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re: meta, fediblock 

@Kye@tech.lgbt To be clear, in this case I wasn't referring to this block in particular, but more to the general discourse around "fediblock is out of hand" that seems to be going around again. Though at least this time, some of the discourse is more nuanced than that, which is good to see.

But yeah, in that specific case, a lot of people seem to just be *assuming* that there must not be much to it, just because they haven't seen 'printed receipts' of the exact details, if that makes sense. That's something I've seen happen a few times before as well.

meta, fediblock 

Since there's apparently fediblock discourse again: "instance blocking is a last resort" and "instance blocking is a frequent occurrence" can both be true simultaneously.

There's an awful lot of people (including instance admins!) who still need to learn how to deal with community safety effectively and what the impact of their choices is on other communities.

If you want to see the amount of instance blocking reduced, then your focus should probably be on "eliminating the reason for it" rather than "telling people not to do it" or invoking cancel culture rhetoric.

This includes things like "understanding how one admin's failure to moderate leads to everybody else's workload increasing", and "when someone is behaving abusively, the primary focus should be on the safety of the victim(s) and not on the abuser, even when the abuser has trauma/etc. themselves".

Holy shit, somebody told me about one of the questions they ask when interviewing at a tech company and it’s so good.

“Walk me through the process of expensing a $50 book”

@scanlime I haven't tried exactly that, but I *do* regularly keep an eye on where things are served from, and unfortunately Cloudflare controls a double-digit percentage of web traffic and that's not *just* big sites, quite the opposite :(

meta, blocklists 

@asb This is something I've been conflicted on, personally.

There's clearly value in off-the-shelf blocklists for at least some baseline set of malicious instances, which people now have to gradually rediscover themselves after getting a lot of abuse.

On the other hand, there's a very real risk with "review-less" blocklists in particular, of instances ending up on blocklists and getting widely *wrongly* blocked (for reasons ranging from "this is a more subjective block reason" to "someone was added to the list maliciously"). There's a history of this sort of thing being weaponized towards marginalized folks in particular.

I'd really like to see some implementation of blocklists that accounts for this, and that involves a review step but without making it a lot of work. The Fediblock hashtag gets pretty close, but is difficult to explore retroactively for new admins.

TL;DR: Yes, I think it's needed, but it's also something that's very easy to get dangerously wrong.

Real talk. Jobs being "good for you" is capitalist propaganda. Organized labor is good. Socialism is good.

We work jobs for shitty employers because we have to in order to eat, and it's a mistake to attribute some kind of moral good to this.

@ethorsoe Yeah, and how inextricably it conflates that with the technical properties of what *should* be called eg. a library or module (depending on perspective).

So my husband taught his parents’ dog how to walk their other dog and I thought you needed to know.

(Edit to add - Molly and Winston live out in the country on an acreage so this is a safe way for them to get their exercise without bothering anyone or being bothered 💜)

Hello, friends. Here is a gentle reminder that we are halfway through February and for a lot of people that's when SAD sneaks up and knocks them into depression. Take care of each other and yourself. Keep an eye out for friends in need. Maybe save a life or two.

"Enables ordinary LEDs to transmit barcode data – The Barcode Emulation reference design allows an ordinary LED to transmit barcode data. The LED is driven such that it transmits pulses that can be read by a checkout scanner."

What.

i don't know why there's an entire holiday about the olivetti valentine but if you had to pick a typewriter to be romantic about, you could do far worse

"Motonormativity":
gets my vote for Urbanist Word of 2023 (aka "Car Brain").

The idea that people think it's normal for cities, and the world, to be designed around automobiles, a transport method that excludes almost one-third of people in most societies.

Based on philosopher David Hume's hoary is/ought fallacy (Just because something "is" like that, people think it "ought" to be like that.)

Thanks to Ian Walker for coming up with a very useful term!

Study here:

psyarxiv.com/egnmj

If but one in ten of these devs who, upon discovering Mastodon, immediately set about constructing yet another consent-free crawler, instead put that energy into contributing to Mastodon code, we could have a viable hard fork within a month.

@jfhbrook Hmm. Don't think that's possible? IIRC qmk expects you to specify options at compile time?

@jfhbrook This is pretty much how I at one point implemented Nix (lexical) scope inheritance in my Nix-to-JS compiler, but iirc there was some cursed Nix-specific nonsense that made it not work in 100% of cases

"ai" 

Earlier today, I saw something from ChatGPT go mildly viral, only to notice it had plagiarized some of my papers. It hurt like hell to see all the technical meaning that I had worked so hard to convey with my words reduced to textured English product and regurgitated.

The last thing in the world I want is for that to be integrated with my literal browser.

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