Episode: 3747
Title: HPR3747: Twitter and Dinner with the Humans
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3747/hpr3747.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 04:55:06

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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 Zen Flotor 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, Zen Flotor your favorite magical forest squirrel, former human being
converted into squirrel by aliens in the 1960s and atheists.
Trying an experiment today.
I have a new Chromebook that I've been playing with for the last month.
It is a Samsung.
And I forget the model number of this.
I'll have to go back and look at one of my videos and tell you what it is.
But it's a really small notebook, Chromebook that I picked it for $149 at a Walmart.
And I've just been carrying it around everywhere.
It's got a 10-hour battery life.
Anyway, the squirrel is in a restaurant in Arkansas and we're on the road today.
And so I thought I would record a clip of me coming into a human restaurant which I have
come in.
I have sat down and said for 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 rye 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, 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 Picon coffee because you know squirrels
like nuts.
Anyway, I thought I would talk about my little Chromebook.
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 touch screen to it.
But you know that's just fine with me.
I don't hardly use the touch screen on my Google Go Pro.
Google Go Pro.
So let's see which Chromebook was this that I have.
Samsung 310 Netbook, here it is, yeah.
And they have a couple versions of this.
One of them has a slot on the side to read a plug-in memory card.
But this one has a USB-C plug-in on one side.
And then the other one 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 once you charge it, it lasts for ten full hours.
Anyway, I thought I'd go ahead and close down the web browser and talk about the Chromebook
a little bit.
It has a regular trackpad.
It's really small.
It's slightly bigger than a textbook folded 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've plugged into.
You can't boot an operating system from a USB keystick on your Chromebook unless you
push a couple of buttons on it.
But you can't actually use QMU to run an operating system unless it's 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 QMU, 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 anytime I wish.
And I can run QMU 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 not missing it.
If I wanted to run an operating system in QMU, I can just use the open BSD server, sitting
at my house to do it with.
I also decided to sign up for a Google One services, which gives you access to their
Google Drive storage for which I signed up, probably, with 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 Demi's, you know, just click a button and they have everything all set
up.
That's one of the nice things about running Chromebucks 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 DistroWatch.
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 more, a little better than the standard one that you get with a Google Chrome.
And let me see if I can pull up the company that makes that one here.
Here it is.
Read selected.
Let me read who it is is doing this because I forgot the name of the company.
Let's see, where's the settings, I think that's the settings, maybe it gives me the name
of the company in there.
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, I don't know, 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 you, 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.
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 a screen castify 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 a network drive like Google Drive.
I've also been installed a program called Drive 2 on OpenBSD and there's also what is
it called our clone, I believe.
Those are the two utilities that you can use to access Google Drive with and write files
to and from the OpenBSD server so that I can do backups of stuff 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 podcast 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 type of documentation and spreadsheets
and things that I keep out on Google Drive because I've become accustomed to it.
Running in bucks a year it's certainly cheaper than running OpenBSD from just the electricity
alone on a server.
Of course if you run 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.
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 to 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.
All right boys and girls dinner is over and it was just absolutely lovely eating human food
in a human restaurant. Things went long swimmingly. I had enjoyed a couple of cups of black coffee
and two glasses of water while I was there after finishing my meal.
Well nobody really bothered me. However there was a pile up at the cashiers
register leaving and people were lined up behind me. It 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.
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 I was 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 I wanted to talk about
the reality two cast podcast with duck surles and Catherine Druckmann. They spend 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 is about other than I see
people saying things that have been reposted on other sites from Twitter. 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 at 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 center of a leftist politically
leaning organization and then one day a man named Elon Musk came and bought them out for 44
billion dollars and this concerns all the leftists because they feel that that's their left
place. 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 a thousand 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 them just deciding what was going to happen with the site and everyone else could
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.
At any rate 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. You know 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 bus
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 the 1960s people would refer to World War II as an
ancient event and that was only 20 years ago. And 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. And in my opinion Twitter is kind of that way by limiting you to what is
120 130 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. And then there's the other issue that Elon Musk is going after,
which is stopping grooming gangs in pedophilia. And he's basically, I believe he's pretty much wiped
out anafa off of Twitter. That's what he's done right now. I don't know what other groups,
what other 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 good. A balanced site 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. And I think I did make a hacker public
radio show about RMS and his pedophile comments in the past. You can go look that up if you want.
I'm not even going to reference it in the notes. But at any rate, now that 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's 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,
you know. And I wish we wouldn't have to worry about discrimination like between
Skural Human. I wish that didn't have to happen. I'm not on 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 bit shoot videos and honesty videos. But I like to make videos and
podcasts more than I do anything else. But I do have a particular off-the-road 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 Skural'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 Berber Stress Center, something they just have to be near me
and touch me. You know, I'm like John Travolta. 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 a hundred million humans having trouble with each other. Just amazing.
And 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 talked alike and thought alike.
And there wasn't any political difference. You know, there wasn't 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 have to learn. And apparently in our public school systems,
we haven't really taught that heavily. 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 some day soon. And you managed to get in and 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 not on these things called interstates in
US highways. They'll come after you like their hawks or something. You know, they're just nutty.
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 2 podcast. They were complaining about
Twitter by the way. I think Doc Sirles 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 too much 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 six to 800 followers like I do in Bit Shoot, 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 money off of this hobby.
And as we all know, money 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 or their 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 of social network like
Twitter? I mean, how popular are you really? If you move from Twitter or you move from YouTube
to Bit Shoot 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 Bit Shoot, I got
600-800 views now, 300 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, movie stars and singers will pay
companies to have them followed in post comments that are fictitious on Twitter, just so that they appear
popular. And that's another problem that I have with organizations like Twitter in that it's sort
of a puff balloon. But in any rate, 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. 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 whatnot. 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 heart. 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 got into more than he could chew with Twitter and
obviously firing all the employees of Twitter has made a huge impact and 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 quickie podcast.
It's kind of a garbagey podcast, but it was a quickie. Love your 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.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio.
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