively analyzed his documents, however, now possess insights into strategic thinking, decision making, and resource allocation of the Five Eyes intelligence agencies. The long term value of such information is just as, if not more, valuable than code drops.
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Terrestrial Movement
Photo made with Olympus E-M10ii and Olympus M.Zuiko Digital 14-42mm F3.5-5.6 II R at Niagara Falls on October 15, 2017 in Niagara Falls, Ontario. Edited in Apple Photos.
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A Fix for Bad iPhone Battery Life
For the past weeks I’ve had outrageously bad battery life on my iPhone 7, running iOS 11. A lot of the battery drain was from the Podcasts app (approx. 24-33%) but I couldn’t figure out why the drain rate was so high: even when I only streamed over Bluetooth or Airplay I’d had the same power drain percentages, so it didn’t seem to be linked to powering the speaker on the phone (which can impact battery life significantly).
Then I realized that the application was searching for new podcasts every hour and downloading any that were available. My battery life has drastically improved after changing the setting so that the app only looks for new podcasts every 6 hours: I can now use the phone normally for a day and end up at about 20-30% battery remaining when it gets set down to charge for the night. Victory is mine!
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USB-C is a Failure
Marco Arment has a scathing and altogether too accurate accounting of the USB-C standard. Anyone who is dealing with the headaches of managing different USB-C cables, hubs, and chargers is all to well aware of the problems associated with the standard, but Marco’s post is the best summation of all the problems in a single location.
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Apathy is Political
On Sidney Crosby’s visit with the Penguins to the Trump White House:
Apathetic white people who groan when athletes of colour get political, or who suggest as Crosby did that politics and sports do not mix, are in need of a reminder that for most, political activism isn’t a choice or a hobby. People don’t usually consider it fun or interesting to put their jobs on the line to speak out against a bigger power. The marginalized do not go looking for politics. It seeks them out. In this context, it sought them out when the President of the United States openly flirted with a racist ideology that would very much like to destroy them.
Exactly.
As part of a long-feature for The Guardian:
The techniques these companies use are not always generic: they can be algorithmically tailored to each person. An internal Facebook report leaked this year, for example, revealed that the company can identify when teens feel “insecure”, “worthless” and “need a confidence boost”. Such granular information, Harris adds, is “a perfect model of what buttons you can push in a particular person”.
Tech companies can exploit such vulnerabilities to keep people hooked; manipulating, for example, when people receive “likes” for their posts, ensuring they arrive when an individual is likely to feel vulnerable, or in need of approval, or maybe just bored. And the very same techniques can be sold to the highest bidder. “There’s no ethics,” he says. A company paying Facebook to use its levers of persuasion could be a car business targeting tailored advertisements to different types of users who want a new vehicle. Or it could be a Moscow-based troll farm seeking to turn voters in a swing county in Wisconsin.
Harris believes that tech companies never deliberately set out to make their products addictive. They were responding to the incentives of an advertising economy, experimenting with techniques that might capture people’s attention, even stumbling across highly effective design by accident.
The problems facing many Internet users today are predicated on how companies’ services are paid: by companies doing everything they can to capture and hold your attention regardless of your own interests. If there were alternate models of financing social media companies, such as paying small monthly or yearly fees, imagine how different online communications would be: communities would likely be smaller, yes, but the developers would be motivated to do whatever they could to support the communities instead of advertisers targeting those communities. Silicon Valley has absorbed many of the best minds for the past decade and a half in order to make advertisements better. Imagine what would be different if all that excitement had been channeled towards less socially destructive outputs.
