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Forbidden thoughts you can't say 

@ramonita Part of me wonders if this is a social convention that exists specifically for the purpose of not having the more stressful alternative you describe from latinomérica. A sort of unspoken mutual "this is better for everybody" agreement.

And yeah, I've noticed the same pattern, also in how some activists sign up as volunteers for the riot squad trainings here (on the pretend-rioters side), almost as a sort of 'practice match'.

Forbidden thoughts you can't say 

The conflicts between cops and antifas here feel a bit like a game. A type of rugby, I suppose. If nothing happens until late into the protest someone will probably start something just because. I mean you went all the way up there, put on riot gear / black block, brought even an abused police horse / pyros, are you going to what, just go home quietly and not use any of your toys?

I mean it's not like the cop is going to grab me under a bridge, put me in a car trunk, bring me to a cemetery with other cops, draw their guns movie-like and tell me: "run". It's not like I am going to track the name and address of the cop, stalk his routine, get up to his car in a traffic jam at 9am in broad daylight with a shotgun and blow his brains on the spot. That's how they played cops and robbers back in latinomérica. Who wants to live like that?

I remember Lützerath moments before the eviction, everybody was so utterly terrified that somebody else was going to throw stones at cops. Nobody was planning to throw stones at cops, but some people wanted to philosophically defend the validity of throwing stones at cops. Others debated hotly on escalation to all without consent. This seemed to be the #1 topic of the emergency plenums. The fear that shit gets real.

The first time I was kesseled and kept on a sidewalk for 12 hours straight, I was let go past midnight and when the final bureaucracy cop filed the papers and declared me banned from the city for the rest of the weekend--there was some undertone of, how can I say this? Actors saying goodbye after a play? I kept having this intrusive thought of that Looney Tunes cartoon, the one with the wolf and the sheepdog. You know that one? Ralph and Sam? They spend the entire episode with the wolf trying to steal sheep, and the sheepdog beating him up for it. Suddenly a factory horn signals the end of the workday. They stop mid-beating, dust off their fur, and calmly head to an old-fashioned punching clock. "See you tomorrow, Ralph." "Goodbye, Sam." They get into their cars, drive to their homes. Fade out. Cheery tune. "That's all, folks."

Please, USAmericans, when you refer to this org or that org as being a 501(c)(whatever) please could you also give us the plain English version of what that means? There seem to be a lot of different designations and to those of us not familiar with the details of the Internal Revenue Code, they all look the same.

@hugh Do they mean 'support' as in 'works on the network', or as in 'will help you debug it'? As companies often mean the latter

Hey #neuroscience folks, for some reason my university thought it was a wise idea to be put me in charge as director of our neuroscience institute for a little while. Those of you working in the trenches at all levels (e.g. students, RAs, postdocs, faculty) I'd like to hear from you.

What are specific things that a department/institute can do to either inject more joy in the work or make the process of research easier?

#academicchatter #science

reddit apparently has a .onion domain, but if you go to it, it will tell you it’s seeing too many requests from your IP (the IP belongs to AWS) 🙃

@millihertz Oh, missed a step: and I have a few SAMLAs of various sizes to store the spooled cables in, roughly sorted by category and labelled and stacked in a storage rack.

politics 

We should make a law where if a piece of media becomes popular enough, it gets seized into public domain, including any potential source code.

@millihertz Got rolls of tear-off velcro cable ties first from Action, later from AliExpress (the 'tear-off' is important - it lowers the spoons cost) and just roll up cables and wrap some cable tie around it in one or two places. Works for every size, thickness, and length of cable. Doesn't unspool, doesn't tangle in storage.

I also have a 3D-printed cable holder hanging thing taped to my wall next to my desk with 5 slots for my most common cables (mainly some nice USB cables).

how do you folks organise cables?

(deliberately left open. please boost)

Request for information (boosts appreciated) 

If anyone has any resources on queer biker culture or history, please send it my way! I'm thinking about doing some worldbuilding relating to it for my writing projects!

How Decentralized Is Bluesky Really? dustycloud.org/blog/how-decent

A technical deep-dive, since people have been asking me for my thoughts. I'll expand a bit on some of the key points here in a thread. 🧵

How to defend yourself during a police interrogation

„An interrogation is not a harmonious exchange between two individuals. It’s a conflict.
And in this conflict, our ignorance is their strength. Ignorance of the meaning of police work, ignorance of the manipulative techniques used, ignorance of the legal framework and, last but not least, ignorance of our means of defence.
In response to this observation, this book is intended as a tool for self-defense against police interrogation practices of interrogation…“

Evasions-Project Releases English Translation of the #Book

PDF:
projet-evasions.org/wp-content

Thanks to @unsalted
unsalted.noblogs.org/post/2024

German and french Version 👆

#Police #Data #Privacy #Repression #Antireport #Zine #Distro

Building better user interfaces, 10 minute edition 

Here's some highly condensed pointers on building better user interfaces, in the form of a few rules of thumb:

1. Make things look like what they are. Buttons should look like buttons, checkboxes should look like checkboxes, and so on. Familiarity works.

2. Think about functionality in terms of 'tiers of need'. Make the most commonly needed features immediately visible at all times, hide less common features behind a predictable menu, really uncommon features in a *submenu*, and so on.

3. Present data in the form and context that someone is likely to want to see it, in the common case. This usually will not match the shape of your internal storage at all! Much of your UI work should be converting between these two representations.

4. Look at accessibility guidelines like the WCAG. This not only makes your UI more accessible for those using assistive tools, it also makes it more predictable for everyone else. Don't forget about contrast!

5. Make things immediate where possible, and avoid things jumping and changing too much. Loading indicators should only exist for fundamentally slow tasks, and as much as possible should be done/reflected locally without waiting for a server.

A lot goes into building good UIs, but these are the things that people most often get wrong. If you get these few things right, you are halfway there!

Does anyone have any favourite designs/styles for forms on webpages that they find nice to use, as a user?

its so absurd to me that humans have known the importance of ventilation and clean air for centuries or more, when now that it's more important than ever, when we have cheap and plentiful devices to objectively and easily measure air quality, and the technology to do so much better, is when the world decided to reject the idea altogether

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