The unprecedented proposal was quietly revealed in a short notice from the Office of Personnel Management in December, KFF notes. OPM said it is seeking “service use and cost data,” which would be harvested from medical records such as “medical claims, pharmacy claims, encounter data, and provider data.”

That list could give the federal government access to prescriptions employees have filled and their diagnoses, as well as provider information, doctors’ notes, treatments, and visit summaries, among other sensitive health information. The collection would affect more than 8 million Americans and harvest data from 65 insurance companies, according to KFF.

They clearly want to feed everything they can get their hands on into one or more LLMs to analyze, and it’s impossible to effectively anonymize the data they need to produce the reports they want.

Other experts expressed concern over how the Trump administration could use the data, with fears including potential political retaliation or targeting of workers who sought certain medical care, such as abortion or transgender care. They also note that there isn’t any stated safeguards on how the data will be handled.

Absolutely, once it’s been fed into an LLM there are all kinds of ugly questions that can be asked. Usually at this point in such a story we need to stretch a little to imagine an unfriendly future government that might abuse the trust that was inherited from a past government, to use power responsibly. I don’t think we need to stretch very much right now. This is an offensively invasive terrible idea for everyone but the oligarchs, even if most of the red team doesn’t understand that it’s against their interests.

If this play works out then eventually they’ll come for Medicare records. Then the denials increase. Look ma, it’s cost saving!

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If you’re deliberating between Apple Maps and Google Maps, the only advantage Apple ever had was the lack of ads. Apple’s data is worse, routing is worse, navigation UI is worse (which of the lanes should you be in right now for your next turn), etc. It’s astounding that Apple would enshittify this right now when they’re not even close to being a decent replacement for the primary competition.

https://www.benjaminlcorey.com/could-american-evangelicals-spot-the-antichrist-heres-the-biblical-predictions/

Many of my fellow Christians in America have warned me over the years of exactly that, often telling me: “I feel sorry for you, because when the Antichrist comes you’re not even going to recognize him!”

To honor those who have given me such warning, I decided to spend the past week studying the most significant biblical prophecies and descriptions typically believed by my conservative friends to refer the Antichrist. If my evangelical friends are correct, and if it’s entirely possible that the Antichrist is on the global scene today, I certainly wouldn’t want to be the only person in the room who didn’t recognize the Antichrist when I saw him.

In case you too are a bit rusty in the area of biblical predictions about the coming Antichrist and don’t want to be oblivious if such a person were to arise, consider me your chief antichristologist who is more than happy to help you out.

Nice job tying things together. Thanks OP for the transcript and editing work.

That top ten list is good, but there’s a glaring omission that’s worth noting. A year ago (so recent and yet so long ago) in March, not long into this presidential administration, the US stopped most cyberoffense against Russia along with discarding defensive personnel.

Another important omission is the cancellation of the FBI task force investigating foreign (largely Russian) influence in US elections.

This is a good time to refer back to a Forbes piece on Brian Acton from a few years back:

The Facebook-WhatsApp pairing had been a head-scratcher from the start. Facebook has one of the world’s biggest advertising networks; Koum and Acton hated ads. Facebook’s added value for advertisers is how much it knows about its users; WhatsApp’s founders were pro-privacy zealots who felt their vaunted encryption had been integral to their nearly unprecedented global growth.

This dissonance frustrated Zuckerberg. Facebook, Acton says, had decided to pursue two ways of making money from WhatsApp. First, by showing targeted ads in WhatsApp’s new Status feature, which Acton felt broke a social compact with its users. “Targeted advertising is what makes me unhappy,” he says. His motto at WhatsApp had been “No ads, no games, no gimmicks”—a direct contrast with a parent company that derived 98% of its revenue from advertising. Another motto had been “Take the time to get it right,” a stark contrast to “Move fast and break things.”

Facebook also wanted to sell businesses tools to chat with WhatsApp users. Once businesses were on board, Facebook hoped to sell them analytics tools, too. The challenge was WhatsApp’s watertight end-to-end encryption, which stopped both WhatsApp and Facebook from reading messages. While Facebook didn’t plan to break the encryption, Acton says, its managers did question and “probe” ways to offer businesses analytical insights on WhatsApp users in an encrypted environment.

Long live Signal!

Maybe we’ll see a resurgence of kite photography. Modern camera tech should make it especially light and awesome.

Yes they should

I’ve proudly been giving them money for decades.

It’s always been inconsistent for me and I’ve usually suspected it to be the fault of the instance but I don’t know.

But the Fediverse is very public so of course somebody else is recording and republishing all the data:

Here’s your voting history

Yes, sort of, in the Voyager app, but it’s awkward and unintuitive.

Pretend you’re going to create a new account or log into a different server through Voyager’s interface. Search up the server you want (sh.itjust.works in your example). Tap it so there’s a checkmark on its entry in the list, but instead of pressing the big blue Next button at the bottom, tap on the three dots in a circle icon in the upper right, and choose “Connect as Guest”.

Then it will be one of the account list entries and you can switch to it like you would switch to another account. Go to the community list from there and select Local. Now do a very awkward dance if you find a post that you want to interact with from your logged-in account. Best way to use this “feature” is probably just as community discovery to then subscribe from your account.