Recent posts by users in this instance
re: @Misofist@girlcock.club
¹ It would make a bit more sense for IRC/XMPP-style ephemeral chat, except that both ecosystems there have bolted on loggers, archives, and other extensions to keep the messages around anyway.
EDIT: Hah, the very next post in my feed after I sent this was Soatok addressing group E2EE: https://furry.engineer/users/soatok/statuses/116070028537427556 The ubiquity argument isn't without merit, yeah, but it's still a "would be nice" level rather than a "crucial" level. Same reason I don't agree with his categorical dismissal of XMPP as a platform.
But it was designed for contexts where you read the raw contents, not for rendering into rich formatting. Once you do that, especially for anything more complex than a basic note, you've broken the foundation of the language and it all starts crumbling around you.
A few years ago I read an article making the case that HTML5² was the best lightweight markup language. (Unfortunately I didn't save it, and can't find it again; here's Jeff Atwood saying a similar thing but more dryly.) I don't entirely agree since "best" is so dependent on context, but it did get me thinking, and now I do reach for HTML when I need to do anything with even moderately complex formatting, or where it will wind up "published" in some way. Scribbling out a couple paragraphs worth of thoughts: Markdown. Turning those notes into a manuscript draft: HTML. Writing something off the cuff for Fedi: Markdown. Writing a long-lasting essay for the blog I've not gotten around to getting back up: HTML.
Jekyll, Pandoc, all those static site generators, they're a wonderful lure and I definitely share the desire to use them. But in my mind they're a trap where ultimately you wind up putting just as much effort into producing the HTML you want from a more limited language, as you would have just writing in HTML in the first place.
re: @QuietMisdreavus@squad.town
¹ Yeah, there's always going to be a bit of iconicity and arbitrary syntax that you need to learn; nobody comes to their first MD file knowing that a backtick indicates code/monospace. But the set of rules to learn is very minimal, and once you do, they all become very natural very quickly.
² And specifically HTML5 given its rules for end-tag omission, and other niceities that lead to a lot less overhead than XHTML.
Americans under the age of 50, and especially between 18 and 29, are significantly more accepting of trans people.Meanwhile, the House is the only top governmental body which allows members from that age range¹ in the first place. Most politicians are in their fifties or older. Most of the people behind the mainstream media are as well (and regardless are used to deferring to whichever party line their network is aligned with).
The narrative of caution in accepting trans identities and the political will behind it is, like you say, not coming from the general population; it instead reflects the opinions of the aging seats that actually decide policy, and the microphones spreading it. Representative democracy can only work if the representitives truly represent their constituents -- as idealistic as it is, and outliers like Bernie Sanders aside, someone whose foundational political growth was steeped in the "I don't see color" or "don't ask, don't tell" era of "equality" is almost certainly not going to muster more than a lackluster debate for a cause that they don't see as affecting them.
I've got my own, more radical opinions about the viability of reform-via-election, but even setting those aside, there's absolutely nothing surprising in the Democratic Party's lack of enthusiasm... so long as people remember that we aren't a direct democracy.
re: @juliaserano.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy
¹ The Supreme Court technically doesn't have an age limit, but given that the very youngest nominees were still 32, I'm not counting it as an under-thirties allowance.
¹ #snac's HTTP auth ironically doesn't play well with password managers taking the focus for long enough to choose which password to fill, so I'm not using the web interface for the moment on my phone until I get a better solution figured out.
But, no, fragile male egos would be absolutely shattered by "the girl" getting a draft offer before they did.
re: @gintoxicating@transister.social
re: @fluffykittycat@furry.engineer @david_chisnall@infosec.exchange @w3c@w3c.social
The one thing I'd quibble with is how low you rank the actual obligation of todo apps -- surely I'm not the only one using them to manage the basic and necessary chores that wouldn't get done without that bit of accountability -- but that certainly doesn't take anything away from the actual thesis.
Note that we require students how to do math longhand as well before allowing them to bring successively more complex calculators into the classroom. We don't say calculators are unconditionally bad because too heavy a reliance on them hinders learning.
Computer science courses are far from being made obsolete through AI. The fact that debugging skills suffered the most from relying on the AI suggests that a solid foundation might even be more important as these tools become a standard part of the toolkit. But that's all that can be gleaned from this study -- trying to say anything based on these results about programmers who are already experienced with the language and libraries being used, is entirely misrepresenting the findings.
re: @Loosf@yiff.life
re: @gintoxicating@transister.social
But you know how that appeal to Cheney's center (and the support of Israel) felt like they were leaving the entire left half of their actual voter base in the cold? That's what Democrat appeals to leftists feel like all the time. I respect the DNC, but as a savvy political opponent who leftists can nevertheless sometimes court in temporary alliances. They're a centrist party that just happens to be left enough to hold liberals, they're not a left party.
re: @kouhai@treehouse.systems
re: @w3c@w3c.social
¹ Yes, epub is for more than just books, and I do take a broad definition of "book" to encompass less traditional hypertext fiction, etc. It's still a very different design approach than the internet, and shouldn't follow those footsteps just for the sake of it.
Maybe you can crow about being right to the "moderates" who still believed the government wasn't entirely disfunctional. That's your own base; deal with it in house. Everyone on the actual left¹ knew things would get bad, and if we didn't vote for Harris it was a deliberate decision because they're all performing crimes against humanity and we know that the only thing different with Harris would have been maintaining the comfier illusion out our own particular windows.
And that's not just accelerationist talk. That's simply knowing that the lesser of two evils is still not anything you want to welcome in. You want us to vote for someone who doesn't represent us? Give us someone who is at least willing to meet us partway. Give us someone who would campaign with Bernie Sanders instead of Liz Cheney. Don't treat us like an afterthought² and expect us to keep chasing after you for scraps.
You want socialist electoral support against fascists like Trump? Either adopt the policies of the Green Party and you'll at least be our neighbours on the spectrum instead of the centrists a good ways away. Or introduce runoff voting or -- better -- full-on proportional representation and learn how to negotiate with your coalition. We're not the slightly wacky wing of the big blue blob, that needs to come to heel; we're our own (diverse) landscape, with our own priorities that, occasionally, accidentally align with the liberals'.
You don't get to blame the people who didn't vote the way you tell them to, when you never listen to us in turn.
re: @Legit_Spaghetti@mastodo.neoliber.al
¹ We all know who the sort of rhetoric in your post is usually pointed toward. I'm giving you personally the benefit of the doubt because you opened up talking about tech elite who are proportionally less likely to be leftist. I can believe they didn't believe you; don't pretend like everyone who "stayed home" shares their blindness.
² Which is, again, being generous since most of the time the bones we're thrown are the ones that happen to correspond to the Democratic party line already, and then we're conveniently forgotten when it comes to the "new" things we're asking. Medicare for All is the farthest anything's gone to humour us, and that's still got the side benefit of keeping the general blue proletariat/petite bourgeoisie happy. How's even Warren's wealth tax looking? Reparations and land-back? Defunding the police and abolishing prisons? Dismantling the modern interventionalist empire?
re: @Nuki@yiff.life
One of my stalled projects is effectively wrapping an ActivityPub feed around a Solid pod for a more digital-garden approach to Fedi. It stalled both because those aren't necessarily the easiest standards to reconcile in the finer details, and because #snac wound up filling most of the use cases I was wanting it for, but I do still want to get back to it at some point to allow better long-form essays, even beyond the control and flexibility that Solid would allow.
EDIT: To be clear, I'm not actually connected with ActivityPods, which started discussions about the same time I started thinking about my stuff, but which actually got off the ground pretty successfully. There's a few places I disagree with small points of their implementation (such as: please not JavaScript) so I still want to write my own, but I definitely reference them and their work heavily.
re: @kevinashworth@mastodon.social
Small fix for your alt text: it currently says "...the Department of Energy reaching about +5% in 2019-20." The actual number seems to be "+13%" (the 10's place in the positive Y-axis labels is missing).
loli/zoo discourse [SENSITIVE CONTENT]
In reply to a followers-only post, which explained the drama over an individual whose worst offence was "being decent to folks with zoophilic attractions they don't act on". This is important enough for me to say on main yet again.I think the drop-taints-the-well approach people are taking is more insidious than simply "fuck nuance". Since the start of the decade I've been noticing that sort of hard-line denunciation getting more and more common. Zoophilia is kind of just caught in the crossfire for the moment, but the real target has been loli.¹
Get the groundwork age verification, chat control, etc. passed on the back of fighting actual pedophilia. Get it expanded to fictional underage content on the back of people not making a distinction between attraction and action. Suddenly you're embedded in nearly every creative/trauma-support community, so when you start directly targetting queer people (or sex workers, or ...) you can freely give up the shakier ground without losing your foothold entirely. In the end, you come out of it with your opponents patting themselves on the back for having fended you off from criminalizing posting transition photos or something, without realizing that they can no longer talk about how being trans affected them even before they turned eighteen.²
I don't want to say that the entire thing has been a governments-backed psyop, but it's certainly playing right into their hands. We're tearing our communities apart and paving the way for our own oppression by buying in to the "thought crimes" mentality. Nobody is being abused when an artist picks up a pencil.
I get not wanting to see loli, or zoo. I don't want to see it either. But here's the thing: we never did see it. All the same stuff was getting drawn or written decades ago. The internet was wilder then, and a lot of it was only hidden by a "Do you really want to see this?" banner that only took one click to get through. But for those of you old enough to remember those times, how much questionable kink did you actually see? The people who like that stuff know that the vast majority of people don't. They have some of the best content-warning discipline that I've come across. Communities don't get overrun with unsavory art just because some people have attractions they'll never act on; that art always gets fenced away in a corner where it won't bother anyone who doesn't go looking. When it doesn't, the people breaching containment are almost invariably the abusers, not the ones who keep their fantasies fantasy.
Damned-by-association purity testing doesn't help anyone. You aren't made any safer by shoving your neighbour into the line of fire, the crosshairs will just swing back around to you once the gun's gotten that little bit more entrenched. Judging people for thought crimes is facism, and facism doesn't operate on firebreak logic; you can't prevent a "larger" facism's approach by burning a line with "little" facisms, trying to do so just leaves you with more facism.
¹ It wasn't necessarily always going to be pedophilia. The facists were laying the groundwork to gain control through zoophilia with the uproar after the Mr. Hands death, and then later deliberately tested its viability with the seeming ridiculousness of furry->therian->litterboxes in schools. But they found that the "think of the children" angle could still be squeezed to a better result than "think of the fur babies", and that their own ~improprieties~ didn't actually meaningfully harm their case. We all see where they've taken it since.
² Yes, that's an extreme example, but it's uncomfortably close to the truth. How many places already would someone get in trouble "with the mods" for publicly talking about how they were abused as a kid? How many layers of verification would a forum need if it were dedicated to letting people work through trauma by sharing their stories of that abuse without having to self-censor it into worthlessness?
My audience is neuroscience-inclined and that's the community I'm from.Fair enough, but all of Fedi is connected and so long as you talk in absolute terms like "almost all philosophers" while meaning something different than what a layperson would assume from reading "almost all philosophers", expect pushback when posts of yours reach beyond your bubble.
I still have no idea how you get away with dismissing the existentialists out of hand, but y'all do you, I guess.
(And for the record, it is still nebulous since you've still left "subjective experience" undefined. Enjoy your ~scientific~ flavour of soul-like things.)