This is Hacker Public Radio episode 3,747 for Tuesday the 13th of December 2022.
Today's show is entitled, Twitter and Dinner with the Humans.
It is hosted by Zenfloatored 2 and is about 27 minutes long.
It carries an explicit flag.
The summary is I talk about Twitter after dinner with some humans.
Hello boys and girls, Zenfloatored your favorite magical forest squirrel, former human
being ofverted into squirrel by aliens in the 1960s and atheist.
Having an experiment today, I have a new Chromebook that I've been playing with for the
last month.
It is a Samsung.
I forget the model number of this.
I'll have to go back and look at one of my videos and tell you what you want to miss, but
it's a really small notebook Chromebook that I picked it for $149 at a Walmart.
I have just been carrying it around it where it's got a 10-hour battery life.
Anyway, the squirrel is in a restaurant in Arkansas and we're on the road today.
So I thought I would record a clip of me coming into a human restaurant, which I have
coming.
I have set down.
So far, no one has noticed that there's a squirrel in the restaurant, which is good.
No one's making a scene ever.
The waitress did come up to me and took my order.
I'm ordering coffee and water for my drink and also a Western omelet with diced potatoes and
raw toast and pancakes I'm going to have.
Making a little recording here.
Anyway, we've had a nice long day of driving and we're taking sort of a cross-country
trip and just checking in the outside world to see what life is like before the snow flies.
Anyway, at the waitress just gave me my coffee, I like it black, of course.
However when I'm in Texas, I like to get the Texas pecan coffee because you know, squirrels
like nuts, anyway, I thought I would talk about my little Chromebook app.
Let's see if I can pull up the model number of this from one of my videos just a moment
here.
Let me click some buttons.
This Chromebook does not have a touchscreen to it, but you know that's just fine with
me.
I don't hardly use the touchscreen on my Google GoPro, Google GoPro.
So let's see which Chromebook was this that I have.
Samsung 310 Netbook, here it is, yeah.
They have a couple of versions of this.
One of them has a slot on the side to read a plug-in memory card.
This one has a USB-C plug-in on one side, and the other it has a regular USB plug-in,
the big one, and I kind of like that.
You charge it from the USB-C side, of course, and I want you charge it at last for 10
hours, anyway, I thought I'd go ahead and close down the web browser and talk about
the Chromebook a little bit.
He has a regular trackpad.
It's really small, it's slightly bigger than it takes, but fold it up.
It weighs nothing, it's like maybe a pound or so.
I've got a headset plugged into it right now that I'm using to make this recording.
And I thought I might spend a few minutes talking about Chromebooks, I know a lot of people
don't like to use something that's tied to Google as much as Chromebooks are, but I've
sort of enjoyed it.
It does have some shortfalls, of course, you can't do any low-level hard drive formatting
with anything that you plugged into.
You can't boot an operating system from a USB key stick on your Chromebook unless you push
a couple of buttons on it, but you can't actually use QAMU to run an operating system
in less its in QCal format or something.
And it happens that QCal format happens to be on your little SIM card that's buried
inside the unit, unfortunately.
You can't run QAMU, at least I can't, from a plug-in USB hard drive, this doesn't seem
to work.
So it has some disappointing sides, but on the other side of it, I have an open BSD server
at the house that I could just log into any time I wish, and I can run QAMU on any operating
system I desire from there.
So, and that, of course, has more memory, more storage capacity, and everything else.
So, I'm really missing it if I wanted to run an operating system in QAMU, I can just use
the Open BSD server of sitting at my house to do it with.
I also decided to sign up for Google One Services, which gives you access to their Google
Drive storage for which I signed up for, I believe, it's two terabytes, it's 99 bucks a year.
And they give you a VPN service, and I also decided to sign up for screencastify, which
I've been enjoying.
You know, basically making videos for Demis, you know, just click a button and they
have everything all set up, that's one of the nice things about running Chromebooks
is that everything is already set up for you.
I also picked up one other program that I had installed in my browser here, and let me
see if I can find the manufacturer of that just a minute.
Let me pull up a web page here and have a look at something, or I know what I can do,
I can pull up district watch, and let me just do that, and I've got a screen reading
program that I subscribe to for what is it 50 bucks a year or something that it's basically
a little bit better than the standard one that you get with the Google Chrome.
And let me see if I can pull up the company that makes that one here.
Here it is, reads selected, let me read who it is just doing this, because I forgot
the name of the company.
Let's see, where's the settings?
I like that's the settings.
Maybe it gives me the name of the company in there.
And I'm not getting it to function for some reason.
Anyway, it's one of the add-ons, and it will screen read for up to 20 minutes or something,
and then they cut it off of the day.
So you get 20 minutes a day for free, but if you want more than that, there are three
tier plans for it.
Anyway, I've got it now, and I've been making some videos with this screen reader.
And enjoying it.
It's a good addition, so anyway, I like this, it's nice, and it stores everything
to Google Drive, and uploading it to YouTube is really fast.
It's really fast, you just click the YouTube button after you're finished making a video
with the screencastify, and you enter a title, and maybe a description, and click, and
it's done in like 10 seconds or less.
No matter how big the video is.
So there are some advantages to working with the network Drive, like Google Drive.
I've also been installed a program called Drive 2, an OpenBSD, and there's also what
is it called, or Clion, I believe?
Those are the two utilities that you can use to access Google Drive with, and right files
to and from the OpenBSD server, so that I can do backups, a step to and from the
Google Drive, from the OpenBSD server, which I find useful from time to time.
I have it running, the OpenBSD server, I have it running Bash Potter, and it collects my
podcasts, and then I have Drive 2, just send them out to Google Drive, which I think
works pretty dandy.
I can also send ISOs, or labor office documents, or anything I want out there for storage.
I have some business related, and also person related, you know, talk documentation, spreadsheets,
and things that I keep out on Google Drive, because I've become accustomed to it.
We're running in Bucks a year, it's certainly cheaper than running OpenBSD from just
the electricity alone on a server.
Of course, if you ran a Raspberry Pi to do it with it might be a little cheaper, but I don't
think it would be as dependable, and you wouldn't have the backup capacity that Google
does.
But anyway, there are other cloud options I'm sure.
Anyway, I thought I would pause the video, I'm going to be eating my dinner, and when
I finish, I'm going to go back to my vehicle, and we're going to talk a little bit about
Twitter and Elon Musk and Apple if we can, so I'm going to pause this for just a moment
as the squirrel eats his dinner, and we wouldn't want people know that I could talk
while I could eat, you know, that's a magical property that we must keep secret between
ourselves.
Hang on folks, I'll be right back.
Alright, boys and girls dinner is over, and it was just absolutely lovely eating human
food in a human restaurant.
Things went along swimmingly, I had enjoyed a couple of cups of black coffee and two glasses
of water, while I was there after finishing my meal, nobody really bothered me.
However there was a pile up at the cashiers register, leaving and people were lined up
behind me.
I was afraid maybe they might notice I was a squirrel, but fortunately none of them did.
They kept their distance, didn't say anything to me, I didn't say anything back, and then
I left.
Anyway, it's fine.
You know, sometimes there's tension between squirrels and humans, humans don't like squirrels
around that much, especially in their restaurants.
There are some states, perhaps Arkansas is one of them, that won't allow a squirrel in a restaurant
or a grocery store anywhere there's human food.
Fortunately, I got away with it this time, but you can never tell.
Anyway, I wanted to talk about Twitter and what was going on, and wanted to talk about
the reality to cast podcast with dark circles and Katherine Druckman.
They spent a lot of time making podcasts talking about what's going on at Twitter because
it concerns them.
This squirrel has never been on Twitter.
I don't know what Twitter's about, other than I see people saying things that have been
reposted on other sites from Twitter.
And I just never got to a point where I felt that I was interested in joining a site that
would only allow you to type out 130 characters of text per whack.
I mean, I just didn't understand that Twitter was kind of like, when Twitter came on the
scene on the internet, we had my space, and I forget what else, I don't think Google
Plus was there yet, and I was a Google Plus user, but there were other sites that you
could type two or three paragraphs of text.
I believe Facebook was just getting started, and you could type quite a bit of text on that
and send pictures and everything.
You weren't limited to 130 characters, and I've never understood the fascination for
130 characters.
But over time, Twitter became certainly leftist politically leaning organization.
And then one day a man named Elon Musk came and bought them out for $44 billion.
And this concerns all the leftists because they feel that that's their left place, you
know, Twitter is where all the leftists go, and without Twitter, they have no place to go.
And they absolutely will not tolerate people like Donald Trump being back or Carl Benjamin
from England, or some of these other people that have been banned of which I'm not going
to name them all, there must be 1,000 of them, I mean it was shocked at the number of people
that were banned from using Twitter by the people that were running Twitter that are now
fired.
They're all gone, they're all out of a job.
He's fired the entire company, they're gone.
All I can say is what I've seen, what I saw they did with Twitter and what happened was
just bizarre.
It was social molding against the will of one half of society.
In other words, it wasn't a democratic function at all, it was just they're them just
deciding what was going to happen with the site and everyone else could just basically
go to hell.
I mean that's what I saw from it.
In fact, I've never thought that I would live long enough to see a sitting U.S. president
banned from anything.
It was quite shocking.
And I'm not a Trump supporter, I just respect the office, but apparently some people don't
and even if you think Trump doesn't, or Biden doesn't, you still should respect the office.
Anyway, Twitter was a segregated society and having lived in a segregated society in the
50s and 60s in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which I'm sure you've heard of my town Biden had to come
to our town and make a huge speech about the race rights of 1922, 21, whatever that happened.
I remember being taken to the mound when I was a child and the school best, they have
a plaque in front of it that commemorated that event.
And not much was said about it.
It happened a long time ago, it was over 100 years ago.
I find it funny that when I was a child in 1960s, people would refer to what were two
as an ancient event and that was only 20 years ago.
But the Civil War was an ancient event also when I was a child.
So things change, things move.
But I think Twitter is also kind of like what happened to our residential housing in towns
like Tulsa.
When segregation ended, front porches were no longer being built on houses.
They didn't want to have places where the neighbor who could come around and meet together.
In my opinion, Twitter is kind of that way by limiting you to what is a 12030 characters.
They're basically trying to cut your conversation down quite a bit.
Perhaps that was a part of the idea of making it so short was if you only had 130 characters
you couldn't say enough to irritate anybody.
Then there's the other issue that Elon Musk is going after, which is stopping grooming
gangs in pedophilia.
He's basically, I believe he's pretty much wiped out, and if I'm off of Twitter, that's
what he's done right now.
I don't know what are the groups.
What are the groups he's going to be going after, but they're going to be leaning
Twitter to the right.
Hopefully not too far because we don't want it to turn into a right-wing side either.
That wouldn't be a balanced sight would be better, but anyway, he's going to wipe
out pedophilia, and that's fine by me, it's illegal to be a pedophile.
I think I did make a hacker public radio show about RMS and his pedophile comments in
the past.
You can go look at that if you want.
I'm going to reference it in the notes.
But at any rate, now that Elon Musk has done all this stuff and fired all the employees
from Twitter, they're all gone.
Lock the doors, closing offices, but he's keeping the servers up, Twitter still running.
Apple equipment company, a computer company, has decided that they're probably going
to ban the Twitter app from their store.
So again, you have this extreme left versus extreme right fighting openly and publicly
now on the internet.
And really, I wish we wouldn't have fighting.
And I wish we wouldn't have to worry about discrimination like between squirrel human.
You know that I wish that didn't have to happen.
You know, I'm not in Facebook and I'm not on Twitter.
I'm also not really unmasked on.
I make hacker public radio podcasts and make some YouTube videos and bitshoot videos and
audesty videos, but I like to make videos and podcasts more than I do anything else.
But I do have a particular off the red social site that I go to that I use.
And I'm not interested in accumulating crowds, obviously, because no one's that interested
in what a squirrel's opinion is of anything in this world.
In fact, when humans look at me and they come around me, I just kind of write it off like
I'm a movie star.
You know, I'm one of the movie stars like Barbara Strider said or something.
They just have to be near me and touch me.
You know, I'm like John Tabulta, so that's what's special about me.
And you may feel that way if you have problems with humans as well, depending on who you are.
But even within humans, humans have trouble with humans.
And Twitter is one giant example of about 100 million humans having trouble with each other.
Just amazing.
The front porch society that I had in my neighborhood in Tulsa at the first house we lived
in there was wonderful.
Of course, that was back when we had segregated society where you lived in these neighborhoods
where everybody looked alike and they they talked alike and thought alike.
And there wasn't any political difference.
You know, there wasn't any, any difference in the meaning of the mind.
And one thing human beings have not learned how to do is they have not learned tolerance.
They have not learned that it is a skill to work with other people and listen to their
opinion and practice free speech.
It's a skill.
You know, it's something that you you have to learn and apparently in our public school
systems, we haven't really taught that every I think we're lacking in that area.
So at any rate tonight I'd like to conclude my podcast and extend my hand to you humans
wishing you happy holidays and hope that you get something good to eat in a human restaurant
somewhere someday soon.
And you managed to get it out of there without attracting too much attention like I did
and enjoy your meal and that you have a nice vehicle, a huge pickup truck like I do
so that you don't get challenged by other humans in their cars because it's not only
on Twitter where they try to challenge you, it's out on these things called interstates
and in U.S. highways, they'll come after you like their hawks or something, you know,
they're just nitty, they're zany.
So anyway, I'm going to go ahead and cut this audio off and I'm just going to make a reference
to the reality too podcast.
They work a planning about Twitter, by the way, I think Duck Serals was because he was
afraid he was going to lose his audience, you know, he's going to lose his way of life
if Twitter gets modified two minutes or goes out of business and so with a lot of these
people who are huge personalities, you know, that might have instead of just 600 followers
like I do in Bitshoot, you know, people watch my videos, they might have 10 or 100,000 people
that are interested in free software listening, you know, they might be very popular radio
personalities, radio and video making personalities and they're actually trying to make
many off of this hobby and as we all know, many is the root of all evil, but in some
cases, some people are making Linux and free software, their livelihood, which is something
I've never done and so they're worried about losing their livelihood over Twitter and I was
just sitting here thinking to myself, how popular can you really be if you have to
result in marketing techniques on a large distribution area, a social network, like Twitter?
I mean, how popular are you really?
If you move from Twitter or you move from YouTube to Bitshoot or some other place, often
you lose followers, you know, I used to make some slacker videos up in YouTube and I still
have one of them left up there, I believe, and it had like 22,000 views, I think, and
you know, when I moved over to Bitshoot, I got 6-800 views now, 3-2 views sometimes,
not as many, and not as many people subscribe to it either, like they did up in YouTube.
So, you know, I don't think that I'm good enough that I merit, you know, a huge audience.
And I'm not worried about it because I'm not trying to make the living off of anybody
doing this, but I wonder how much of this audience is fabricated nonsense, because a
lot of Twitter is basically robots, you know, moving stars and singers will pay companies
to have them followed in post comments that are fictitious in Twitter, just so that they
appear popular.
And that's another problem that I have with organizations like Twitter, and that it's sort
of a puff balloon.
But anyway, if Twitter goes out of business tomorrow, I'm not going to worry about it at
all, and I hope you don't either.
And as far as Elon Musk goes, I've heard so much negative commentary out of the left from
him, he's, they've kind of tarnished his image in my mind a little bit, that our missile
man, as they call him, are a man that owns the Tesla car company.
But I also realized that, you know, he's the one that made all the stuff happen, including
the, that satellite internet that he's created, that they're using in Ukraine and what
not, and he does have some brilliance to him, and I think he will make something of Twitter
in the end, he seems to be a person of a good art.
If you just give him half a chance, he will probably do well by Twitter, eventually.
It'll take him a while though.
But obviously he, he got into more than he could chew with Twitter.
And obviously firing all the employees of Twitter has made a huge impact in difference
on how Twitter runs.
In fact, I've recommended that in the last three software projects I've worked on.
I just told the guy, hey, why don't you fire all of us?
That way you can get some peace, right?
Anyway, I'm going to let you go, audience, I just wanted to make a quicky podcast.
It's kind of a garbagey podcast, but it was a quicky.
Love you, humans, go out and get something to eat, and don't go near the big, bad social
sites, they're no good for you.
Bye for now.
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