Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

#FOSDEM does do a lot of good too, bringing people together and promoting Free Software. And there are amazing people putting together the event every year — especially the tons of volunteers spending their time and effort to make this all happen.

But promoting the ideals of Free and Open Source Software is all the more reason they should really respect their audience, be inclusive, and try to be better.

(People critical of FOSDEM aren't attacking it; we all want it to be better.)

#FOSDEM:

is inaccessible for those with:

- mobility issues

- scent sensitivities (no policy against perfume, uses smelly soap in bathrooms); this affects around 30% of the population

- who need/want CC for videos

And refused:

- to have a code of conduct for years; have no real means of enforcing the one they have now

- to implement any kind of sickness mitigation (COVID, "FOSDEM Flu", or other), including encouraging masks and ventilation

And promotes:

- cryptocurrency
- billionaires

For zod's sake, PLEASE stop making progressive communications inaccessible.

If you want to get the word out about your union, etc., please make sure all images have alt text, all PDFs are accessible ones, etc.

It literally helps your words reach more people. #Accessibility #Union #Labor

Enjoy the RedNote cultural exchange while you can.

It would be either US, deathly afraid of Americans learning something from Chinese.
Or China, deathly afraid of Chinese being corrupted by Americans.

But someone's going to pull the plug on the thing, sooner or later, I bet.

I don't like the whole generation divide thing. It feels like just another way to split people up instead of having us in community and working together. You know the whole boomers do this, millennials that, alpha over here. Yes, we have differences. We grew up in times that gave us different challenges, necessities, and possibilities. But our differences should be complimentary not dividing.

We should be able to value the skills in each other and support each other with them. For example, I wish I had paid a lot more attention to my Gran when she gardened because I could really use that knowledge now in the face of our exorbitant grocery prices. There are things I could have helped her with too, things I can navigate more easily than she could. I hope my nephews and nieces and I can help each other out with things as we grow too.

I feel like there's not much more scary to leaders than people of different generations working together. Hard to just pin something on one generation and get everyone else to hate on them when we're all here.

#ramblings #thoughts #generations

I’m not attending FOSDEM so I would like to contribute this galaxy-brain idea for those who are: everyone in the crowd gets into a loud, disruptive conversation about software licensing with the people sitting nearest to them for the duration of Jack Dorsey’s allotted talk. Do not back down or lower your voice. Your software licensing opinions are correct and this is your chance to convince everyone.

Some quality lichens shot on Harman Phoenix film :3

It was my first time trying out this film and I'm really happy with how some of the shots came out! It's definitely not the best tool for every job, but it's got a really cool aesthetic; I'm excited to pick up some more now that I have a better understanding of how it behaves

#lichensubscribe #photography #film #harmanphoenix

Amongst other things, arguing against gatekeeping by asserting that HTML is a programming language just lets the gatekeeper shift the goal posts. "Writing documentation isn't programming," "triaging issues isn't programming," "project management isn't programming," "UI design isn't programming," and so forth.

I fairly strongly believe that challenging the core assumption is an effective way of cutting that line of gatekeeping off entirely.

I vastly prefer the second approach, as the first one doesn't actually challenge the core assumption that gives the threat of gatekeeping its teeth.

Also the differentiation between writing a program (very *very* roughly, an executable sequence of instructions) and markup (very *very* roughly the declaration of some data upon which a program acts) is an important one, and I don't think we should let gatekeepers co-opt that distinction to be assholes.

It's been a few days, with a lot of misunderstanding in replies. That's on me for not communicating my point effectively, so let me expand on and clarify.

Suppose you encounter "HTML isn't a real programming language" as an example of gatekeeping people out of tech. It's a real and really awful canard that techbros use, even now.

Very roughly, you can respond in one of two ways:

• Expand the definition of "programming language"
• Challenge the idea that programming is necessary to be in tech

Hot take: "HTML is a programming language" is gatekeeping in effect, if not in intent.

That is, something need not be a programming language to be a the subject of highly useful and important technical skills — viewing all of computing through the lens of programming languages is inherently limiting.

One of the better ways I found to solve programming problems is writing the high level code as if I have all the other parts already in place.

It is a bit like TDD or Tracer Bullet dev, but I don't write any runing code until I feel fine with the phantasy-code I have written (but then I can continue with tests and tracer bullet mocks)

wait, so they rearchitected the whole thing to not suck and rewrote it in rust to reduce overhead and instead of letting everyone benefit from this, they're designating it "Synapse Pro" and will continue to maintain *two* codebases now just to have a product they can sell?

all while even small Synapse deployments can be slow and rickety?

what the fuck

someone has got to create a polyglot filesystem. a filesystem that can be read by two completely different filesystem drivers