Tag: technology

When there’s an app for the commonplace

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

KRON4: SF-based dating site poorly hiding their objective of pairing white guys with Asian females in market where abnormally high WMAF pairings already exist draws massive online criticism

There’s a metaphor I like to use often, about a scenario where a hungry lion leaps into a herd of gazelle, but they’re so blinded by hunger that they can’t seem to focus on a single target, run around frenzied, and eventually all the gazelle get away.

That’s how I feel when I read this article, and I can’t help but wonder if the state of news these days aren’t really so much reports of actual topics as much as they’re reporting on the reception of actual topics.  Like I kind of get it, if I saw an article that was all like ‘there is a new dating app in SF that specializes in hooking white dudes up with Asian gold diggers women’ I’d just be kind of like lol eww fuckin white guys, but give me an article with the hook of ‘internet tears into new dating app in SF that specializes in hooking white dudes up with Asian women’ and now I’m kind of like rage?  What kind of rage?  And then I’m clicking the article and here we are.

But yeah, there’s so much to digest with a story like this that I can’t seem to focus and figure out where to start writing about first, because there’s just so many damn angles to approach this from.

Like how San Francisco is already a place where because there are so many nerdy white dude tech millionaire/billionaires in the area, there’s already a noticeably disproportionate amount of Asian women who land there pretending they’re not digging for gold, and the pairing of WMAFs organically happens, solely based on just fuckin’ nature.

Or how SF is such a smarmy arrogant place so reliant on tech, that they need to make apps and dating services and sites in order for people to function in daily life.  Like, white guys wanting Asian women in a city like SF should be as accessible as walking out the door and breathing fresh air, but these dorks needing apps to curate and do some of the lifting for them seems to be about as the most SF thing in the world.

Or just how gross white guys are, that they continue to fetishize Asian women as much as ever, to the point where fucking apps and services are developed in order for them to expedite their searches, instead of them waiting until they’re in their 50s and relocating to Thailand or the Philippines like legions of white guys before them.

Oh, and Asian women aren’t without criticism either, they’re not helping break the stereotype of Asian gold diggers who are looking for rich white wimps/simps/nerds to seduce and claim for their assets, and then entrap them either.  They’re as palpable to the problem as the white guys they’re seeking.

But like I said, so many angles, so difficult to approach.  San Francisco seems like such a weird place, and I frankly still have to say it’s up there on my top cities in America that I wasn’t impressed with and didn’t care much for.

Maybe they should focus on making an app to help rehabilitate the image of their shitty town, that focuses on identifying savvy PR people to try and take on such a lofty task.

The white man’s equivalent to blackout license plate covers

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

While I was commuting to the office one day, I noticed a Ford Bronco that had a vanity license plate that consisted of nothing but 1’s and I’s.  So if you can picture this description in your head, you can imagine that it’s basically a vanity plate with seven straight lines at a quick glance.  You can also probably also imagine that at a quick glance, it’s probably impossible to accurately pinpoint what the correct combination of characters is, which is more than likely the intention of the white guy who chose it and I’m confident that it’s a white guy because only white people drive and covet Ford Broncos the way they do.

The thing is, this isn’t the first deliberately deceptive vanity tag I’ve seen, it’s just that now I felt like writing about it, and how it seems to be a pattern that it’s always white men who tend to have them.  1I11II1, 0O00OO0, B888BB8, or any other combination of characters that have the capability to blend and confuse human eyes, which is more than likely the intention.  And when people have the intention to deceive, than more than likely it’s so that they can get away with deceit; probably just driving like a dick, but these days the hopes and thoughts that they can confuse the antichrist-like nefarious flock cameras that are all the rage in the increasing environment of surveillance.

And it’s always white males that do this.  Every time I’ve noticed one of these types of plates and I’ve managed to pull adjacent to the vehicle, it’s always been a white guy.  It’s not hyperbole, and it’s not just an isolated incident.  Definitely more than this one instance, but maybe not quite ten times, but every single time I’ve seen a deliberately confusing vanity tag, it’s been a white guy.

Clearly, this is the white man’s equivalent to the blackout license plate covers that black people who want to drive like dicks put on their cars; the intention is the same, but the approaches are different.  Black folk don’t want The Man and Big Brother to have it easy identifying their whips while they drive however the fuck they want to, so they use dark covers and obscurers, but in only the way Whitey can do, white folk do it by hiding in plain sight with completely legal, albeit hard to decipher, vanity plates.

I have a friend that’s in law enforcement, and they said that modern plate readers have no issue in being able to identify vague license plates, so really the intention of them is to confuse other people on the road.  The irony is that white or black, people who want to act like they’re trying to obstruct and make their license plates less identifiable, only draw more scrutiny to themselves by going to the lengths they do. 

If I saw an orange Ford Bronco whose license plate was a state-issued CWN5637, I’ll have forgotten it by the next light, but regardless of if I’m accurate or not, I’ll remember seeing I1II11I or whatever such combination actually is and know that the guy driving it is probably some entitled white guy who drives like a douche.

If only I were in my 30s again

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

There have been multiple times in my life in which I have thought that I was born in the wrong time.  Like whenever I see professional gamers and how revered they are in Korea and how worshipped they are in the gaming community, I think to myself that maybe that could’ve been me, had I been born in like ten years later than I was, where my parents wouldn’t have discouraged and shamed my love of video games and instead nurtured and encouraged them, and maybe I could’ve ended up like Faker or Daigo or some other professional gamer that makes millions of dollars playing video games and streaming video games today.

Lately, I’ve been having those similar thoughts again because for whatever reason, the social media algorithm has decided to start providing me reels of all these people who basically do nothing but film themselves, going around doing mundane things by themselves, but usually prefaced with a caption of “single 30-something does X in a day,” and it’s a 45-70 second reel of them going around, doing mundane things, with the underlying hook being that they’re doing it peacefully and without anyone bothering them.

Grocery shopping, visiting some local restaurant, going on a run, hitting the gym, driving around, eating some more food, cooking food that they’ll eat, getting and/or drinking a fancy coffee; running some mundane errands but doing it at their own pace and leisure.

These videos will all have hundreds to thousands of reactions, comments and seemingly very high engagement numbers, and although it might be all by bots, the stats are still stats, and undoubtedly these people are making money doing such.  They all have templated formats, cold opens and tiny gimmicks, presumably to make them who they are, but at the root of things, they’re still just doing mundane crap, and it just so happens that they’re not all unattractive blobs of humanity, they’re admittedly watchable.

I just can’t help but think that if I were in my 30s now, when I was single forever, and had pretty much nothing but time on my hands when I wasn’t working, I could be in on this hustle, and be making a bunch of videos about my mundane life and presumably be getting paid to do it, and when I got tired of doing it, I’d have a million bucks in my bank account to where I could have the seed money to perhaps embark on to my current life, but with moar capital backing me up.

Seriously, I’m not sure I could churn out content at the rate as many of these creators do, but I think about the things that I have done in my life throughout my 30s, and wonder if some things would be worth making content out of.

  • 30-year old single Korean-American travels to X to visit MLB team/park/city
  • A day in the life of a 31-year old Korean living in Atlanta
  • How a 32-year old single Korean guy prepares for standby travel
  • 33-year old single Korean guy gets stranded in Minneapolis
  • Dragon*con with a 34-year old single Korean guy
  • 35-year old Korean guy visits Korea for the very first time

Shit, I could do what a lot of the creators do now.  Albeit perhaps with less of the extravagances they subtly like to flex, like how all their cars seem to be way high-end, or they have designer belongings, but I like to go to coffee shops and restaurants, and I could film myself walking into a gym or an H-Mart.  Film myself going to my computer “to work” and all the other inane bullshit that all these creators do.

And when the cameras aren’t rolling, basking in the largely positive ratio of engagement scores that my content is generating, and waiting for all the digital media money to start rolling in, and encouraging me to keep going.

Nah, instead I’m in my mid-40s now, married with kids, and I’m not saying that they’re the reason why I couldn’t embark on a new career of being a content creator, it’s just that I know that content creation is an largely, wholly time-consuming endeavor to embark on, and personally it’s more important to be present with my family and children versus getting caught up in the rat race of trying to produce, film, edit, and post content, and knowing my luck, by the time I get the machine rolling, the content creation bubble will pop, and it won’t be nearly as lucrative then as it is now.

And ironically, the new moneyball of making money, would be getting a fucking job, doing it, and getting these periodic things called paychecks.

But, nothing is ever going to change until I get in on things, because I am begrudgingly the master of the universe, and nothing happens until I decide to get involved.  If I did what the single 30s somethings are doing today, it probably wouldn’t be nearly as monetarily viable as it is now.

The white font is still undefeated

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

The Register: Alcorn State professor uses white text hidden in assignment instructions to phish out AI-using cheaters, catching 32 out of 35 students

A long time ago, during one of the agonizingly arduous job searches in my life, I once filled out an application that took me the better part of an hour to complete, what with all the PII I had to disclose, as well basically manually typing in all of my resume’s information, while uploading the resume itself, as well as composing a thoughtful cover letter that basically said hi my name is danny look at my resume to see why i believe I can do your shitty job.

Submit, confirmation email five minutes later, check the link to see what application status page looks like.

Applicant rejected.

Fucking seriously?  In five minutes?

It became apparent that I had been an immediate victim to bot screening, little possibility that any human had seen my application, and that my application had been phished out presumably because it did not contain any of the unknown criteria that the position had been looking for.

But really, I was incensed that nearly an hour of my already frustrating-on-account-of-being-unemployed life’s time had been wasted in less than five minutes because a fucking bot didn’t see enough of the words they needed to see in order to even consider my application for human eyes.

After the initial rage subsided, I decided to take a different approach to building my resume, taking into consideration that my resume was more than likely going to be passed through bot screeners that do little else than analyze the words they identify, with greenlit terms scoring higher and increasing my chances of getting seen by a human screener who then can possibly be convinced to reach out.

In both the Word doc and the InDesign-created PDF variants of my resume, I created floating text boxes on a separate layer, and wrote in every single term that I thought might increase my odds at ticking green flags from a bot screening; skills, software, awards, orientations, but mostly race-related.

adobe microsoft photoshop illustrator indesign acrobat flash html css java final cut video illustration mac mobile desktop print digital omni concepting art direction management

award winning accolade gallery featured magazine publication ad creative organization

gay lgbt lgtbq pride college university masters veteran military

asian black hispanic latino minority korean japanese african woman spanish bilingual language fluent

And then I’d set the entire block of text to white, and build out my actual resume on top of it.  Invisible to the human eye, but in the view of zeroes and ones that the bot sees, every single one of these terms is as clear as day, and my hope was always that if any of them helped flag my resume as worth looking at, why the fuck didn’t I think of this sooner.

I’m not saying that this tactic necessarily worked like I had invented Google, but I can say that I was never screened out of a position in five minutes ever again.  Maybe it’s on account of bots becoming as lazy as the humans who implemented them, maybe it’s because the bots’ processes aren’t disclosed anymore.  Maybe it’s all of the above, or maybe, just maybe, my tactic might have actually proved to be useful.

Needless to say, this story about the Alcorn State professor using white text to phish out and bust his own students, tickled me in a manner that brought great joy and great satisfaction to my soul.  The tactic is as old as when font color selection in word processor software was launched, and no manner of AI advancement has been able to get around the fact that at some point, humans are still involved in the process.

I already have a contentious opinion and relationship with AI, and of course everyone including this professor knew that people were lazy and were already utilizing it to do things that they should be doing and trying to pass the results off as their own.  And frankly, the fact that he ended up busting that many students in his class isn’t at all surprising, and the real surprise is how three of them didn’t get caught.

Because it’s not like the three that didn’t get caught probably weren’t cheating with AI either, it’s just they were probably the students that either had the 1-2 IQ points higher to have the wherewithal to review and proofread their AI-generated papers to catch the dummy prompt’s trapdoor in their assignments, and/or maybe they had an appearance setting in their device’s OS running to where they had any sort of colored background other than default white, and were able to see the dummy trap prompt in the assignment before they ran it through an AI.

Frankly, I’m more annoyed with the verbiage that states that the students were only partially failed, because I’d have failed them all outright.  AI-generated work is tantamount to plagiarism in my opinion, and in this day and age, a lot of time if people are not punished severely, they’re going to just look for ways to circumvent in the future, and not learn all the same.  I’m not saying that making them repeat and pay for class all over again won’t result in the same outcome, but at least the school might make some money on it in the process, and smarter people might think twice about doing it and might actually learn something when they do things themselves.

All the same, the real winner in this entire story is the white text strategy, which has proven to be as unbeatable now as it was in the 1980s when WordPerfect and Microsoft Word first came into existence.  As long as humans are involved in the process, failure will be too.

Flock camera haters wouldn’t last 4 seconds in Korea

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Over the last few weeks and months, I’ve been hearing about Flock cameras and how there are a lot of people who seem to be vehemently opposed to their existence.  Not only have haters been vandalizing, sabotaging and outright destroying them – FOR ‘MURICA, apparently there’s been a lot of controversy over police using the tech on the backend for less-than-ethical means, leading to a surprising amount of discipline towards a group of individuals who have been seemingly immune to the consequences of oversight over the years.

As far as punishing the po-po who have been supposedly abusing their access to Flock camera information, a lot of context is missing, and very little details ever seem to be given in regards to what curious cops are doing with Flock camera data, although it must be pretty substantial for them to actually be receiving disciplinary action, considering all manner of abuses of power, such as driving like shitheads and killing minorities tend to get swept under the rug, but god forbid these guys access surveillance without proper authorization, so I only have so much opinion on them, although I can’t imagine it would improve if we the people were actually given any further information.

But regular people, the Joe-Schmoes of the world who are getting so bent out of shape over the presence of Flock cameras, this kind of fascinates me.  In one hand, I get that it does kind of suck to know that there is an increase of Big Brother-ing by, for lack of a better term, the government, that frankly nobody asked for, and people, especially ‘Muricans, generally don’t respond well to the idea of being surveilled.  But in the other hand, my general take on surveillance is that, if you’re not doing anything sketchy or illicit, what does it matter if you are being potentially monitored?

It’s not like Flock cameras are sprouting like mushrooms and fungus during the summer humidity, from what I can observe, it’s usually areas near schools, busy intersections and high-traffic roads in which they’re installed.  Most of the time it looks like they’re installed in areas closer to schools with a primary objective of busting all the shitheads who drive too fast in school zones and having an automated means of issuing citations without a human cop to do it.

Additionally, ‘Murica is too cheap to plant these things in places without just cause, and I don’t think they’re randomly positioning these without any sort of data or justification.  They seem to be placed on major veins and well-traveled roads that suspicious people could potentially use, and should the need ever arise to try and locate a suspicious person, they could triangulate a location better with this kind of footage.

Frankly, I like to believe that they’re being placed in areas where people actually might care more about the crime rates of the area.  On the flip-side, I bet there are few or no Flock cameras near my old house on the south side.  And if there were, I’m sure that’s where there’s destruction of property, because the crime rate down there was already high, and the last thing any of those crooks would want is anyone having the chance to surveil them and possibly increase their odds of prevention.

I kind of get it though.  On the simple preference of if you would mind being watched over having greater privacy, I’d probably pick the privacy myself.  But considering that decision has been taken away from me, at least in areas where there are Flock cameras, I’m not sweating anything, because I don’t (at least I hope) practice in any nefarious or shady activities that I would be concerned about being monitored over, especially to the point of where I need to go sabotage and destroy government property.

The funniest part about the above image is the planting of the American flag in the destruction of a Flock camera.  It was clearly done in a manner in which the flag is acting not just as a symbol of defiance, but straight up like a middle finger.  This is the kind of shit I’d imagine like Ukrainian forces doing over a pile of dead Russian soldiers, or like when in 2006, the Korean national baseball team defeated Japan in the World Baseball Classic and planted their flag on the pitching mound, causing Ichiro to crash out.  But with these incidents of Flock camera destroying it’s basically ‘Muricans giving the middle finger to, America, and I often don’t believe there’s any country in the world that hates so much of its own country more than America does.

Speaking of Korea though, getting back to the title of this post, the people who hate Flock cameras, they most definitely would not last four seconds in Korea.  From the busiest neighborhoods in Seoul to the shittiest back alleys in like Pohang, there are CCTV cameras covering probably 75% of the entire peninsula.  My mother-in-law and I walked through a historical park that was pretty wooded and nature-y, and wouldn’t you know it, CCTV cameras were affixed to live trees, monitoring over the walking trails, and at multiple points during our trip, I’d remind her that the cameras were everywhere.

And they’ve got surveillance teams in surveillance rooms that look like Avengers HQ with how many screens and cameras they all have to monitor at all hours of the day.

Yeah, if Flock-hating ‘Muricans are up in arms over a few cameras going up along busy streets, I don’t think they have the perspective to know things could be way, way, way worse, compared to places like Korea, where surveillance is 70% more big-brotherly and privacy is way lower.  But again, if you’re not doing anything wrong, what does it really matter?

Finally, some #TRYHARD answers

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

ABC7 Chicago: Gary, Indiana teen with “perfect 4.0 GPA” accepted into 126 colleges, amassing $9M in cumulative scholarship offers

Gary, Indiana must’ve never heard about Westlake High, because 126/$9M seems kind of mid in the grand spectrum of the #TRYHARD game.  Also, I put perfect 4.0 GPA in quotes above, because not long after discovering the Florida nerd with the 11.99 GPA, the whole concept of grade point averages has been blown out the door, and every number warrants questioning and examinations that nobody wants to have to do and it sucks to be a egghead teenager today in that regard.

Anyway, not that I really wanted to get back in the swing of documenting teen #TRYHARDs left and right like I did that one year, this particular story came of interest to me for one specific reason: it appears to have shed a little light on the whole #TRYHARD game, namely potentially answering one of the biggest questions I had about the game as a whole itself: how are all these kids able to apply to so many colleges without seemingly having to worry about those pesky things called, application fees?

Apparently, there’s a site/service, CommonApp, where there are 1,100 schools on the platform, so it’s apparently easy to make a profile and fling it out like Gambit to any and all schools available; many of which seemingly have no, or are willing to waive, those pesky application fees.  I don’t care to dig into just which schools are on the platform, but imma guess many notable and nameworthy ones, based on the cache of schools that have been mentioned by #TRYHARDs throughout the years.

Welp, that answers a lot of questions I’ve always had in regard to how these #TRYHARDs are applying to hundreds of schools.

Anyway, before I wrap on this post, a few things I want to clown on:

[They had] a perfect 4.0 grade point average and is ranked second in [their] class.

Second?  If they’re ranked second in the class, what does first place look like?  And why aren’t they making the news?

[They] did have to write about 30 essays to go with some of the applications. But [they] says it was worth it.

30 essays?  Oh the humanity!  Oh the strain, the labor, the exhausting ordeal!  Lmao, I could knock out 30 essays in a day, but then again, there’s nobody I know who has been writing as much and as long as I have, and even Jerry Seinfeld probably has taken more breaks than I have.  But if 30 essays was the cost for not having to pay application fees, I would’ve written 100 to not have had to pay for the 3 colleges I paid to apply to.

And in true #TRYHARD fashion, I can’t seem to find any intel on where they actually picked.  This article originally dropped in March, and decision day was back in May, but no information on where they ultimately chose, which goes to show that once the initial news of #TRYHARDing breaks, frankly nobody cares what happens afterward.

The ever-increasing aggravation of phone avoidance

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Much like the rest of ‘Murica, I don’t really like having to speak on the phone.  Frankly, I don’t like having to interact with other people if it can be avoided.  However, there are plenty of times in which I understand that a vocal interaction is capable of being way more productive than trying to do things over text messages or emails, and I will pick up the phone and make calls when necessary.

The other day, I had two things I wanted to accomplish: contact an optometrist and make an appointment for my dad to get an eye exam and some new glasses, and set up an appointment with my pest control people because it’s that time of year in which ants decide to intrude in my home and I don’t understand why ants exist in the first place.

When the business day was effectively over, neither objective was any closer to accomplishment than the start of the day and it’s partially my fault for thinking that text correspondence was going to get the jobs done as opposed to just calling up the places I needed to speak with.

The optometrist that I had in mind, not only would they not pick up their phone during business hours, there was a message that gave a phone number that could be texted for business purposes.  Hm, I thought, maybe they’d be like Delta Airlines and be more efficient at getting shit done over text than over the phone.

I was wrong.  The number I was given took three hours to get back to me, and responded to me as if I were an existing patient and was referring to bloodwork, and when I corrected them, they were like oh sorry, and gave me a different number to reach out to after 1:30 when the office was back from lunch break.  So I reach out to them, they don’t respond until two hours later, oddly in ALL CAPS, asking when I want to come in, and there’s no more response after I tell them the desired day in which I want to come in, and asked what information I need to give them in order to secure an appointment.

Mission failed.  Need to call tomorrow.

My pest control people, I reached out to them on Friday before the start of the business day via web submission, since it was early as fuck in which I realized that my annual ant problem was happening again.  No response at all, so Monday AM I call and ask what the delay is, since they’ve never taken this long to respond before, and am given a canned corn response that they’re busy and a scheduler will get in touch with me later.

Later comes, in the form of a text message, giving me a date and time that they’re available.  However, I am not, because of a work conflict, do you have another time?  No, we’ll just have to look for another time.

And then silence for the rest of the day.  Mission failed.  Need to call tomorrow.  But this time remind them that I’m over having an annual ant problem and that I will be reaching out to other companies now, and the first one available will be my go-forward pest control.

The point is, yes, having to speak with other people is a massive inconvenience that I understand that we all want to avoid if we can.  However, the issue is that the alternative is about as effective and efficient as trying to send an email with a cucumber or trying to construct an airplane with Fisher Price tools.  People hide behind the lack of pressure from real-time correspondence to suck at their jobs way more than they already do, and the clocks of life are never pausing, and the most important commodity in life, time, is continuously being wasted.

Until people on the other ends of the lines can prove to me that text correspondence can be remotely as efficient as pursuing a forced interaction over a phone, I need to remind myself to just forego the typing and just get in the grills of people and force them to speak, because when the day is over, I want to meet my objections and be efficient with my time over the convenience of not having to interact with others.