← Feed

Posts

• Post #3566761

  Always focused, always alert. #dog #photography #pointer

• Post #3566760

  Having been a user of both @GrapheneOS and @ivpn for a while now, I think their philosophies align well. I'd personally love to see a close integration between these two organisations. Imagine a zero-knowledge OS paired with a zero-knowledge VPN and private DNS (IVPN's modDNS), all working together at the system level. No affiliation with either, just a user who thinks the fit is too good to ignore.

• Post #2735379

  A study found AI platforms are more likely to reference Nigel Farage than any other UK political leader unprompted. Six weeks ago I started harvesting headlines from 24 UK media outlets for a linguistic study on propaganda ahead of tomorrow's elections. So far, I harvested 51,710 headlines. I just ran a query: Farage: 429 mentions Sarwar: 259 Polanski: 208 Badenoch: 171 Offord: 165 Findlay: 82 Greer: 26 Davey: 19 Cole-Hamilton: 17 Mackay: 12 The media made this happen. https://www.t...

• Post #2735378

  Six weeks of UK media headlines. The election is done. Now we can compare. Reform UK received 2.23x more coverage in UK-wide outlets than Scottish outlets from the same publishers. Their vote share was 2.21x higher in England than Scotland. The Scottish Greens finished third in Holyrood. Their co-leader received zero BBC Scotland mentions in the six weeks before polling day. Some more findings, including how UK and Scottish editions frame the same stories differently: https://raffkarva.com/b...

• Post #2178756

  I have been harvesting UK media headlines for six weeks as part of a linguistics study. I ran a query this morning, election day, to count how often Scottish party leaders were mentioned across 25 outlets. The Scottish Greens are polling second in Scotland tonight. Their two co-leaders got 40 mentions combined. Malcolm Offord, whose party has never held a Holyrood seat, got 167. Follow the link for more findings, including why this might matter. https://raffkarva.com/blog/posts/media/the-lou...

• Post #2056016

  You cross a finish line. Someone enters your bib number into a publicly accessible gallery. Within two minutes they have 72 high-resolution photographs of your face and body, your full name, age category, finishing time (which suggests your health status), and running club affiliation. No login. No identity verification. No data protection mechanism triggered. They have no relationship with you whatsoever. This is not a hypothetical. I tested it. ——— I've been reviewing privacy po...

• Post #1741255

  A new post on Raff's Reflections: Killing with Kindness: The Problem with Feeding Wildlife https://raffkarva.com/blog/posts/wildlife/killing-with-kindness/ __ I often see neighbours leaving food out for foxes and birds where I live. I decided to investigate what the science actually says, and what I found troubled me enough to write about it. The research shows feeding wildlife spreads disease, benefits common aggressive species over the ones that actually need help, and introduces...

• Post #1395389

  Can anyone recommended a good method for dealing with executive disfunction? I think I tried everything. There are a few things I should have dealt with months ago, instead I have completed hundreds of unnecessary projects. #ADHD #AuDHD #AskFedi

• Post #1332708

  @jpmens @hyc Homo-sapiens: 300,000 years. Smartphones: 20 years. "I can't imagine moving to Android" NB: two months ago, I moved from iOS to GrapheneOS. It's awesome. I wish I had done it sooner.

• Post #1332707

  Mindfulness Through Photography. New post on Raff's Reflections — my first camera, film discipline, patience, and what happens in my head when I raise a camera. https://raffkarva.com/blog/posts/photography/mindfulness-through-photography/ #RaffsReflections #photography #blog #writing

• Post #1332706

  North Edinburgh seagulls are in the middle of a brawl. It sounds worse than an eastern European parliament sitting.

• Post #1137415

  RE: https://sunny.garden/@RaffKarva/116391971444212316 "What photography actually gave me — and I didn't know I needed it until I had it — is self-reflection and self-discovery. When I raise the camera, something shifts. My breathing slows. My heart rate steadies. The noise that runs constantly in the background goes quiet. I am present in the moment. Most of us move through the world on a kind of autopilot. We see without looking. We're present without being attentive...

• Post #943074

  I'm harvesting data for a six-week study on linguistic propaganda techniques. Ran my script twice in 12 hours and got 6000 rows to classify. 6000 rows in 12 hours × 6 weeks = me questioning every life choice that led here. (Unpaid. Spare time. Send coffee.) #linguistics

• Post #943073

  RE: https://ec.social-network.europa.eu/@EUCommission/116334100873132290 Research shows it clearly: a tiny fraction of supersharers—many from coordinated troll farms—are responsible for spreading the vast majority of misinformation. Yet institutions keep blaming everyday people for the problem. https://www.science.org/content/article/tiny-number-supersharers-spread-vast-majority-fake-news Stop shifting responsibility onto victims! We won't solve misinformation by policing individual...

• Post #757896

  There are no swearwords in existence strong enough to convey what I think when I read this: **Anduril the autonomous weapons maker doubles the size of its space unit.** “The acquisition would significantly enhance Anduril’s ability to develop and deploy solutions across space sensing, tracking, and countermeasures, building on existing collaborations between Anduril and Exo to significantly scale the impact that we will be able to provide for national security missions,” Anduril said. “We bel...

• Post #757895

  #Announcement After a few sleepless nights and what feels like eternity, last night I was finally able to launch a Print Store on my website. Self-contained** and built in HTML and PHP (I like to know how things work). No algorithms, no cookies, no tracking or tagging, no basket reminders, pop ups or ads. Just a print store that (hopefully) works. Small selection of my wildlife and landscape images from Edinburgh and Scotland. Check it out and let me know what you think. --- I also launched...

• Post #757894

  RE: https://sunny.garden/@RaffKarva/116227827043061115 Blog rebuilt. It turned out simpler than I expected. I ended up using plain HTML and PHP. From now on, I will write posts offline in markdown, convert to HTML, upload. Such workflow is more aligned with how my brain works. It's a shame I delayed learning HTML for so long. It's a lot of fun. Link below in case you want to see what this post is about: https://raffkarva.com/blog/ #RaffsReflections

• Post #757893

  New post on Raff's Reflections: my privacy journey. From being a genuine Google fan to GrapheneOS and Linux Mint, and why it happened. Practical tool recommendations included for those who want to start somewhere. It's been sitting in my head for a while, I'm glad it's finally out. https://raffkarva.com/blog/posts/privacy/from-googler-to-grapheneos/ #RaffsReflections

• Post #757892

  RE: https://sunny.garden/@RaffKarva/116257867631848508 "A few years ago I wasn't thinking about any of this. I was working sixty-plus hours a week, raising kids, coaching volleyball, running a scouts group. Privacy wasn't on my radar — not because I didn't care, but because I simply didn't have the bandwidth to notice. I was too busy living my life to think about who was watching it. Most people are in that position right now. Not indifferent — just bus...

• Post #757891

  I was walking Pojke one evening when something surfaced from my brain's background noise. Creep. Not the Radiohead version I've known since the nineties. Not Scott Bradley's Post-Modern Jukebox arrangement I love. Something quite different. Fully formed, waiting to be recorded. I got home and did exactly that. Creep has followed me for a long time. "I'm a creep, I'm a weirdo, what the hell am I doing here? I don't belong here." T...