Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

The result is that I’m reading a Stack Overflow question right now (“why does sin produce different results on different computers”) and a lot of well-meaning people have responses that boil down to “you can’t really expect anything from floating point numbers”.

Programmers learn about strings being character arrays and then they learn about Unicode and it traumatizes them so much that they just assume that like you can no longer do any useful operations on strings. And they will confidently go up to people doing this and say as such

I have noticed a worrying trend in computer science where topics that are have surprising, non-intuitive properties are now taught as “oh, treat this as a magic black box, you will never understand it”. I hate this as people then “teach” by discouraging exploration in the space

Germany is accelerating in its shift to the right and I’m not seeing any sufficient resistance. Partially this can be attributed to even the try of doing so being heavily prosecutable. Yet still there’s a difference between not wanting to be subject to state violence and complying with a shot societies rules. There’s ways you can fuck around and ffs I’m not seeing it.

I’m seeing how shit that was implemented five to ten years ago being enshittified to death.

I’ve recently reconnected with a few lost friends and the first things I get to know of about the mean time are:

non prosecuted sexual abuse in numbers that are actually scary and I can count myself in the statistic
ridiculous medical & drug abuse, including the worst way to learn that oxycodone is actually available

I want to look away and run, but once again I can’t - I’ll not refuse to at least try no matter how much it’ll be worth.

#OpenCore means "we won't accept the contribution you worked hard to implement on your own dime and time because we need to keep it a proprietary feature in the Enterprise Edition".

#FreeSoftware #OpenSource #FOSS #OSS #SoftwareFreedom #Community #COSS
https://github.com/hoppscotch/hoppscotch/pull/3266#issuecomment-1984106576

Okay. We all know children are not miniature adults.

Like they do NOT have as good of coordination as an adult, (and in a lot of cases, yes that is worse if you are autistic)

But a lot of kids LOVE drawing and coloring, especially if grownups will participate while they do that.

Here is the thing:

if you are drawing (or coloring) next to a young child, use your non-dominant hand to draw and color.

Because otherwise, you end up with semi-decent (for someone without art skills) lines and curves that child CANNOT make, and they get discouraged.

Like I think a child expects you to be a LITTLE better, but not LEAGUES better.

I made a little guy feel bad about himself because I was Better at drawing than him. He didn't want to draw anymore. Just wanted me to draw. because there was no point.

What I told him, was that I loved his drawings, he WOULD improve, and then we drew a monster together (basically, I would draw a body part and then he'd draw one, and I tried to make it as silly as possible). After that I always made sure to use my left hand.

It is okay to not be the best at something, but a lot of children aren't okay with that, partially because we as a society are not okay with that.

I mean this is a message I struggled with my whole life (and to this day). A lot of us weren't taught that it's okay to suck at doing something, and that you'll improve if you keep at it. But this sort of thing starts young. So use your other hand

To make things a little shorter: fucking mask, wash your hands & encourage ppl to do so as well

Are you marginalized in some way, and have you had a poor experience in the #NixOS community that was not handled properly by the moderators?

I'd like to talk to you about it! I'm not a moderator, but have spent years (behind the scenes, as a community member) trying to resolve the safety issues in the NixOS community.

I've reached a point where I think it's time to start documenting incidents publicly, pseudonymized if needed, given the apparent tendency for them to be "handled" (or rather, not handled) privately.

I'm reachable on Matrix as @joepie91:pixie.town, or by e-mail as admin@cryto.net. I won't publish anything without your agreement, but please talk to me about this before sharing your story, to make sure that we have the same expectations!

"The (mistaken) idea seems to be that any hypothesis—no matter how bigoted—can be safely postulated and tested because the ‘scientific method’ weeds out untruths and leave the truths stand. This, however, overlooks two important false assumptions: that hypotheses themselves are value neutral, and that we have unlimited resources to debunk misconceived ideas." By @Iris

https://irisvanrooijcogsci.com/2024/03/03/the-myth-of-value-free-science/

"It turns out that generative AI companies don’t like it when you steal, sorry, scrape, images from them. Cue the world’s smallest violin."

In Moment of Unbelievable Irony, Midjourney Accuses Stability AI of Image Theft

https://www.themarysue.com/midjourney-accuses-stability-ai-of-image-theft/

More about the hacker community's shitty gender politics and cleaning.

As much as I'm a great fan of joining communities and fixing them from within, of exercising my privilege (in this case, masculine nonbinary, etc.) to bring other problematic folks into the fold, I'm also so fucking tired of masc and other disconnected folks just letting spaces go to shit, cleaning-wise, and of those folks manipulating their privilege to guilt those more responsive to mess into cleaning up for them.

The optics and gender politics of masc mess are absolute crap, they buy into the whole system of gendered unpaid emotional labor, and for those with hygiene and/or immunological concerns who cannot wholly ignore it until the people causing the mess clean it up, it's even more intensely shitty.

For the love of pete, people, learn how to clean, keep house, and tidy up your own messes. One of the reasons I'm on the fence about Noisebridge is that part of the advice on the tour was "If you want to solder, first clean up an area, then solder, then clean up after yourself". Not a great default behavior there, esp when it's clear that the last step is often skipped (or there wouldn't be a mess to clean up, to start).

"De-anonymising data is surprisingly easy: if you know Tony Blair’s date of birth (a matter of public record) and the two dates during his term in office in which he was treated for a heart condition (ditto), you can pick him out of any “anonymised” pool of NHS data in seconds, and then discover all those facts about his health that aren’t a matter of public record... Dr Ben Goldacre and his team at Oxford created OpenSAFELY, a “Trusted Research Environment” that allows researchers to write programs that analyse NHS data in situ. These programs would be dispatched to run against the data held by NHS trusts, and then the system would return the results to the researchers without ever letting them handle the data – which never left the trusts’ own servers."
https://goodlawproject.org/cory-doctorow-health-data-it-isnt-just-palantir-or-bust/
#dataProtection #research #NHS #privacy

PS #Palantir, ... is literally named after an evil, all-seeing magic talisman employed by the principal villain of Lord of the Rings (“Sauron, are we the baddies?”)