Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

Anyone know of a good IRC client for the #blind? I wanna use IRC.

"The project of Gender is one that was/is explicitly deployed as a tool of the settler colonial project on the land mass we know as the 'Americas' including 'Canada,' forcibly deployed onto indigenous nations in an attempt to eradicate indigeneity (nokizaru 4-5). This was done due to the fact that a vast majority of indigenous nations not only structured their socialites in non-patriarchal makeups, but specifically had conceptions of gender that did not at all correlate with the European model (Lugones 25). "

-- Chris Coles, "Paradigmatic Bio-Logic: Against Biology and Towards Translife." p. 28

"To be clear, when I say that Gender is inherently a violent structure I do not mean to say that gender identity in the abstract is bad. Rather, I mean to articulate the way in which a dominant conception of Gender has been created, deployed, and enforced in such a way that it demands people fit into specific gender-identities that they did not determine. Thus when we critique and call for the abolishment of capital-G Gender, that does not mean the eradication of gender identities that exist outside of said paradigm like the Hijra, Two-Spirit, Fa'afafine, etc. but rather for the destruction of the system that makes said identities unintelligible."

-- Chris Coles, "Paradigmatic Bio-Logic: Against Biology and Towards Translife." p.28

have The Talk with your friends:

no, artificial intelligence isn't real now, nor is it just around the corner
we need laws to prevent capitalists using LLMs to try to circumvent labor laws; we don't need laws to stop "rogue AI" because that's sci-fi bullshit with absolutely no bearing on reality
no, "ai" is not "inevitable" -- the bullshit word extruders that are being positioned as the next big thing right now are snake oil garbage, and not even profitable snake oil garbage, and there's no path to develop them into anything else because that's just how they work
if you hear someone talking about how "ai" is going to change everything, treat them the same way you'd treat a scientologist talking about whatever the fuck scientologists believe in: it is bullshit cult nonsense for marks and rubes
remind them to ponder the question of "cui bono" -- who benefits from the narrative that "ai" is the "next big thing"? the answer: mostly filthy rich american fascists, filthy rich chip manufacturers, filthy rich data center operators, and filthy rich silicon valley entrepreneurs

do your part to counter bullshit fucking propaganda from capitalist scumbags 👍

Edit: this seems to have resonated with a lot of people and I've rejected a lot of nonsense replies or people being contrarian and annoying I don't care if you disagree! Write your own post about it! :')

Alchemy is only ever going to get better and it is improving every year.

Soon Alchemy will make goldminers obsolete.

I think a misunderstanding is that people want to fight "scraping" or "automated systems". But my feeling is that the issue is with the _purpose_ of the scraping: It's not "that person is scraping my site" it's "that person wants to use my work to train their slop machine". The issue is the SLOP machine with all the negative externalities they have.
And that is a path worth exploring (that I have similarly argued for code): We want to contribute to the commons but there are specific uses that go against our values.
https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/114754224933740471

Went to two frontend conferences in as many days, and learned a lot; not all of it what the presenters hoped I'd take away:

https://infrequently.org/2025/06/conferences-clarity-and-smokescreens/

Is Linux accidentally giving itself an unfair reputation for being difficult?

Helped a non-techy person on the phone get their wifi working on a Linux laptop, we solved it by them pressing the physical flight mode button and then toggling the wireless option in the GUI. Pretty easy, as easy as Mac or Windows.

BUT... when I initially looked this problem up on a search engine, the first page of results involved the command line and scary paragraphs of CLI text about hardware and drivers.

If this non-techy person had looked this up, they would have seen scary CLI options as top results, and been intimidated away from Linux.

#Linux

last time it kept overheating while trying to compile the kernel, and we had to hold it in front of the air conditioner for like an hour to get it to finish. this time around we should be able to skip that part by using the single-core trick we recently figured out for the laptop, so that's good

as we leave gpn and its lice jokes behind us and look ahead to a long summer full of more chaos events, let's all remember that infectious disease is a community issue. lice can't buy gulasch-genusspakets and wear those shitty wristbands; they don't care what city they're in or who organized the event that brought new people together and prime new louse real estate within crawling distance.

if lice were transmitted at gpn, the same will happen at other events – sure, scale might matter, but lets not pretend that this stuff stops when the jokes do.

when we share space and closeness in our bodies, we also share responsibility. this is, indeed, the point: what brings you joy brings me joy, and what hurts you hurts me; what makes you sick makes me sick, and what helps you helps me. we run on the same biological substrate; we share similar vulnerabilities, and similar desires; and when we acknowledge this by exchanging mutual care and joy in our embodied forms, let's reaffirm that shared responsibility, too.

take care.

A while back when I discussed plastic pollution in my newsletter Talking Climate, I said the most important way we can cut it is not by recycling (only 8% is actually recycled) but rather by advocating for plastic bans where we live.

And now, guess what - there’s peer-reviewed evidence this works!

Find the article here: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adp9274