Commented Links for 2020-08-29

YouTube Unhideable Political Ads, Fediverse Out of Play Store, Haskell From Zero, Haskell Mini-Patterns, Rust Thread Pools, Embedded Rust Logging Crate, Predicable Oracle, Falsehoods About Addresses, Track This.

YouTube Mobile (iOS): I keep getting Donald Trump campaign ads with no "stop showing me" option

What a great way to start a list of commented links by showing Google being... well, Google.

You can hide ads that don't interest you. But it seems certain ads can't be hidden, can't be skipped and don't react like normal ads.

In a way, it's fine that Google decides that, if someone pays enough, they have higher privileges in their system. After all, Google (Alphabet actually) is a company, and it can decide how things work on their system and how they are going to make money out of their system. On the other hand... that's what we keep pointing over and over: Google doesn't care what goes in their systems; Google doesn't care what happens in their system.

And that's why a company that have that much effect in everyone's life shouldn't exist in the first place.

Google is apparently taking down all/most fediverse apps from Google play

Again, Google is free to do whatever they want when their system.

But here is the thing: ActivityPub is a protocol that allows any server to share activities to other servers that implement that protocol. It is not tied to any kind of activity, but the most common one at this point is microblogging (think Twitter). So far, so good.

Whatever people do in their systems is up to them.

Because the protocol is open, anyone can implement anything with it, including clients for, say, Android.

In the early days of the protocol, some bad servers appeared, but people managing moderated servers took care and decided to not federate with those bad servers, basically leaving the bad apples out of the basket.

So yeah, there are bad services in the ActivityPub universe, and they are being ignored by the vast majority of other services. Should Google ban Chrome or Firefox from the Play Store 'cause there is content like Breitbart on the internet?

Haskell from 0 to IO (Maybe Hero)

Haskell is one of those fancy languages I'm trying to get a grasp of.

I can say that I could understand half of this, before the complexities of the syntax throw me off. But I intent to read it again (and probably again) till I get it.

Haskell mini-patterns handbook

Speaking of Haskell, here are some patterns (really small ones) in that language.

Maybe to be consumed after understanding the language.

Multiple Thread Pools in Rust

Serendipity: I was thinking in ways to improve my dhash calculator, using threads pools and queues to check for files and dhash calculation for each image.

And then this shows up.

defmt, a highly efficient Rust logging framework for embedded devices

A new logging system for Rust, targeting high efficiency. But it seems small and simple enough for any system.

aaronson-oracle

A little experiment on how to predict things. After a while, I couldn't make it drop below 75%.

This proves how easy it is to predict behaviors the more data you have about someone. Also could explain how you suddenly start seeing ads for something you just spoke with someone: They have so much data about you that they can predict, with some pretty good accuracy, what will interest you in the future.

Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses

I love these "Falsehoods" posts.

Hey advertisers, track THIS

Mozilla may seem in bad shape these days, but we can't forget how they did something like "Track THIS", which will flood tracking sites with bad content about someone, so they can't predict anything right.