“tiktok” does not appear to me to be a viewpoint

seriously? have you not paid attention to any of the arguments in favor of the ban that boil down to “it’s pushing evil Chinese Communist propaganda into the minds of our precious children”?

here’s the original bill - H.R.7521 - Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act.

it was introduced by Mike Gallagher (R-Wisconsin).

here’s a tweet of his from March:

“This is my message to TikTok: break up with the Chinese Communist Party or lose access to your American users. America’s foremost adversary has no business controlling a dominant media platform in the United States.” - Rep. Gallagher

and from November 2023, in a Fox News appearance:

Rep. Gallagher on why it’s critical to ban or force a sale of TikTok:

“It would be national self-suicide to allow the dominant media platform in America to be controlled, or at least be influenced by, the Chinese Communist Party.”

the advocates for the ban have been very clear, from the start, that they believe TikTok has a viewpoint - specifically that it’s controlled or influenced by the Chinese Communist Party. and they want to discriminate against that viewpoint.

id say you have a stronger argument than viewpoint discrimination by saying it violates the first ammendment of the users of tiktok, personally, though the courts might disagree.

have you read the bill? the actual law, not news articles or summaries of it?

I linked it in this comment. go read it, it’s short, and not terrible as far as legalese goes.

the gist of it is that the law makes it illegal to run an app store (or anything that looks like an app store) that offers downloads of the TikTok app.

so the two big obvious targets of the law are Apple and Google…but it applies equally to everyone. F-Droid could violate it, in theory, by hosting the APK for download through their servers.

or for example, say the ban took effect, and TikTok gets removed from app stores. some tech-savvy high school kid knows how to copy the APK from their Android phone before it gets deleted, and shows their friends how to sideload it onto their phones.

then a bunch of other people ask for it too, so this kid uploads it to some filesharing service, passes around the link, and eventually it gets around to 100 other classmates.

that high school kid has violated the TikTok ban. the federal government can levy a fine against them of half a million dollars ($5,000 per user who downloaded it)

does that satisfy your desire to have the ban infringe on the free speech of “real” people, and not just Apple and Google?

tik-tok could be used to sideload data gathering for China, such as government officials camera or microphone use

but again - nothing about that is unique to TikTok.

do you think the federal government should force Apple and Google to ban the Twitter app, because of the risk that Elon Musk might use it to spy on politicians to get leverage for the 2026 midterms?

or, since Musk has said he’s starting to meddle in European politics as well - should the EU require Apple and Google to ban the Twitter app on European soil, out of a similar fear that the Twitter app could be used as spyware?

beyond the worry of poisoning our society with propaganda.

of the 3 apps that I mentioned - TikTok, Facebook, and Twitter - aren’t all 3 of them “poisoning our society with propaganda”?

why is TikTok singled out for the ban, do you think?

does it have anything to do with the long-standing right-wing grievance and fear and distrust towards Ghyna (or the “ChiComs”, if you prefer the pre-Trump right-wing nomenclature)?

because as far as I can tell, every argument about this ends up boiling down to “sure, lots of apps do it…but it’s uniquely bad when an app written by Chinese people does it”

you arent responding to their point about framing this as a 1st ammendment issue being problematic.

I’ve posted previously about why “the federal government can require Apple and Google to remove apps it doesn’t like, and that has nothing to do with free speech” is a laughable position. I didn’t feel like rehashing it here.

the platform’s collection of user data

this “oh banning TikTok is good because TikTok collects a bunch of user data” talking point has hoodwinked a whole lot of tech-savvy, generally-left-of-center people who really should know better.

thought experiment: I go out and buy a brand-new phone. Apple or Android, it doesn’t matter.

I install some apps. let’s say TikTok, Facebook, and Twitter.

all of those apps use the platform APIs published by Apple or Google respectively.

all of them are equally capable of collecting user data.

TikTok is not unique or special in any way when it comes to data harvesting.

oh, except TikTok is owned by Ghyna, and everyone knows that Ghyna is evil and scary. surely that makes it different, right? US-based companies can harvest our data all they want, and sure maybe an EU-based company too. but Ghyna harvesting our data? that’s a bridge too far!

and that’s why we need to ban companies owned by Ghyna from harvesting our data!

here’s the problem with that. I install another app. I don’t like the stock Weather app that comes with my phone, so I install Totally Trustworthy Weather from a developer named Absolutely Not Spyware LLC.

that weather app needs location permissions, obviously. and network access. and to be allowed to run in the background constantly.

because it’s given permissions to run in the background, there’s a decent chance the weather app can actually collect more info about me than TikTok/Facebook/Twitter/etc.

but, why would a weather app collect data like that? what’s it going to do with it? it’s just a weather app, surely it doesn’t care, right?

wrong - it’s going to sell all the data it collects on me to a data broker.

(read Temptations of an open-source browser extension developer if you’re skeptical of how much money is thrown around in order to collect data of this sort)

if those nefarious people in Ghyna want data about you…they’ll just buy it from a data broker, the same way everyone else (including the FBI) does.

if Congress had passed some sort of GDPR-ish law, that applied across the board to all forms of data harvesting, I’d be all in favor of it. but obviously they’re never going to do that.

instead, what started out in 2020 as a “Ghyna bad” policy from Trump now has bipartisan support and people on the left defending it on data privacy grounds. we live in the stupidest goddamn timeline.

I stocked lentils once and they sat for weeks

random idea - could you make little “meal kit” type things for the less popular ingredients like these?

if someone has never cooked lentils before, and sees them in a free pantry, I can definitely understand why they wouldn’t be inclined to take them, they can be somewhat daunting at first.

but you could do something like bundle together a bag of lentils with a can of tomato paste and a jar of curry powder, with a printout of this recipe or a similar one, and someone would only need to add a couple of fresh veggies to complete the recipe.

Nuts would be great but are pricey.

is buying them in bulk and dividing them up into smaller portions an option? one of my go-to snacks are these cashews which are still on the pricey side, but less expensive than buying them in smaller packages.

here’s the same news, from a source less likely to be (or appear to be) biased (SCOTUS Blog): Parties file final briefs before Supreme Court hears TikTok case

and for my fellow primary source nerds, you can also read all the filings in this case. the particular filing that this story is based on is “Reply of petitioners TikTok Inc. and ByteDance Ltd” from Jan 3rd.

directly from the 31 page PDF:

The Government begins by claiming the Act’s TikTok-specific provision is subject to no First Amendment scrutiny at all—a position rejected by all three judges below. It argues ByteDance Ltd. has no rights because it is foreign, and TikTok Inc. has no rights because it has no authority over the algorithm and recommendation engine used on the U.S. platform.

as I’ve posted previously - news articles about this do a very poor job of explaining that the law applies primarily to Apple and Google. it requires them to remove the TikTok app from their respective app stores, with a fine of $5000 per user if they don’t comply. so “it only applies to foreign companies and they have no rights” is complete bullshit.

the DOJ’s position that this isn’t a 1st Amendment issue is laughable. they’re trying to ban force Apple and Google not to distribute the TikTok app, because they dislike the content published via the app. there’s a specific legal term for this - viewpoint discrimination - and it’s one of the clearest examples of speech restrictions that are forbidden by the 1st Amendment.

based on the data we have now, the expected value of “pandemics per Trump presidency” is 1. so the null hypothesis is that we should expect another pandemic sometime in the next 4 years.

4 years from now, the best-case scenario is that we can revise that estimate downwards to 0.5 pandemics per Trump presidency.

I’m…not terribly optimistic about that. both because of the gutting of infectious-disease public health under White House Brainworms Czar RFK Jr, but also the chilling effect that the article mentions on immigrants, especially migrant farmworkers, who are the most likely vector for a strain of H5N1 to develop human-to-human transmission capability.

the primary source of this is annoyingly hard to track down for legislation that passed Congress and was signed by the President.

it turns out that’s because it was part of H.R.815 - “Making emergency supplemental appropriations for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2024, and for other purposes.”

if you want to read the actual text of the law, this PDF starting on page 61.

the gist is that it’s illegal to:

Providing services to distribute, maintain, or update such foreign adversary controlled application (including any source code of such application) by means of a marketplace (including an online mobile application store) through which users within the land or maritime borders of the United States may access, maintain, or update such application.

everyone calls this a “ban on TikTok” and it kinda annoys the shit out of me, because as far as I can tell, the website tiktok.com is probably still going to be available in the US.

what this law actually does is require Google and Apple to remove TikTok from their app stores, for US-based users. and makes them subject to a fine of $5000 per user if they don’t comply.

I’m generally in favor of more regulation of tech companies…but this is a really fucking stupid way to do it.

oh golly why would anyone do such a thing

here’s a totally unrelated news article from about a year ago: UnitedHealth uses AI model with 90% error rate to deny care, lawsuit alleges

Diane Morgan playing the character of Philomena Cunk. some of the best deadpan British humor I’ve ever seen.

(my attorney has advised me to state that I think murdering CEOs is *checks notes* wrong)

tangentially related:

11 children worked ‘dangerous’ night shift at Iowa pork plant, investigators say

A sanitation contractor has been fined nearly $172,000

Burger King, Popeyes fined more than $2 million for violating child labor laws

poor people go to jail when they get caught committing crimes. wealthy people pay a fine and move on with their lives. usually the fine is small enough that they can just treat it as a cost of doing business.

when people can commit crimes without feeling any real consequences, vigilante justice like this is an entirely predictable outcome.

(and of course, there’s a whole additional layer to this problem, where there’s a ton of corporate malfeasance and misbehavior that harms society but technically isn’t a crime because of some loophole or another…those child labor law violations are one of the few examples where employing children is unambiguously against the law as well as being relatively easy to prove)

here in Seattle: the at-large City Council seat (district 8) between Tanya Woo and Alexis Mercedes-Rinck

Woo ran for a different city council seat a year ago, and lost. in the same election, a sitting city councilmember (Teresa Mosqueda) won an election to the King County Council, so she resigned her city council seat. to fill that vacant seat, the other newly-elected city councilmembers appointed Woo, even though she had just lost.

by the rules of the resignation and temporary appointment, the next regular election (now) elects a permanent replacement.

this leads to an unusual scenario - normally, Seattle (and all of Washington state) holds its municipal elections in odd years. the current mayor was elected in 2021, the most recent city council election was 2023. this leads predictably to much lower turnout for the municipal elections, which leads in turn to conservative business interests having an easier time buying the local elections.

Woo is aligned with the “business-friendly”, conservative (by Seattle standards) councilmembers who were elected in 2023. Mercedes-Rinck is significantly more progressive.

based on the primary results and subsequent polls, Woo winning seems pretty unlikely - but the margin of Mercedes-Rinck’s victory will still be interesting, because of what it says about Seattle politics in elections with high turnout. voter turnout in the 2023 elections was a dismal 36%. this year is likely to be in the ~80% range.

it’s also an opportunity for something very funny to happen - Tanya Woo may set a record that will likely never be broken, becoming the first candidate in city history to lose 2 elections in consecutive 2 years, for a seat that normally gets elected every 4 years.

hello Cleveland Beehaw! happy to be joining this pleasant little corner of the internet.

good news: I’m in the process of buying a house, after renting my whole life up to now. got lucky that the first home I toured in-person (after viewing probably 100+ homes on Zillow) I liked enough to put in an offer, and had the offer accepted. now I’m just going through inspection and mortgage approval crap.

bad news: I broke my big toe. not broken broken, apparently just a tiny chunk of bone flaked off where the ligament is attached. I put off going to the doctor about it, because I woke up with my toe swollen and painful, Dr. Google suggested that it was probably gout, and I didn’t want to bother with a doctor visit if it was just going to be a lecture about eating healthier. so I hobbled around on a broken toe for almost 2 weeks before going in for X-rays and getting told it was broken. now I’m crossing my fingers that it’ll heal up on its own in the Fancy Medical Shoe they gave me, and I won’t have to have surgery on it. and it’s a good reminder that sometimes I need to push past my ADHD and medical anxiety and go to the doctor anyway.

it might be more complicated than you’re looking for (requires a self-hosted server instead of just a desktop app), but take a look at the ecosystem surrounding Subsonic

Subsonic did some licensing shenanigans, but there’s an actively-maintained GPL3 fork called airsonic-advanced

there’s also alternate implementations, Gonic and Navidrome, that maintain compatibility with the original Subsonic API

because they all work with a common API, there’s a variety of clients that can work with the backend.

I’m also a big fan of Beets for music organization, it’s not tied in to the Subsonic ecosystem so you can use them completely separately if you want. it handles tagging, can fetch lyrics, and can also transcode the library (or an arbitrary subset of it) if you want to send it to a portable device. (not sure if this is what you mean by compatibility)

I currently have Beets organizing everything, run Navidrome on my server pointed at the Beets library directory, then Ultrasonic on my phone, and the Navidrome web interface on my desktop. the combo is especially nice for streaming to my phone - Navidrome will transcode FLAC to Opus on the fly, and Ultrasonic has an option to cache those files locally, and to pre-download them over wifi instead of mobile data. so I have my full collection available on my phone, can stream it from anywhere, and the songs I listen to frequently are already downloaded and I don’t have to waste mobile data, or wait for them to load if I have poor cell signal.