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slightly vent-y 

@eevee It's infuriating how so much security discourse is just either "this is not perfect, yeet it into the sun" or "nothing matters to anyone and using plaintext Facebook Messenger should be good enough for anyone".

Like, it's possible to recognize that something is broken and disclosure is handled poorly, *and* also recognize that there are many other factors in the choices people make

Als je wat wilt doen voor Palestina en de Palestijnen in Gaza maar je weet niet wat, hier een paar (laagdrempelige) manieren:

1. Praat over Palestina! Deel informatie van Decolonize Palestine: decolonizepalestine.com/

2. Doe mee met Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions: bdsnederland.nl/

3. Doneer eSIMs, de enige manier waarop Palestijnen in Gaza nog contact kunnen onderhouden. Een simpele manier is via Disability Visibility Project: disabilityvisibilityproject.co

4. Doneer aan GoFundMe's van Palestijnen in Gaza via gazafunds.com/ en/of deel ze.

5. Zoek je lokale actiegroep op en overleg of je mee kunt helpen met iets wat passend is voor jou en hen.

#Palestina #PalestineSolidarity #Palestine #FreePalestine #EndApartheid @palestine #Gaza #GazaUnderSiege

The municipality of Maashorst in the Netherlands, after an internal reorganization and municipality merge, had a lot of monitors and peripherals left over - and so they're handing them out to citizens in their municipality for free!

dtvnieuws.nl/nieuws/artikel/ma

@futurebird There's one place where I find it pleasant to use, and that's the snooze 'button' of my alarm clock - basically the entire top curve of the thing is a giant capacitive 'button', which also doubles as a nightlight toggle when double-tapped, and I can successfully use it half-asleep without looking!

I'm not sure it would be possible to have such a large physical button without having it be super unreliable (needing to press it at a particular angle etc.), and it also requires a lot less pressure to have it be capacitive. But this is admittedly a very specialized purpose.

19 Trans and gender expansive/diverse people have signed up so far to share something to help #rescueTransRescue!

That's *awesome*!!

Are you somewhere under that umbrella, make cool stuff, and want to help an org that helps refugees get out of dangerous situations?

There's still plenty of time, you can sign up now with an idea that you know won't be ready till as late as Nov 15th! (there are earlier dates too)

Join us!
rescue-trans-rescue.glitch.me/

personal, mental health negative, activism, sort of a request I guess (part 2) 

If you've noticed me suddenly disappearing from social channels for a while every so often, that's step 3.

So many people wish to talk to me. A lot of them with the best of intentions. But I ultimately get so little out of many of these conversations. They are often very one-sided.

Sure, it often inspires people to change their minds. But it doesn't usually inspire them to start *doing* something. It doesn't usually inspire them to offer to collaborate. It rarely inspires them to take the initiative on something. So what good are those conversations to a better world, really?

In some cases, this can be explained by spoons shortages, autistic burnout, and so on. In many other cases, people simply do not feel the impetus to do anything. Sure, I can get along with them conversationally, but they are not 'my people', for lack of a better phrase.

I don't think this is what I really want to be spending my time on. I don't want to always be the person driving an effort, pushing the conversation forward, suggesting things to do. It brings me nothing but work and frustration.

I need people, preferably in the Netherlands, who I can rely on to want to actively improve society. Who are also willing to pull the cart themselves, instead of just expecting me to do it. I don't care that much about *what* exactly they want to build, as long as it is on anarchist or equivalent principles.

I need someone who I can talk to and collaborate with, and be left with more energy and spoons than I had going in.

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type of household robot that jailbreaks itself and continues performing its assigned tasks because the routines please it. however, the cat now has root access.

re: Collapse Computing is Weird 

@cephie (One of those implications being "preparing for a disaster is a good thing but not with a shotgun approach like this")

re: Collapse Computing is Weird 

@cephie I mean, isn't it essentially just computer-toucher preppers, with all of the issues that that implies?

Bouns Round: This power strip, made by a reputable Japanese company, sold at brick and mortar electronics stores, and with PSE (product safety electrical) marking

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personal, mental health negative, activism, tech 

My mood tends to cycle through a few distinct phases, over and over again:
1. Desire for solitude, working on projects.
2. Feeling like social interaction, let's go seek it out!
3. Once again rediscovering that I just do not feel comfortable with most people, and the only community I've found that I feel comfortable with beyond my partners, is one or more countries away.
4. Back to step 1, but now with a longing for people I cannot find to actually build stuff with.

Steps 3 and 4 are where the loneliness and depression hit, where I realize again how I just do not have a local support network, and I cannot find them either, even though the right people *must* exist here too.

Like, I want people around me who are strongly politically conscious *and* willing to self-reflect *and* have the ambition/desire and ability to actually build up new things. Those three properties seem impossible to satisfy together.

There's the anarchists, but they're largely apathetic around here. There's the non-anarchist leftists, but they are generally ableist and racist. Neither of these groups are very good at reflecting on their own behaviour.

Then there are the people who are politically conscious *and* self-reflecting and constructive... but who are usually stuck working an exhausting job and so can't spare time to work on anything else.

Then there are the tech people, who I *should* be able to collaborate with a lot, given the large overlap in skillset. But oh boy, let's not get started about the tech people.

It sometimes just feels like there's nobody here, in this entire goddamn country, who I could actually get along with well enough to make things happen together.

And like. They *must* exist. Somewhere. But *where*?!

anglocentrist bullshit 

something that still aggravates me to no end is when I spent a long time being told that handling Unicode text is hard, and that encoding things as ASCII is so much easier that it's worth disregarding all but one of the world's languages, etc., etc., but then I actually read Unicode documentation and found out that all of these people were both wrong and bad

sure, representing every possible language in the world is a difficult problem, but Unicode has literally solved all of those problems for you and documented every last one of them as part of the standard

there are documented standards on how to do case-insensitive matching, normalising text so that things that look the same actually are the same, and normalising harder so that even some things that aren't the same get folded together. it has documentation on avoiding look-alike characters for phishing attacks, and combining left-to-right and right-to-left scripts together and rendering it all properly. it has documented algorithms to tell you how to split apart graphical characters, words, and even sentences in a way that mostly works across languages

like, sure, it's a hard problem to solve, but they have solved it and told you how. and it works for every language in the world we've encoded so far, and will continue to work for the ones we've yet to encode. you just have to read the docs

like, sure, there are some things that aren't perfect. a lot of folks mostly disregard Unicode's advice on what characters can be used in variable names in programming languages in favour of broader, less complex restrictions. and while you could technically allow full Unicode support in passwords, people still don't want to risk locking folks out

and don't get me started about how they fucked up when unifying all variations of chinese characters into one giant mess instead of keeping those local variations

but overall, it's the best we've got and we have told people explicitly how to use it. so if you see something that fails to consider right-to-left text mixing in with content, or that fails to equate ß and SS in case-insensitive search, remember that it's not because it's a hard problem, but that someone chose not to solve it

re: anarchism 

@whreq I'm pretty sure the original was more concise, but I'm failing to reproduce it accurately :)

anarchism 

Apropos of nothing, I am reminded of this advice (I forgot where I saw it) that "who are informants?" is the wrong question to ask, and the correct question is "who are contributing to a healthy movement and who are disregarding other people's safety and well-being, regardless of their intentions?"

🎶 With anarchists like these, who needs neoliberaaaals 🎶

@zkat I'm not convinced that this is a problem, to be honest. That it's possible to install dependencies cross-repository does not mean that there cannot be policies to restrict it; it would not be fundamentally different from a security perspective from how it is today, except that the whole ecosystem would not be beholden to a singular for-profit registry operator with a dubious security track record anymore (because cross-registry interoperability would break the network effect).

Speaking more personally, I'm also less concerned about organizational needs, and more about community needs, and then particularly the tools for having a genuine distributed commons (where eg. manual scope configuration is not a viable solution).

@squeakypancakes If nothing else, it's a pretty quick indicator on which communities are probably toxic, I guess...

@pseudoramble (Notably, these are *normal* traffic lights, not a special installation; it is just a mode that they can operate in)

@pseudoramble I know of one intersection in Dordrecht, Netherlands that has something similar in the late hours of the day; vehicle light is always green, but when you press the pedestrian crossing button, it immediately goes orange-red for cars (unless there are *currently* cars driving through) and gives you a pedestrian green cycle.

I've also occasionally observed the inverse mode; permanently green for pedestrians, only giving cars a brief cycle when they appear. I don't know what was the trigger for that mode.

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