Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

Notice:

It is the official policy of Scholar Social that

Swearing at someone exactly once because they were being racist doesn't count as "harassment" in the slightest and is honestly kind of encouraged here

Absolute nightmare of an experience at Brussels airport passport control. Likely getting profiled because the birthplace on my French passport says Turkey and the chip isn’t working (which is why I was in the manual control lane to begin with).

The joys of being white passing in racist countries. You’re fine until they see you might be a bit too Brown inside.

Now sitting in a room with other Brown and Black folks, waiting (and they have my passport).

#belgium #brussels #racism

Today is the national day of the Sámi people, who mostly live across what is now Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. This day commemorates the first cross-border congress of Norwegian and Swedish Sámi, in 1917.

In Sweden the language is spoken by about 20,000 people, but far more have Sámi heritage, as a result of racism and assimilation policies. #sami #indigenous https://www.su.se/department-of-swedish-language-and-multilingualism/news/s%C3%A1mi-national-day-on-6-february-s%C3%A1mi-is-one-of-sweden-s-five-national-minority-languages-1.595512

I'm in a lot of smaller or more local tech chats with a lot more "normie" engineers, and I'm absolutely *terrified* at the number of them saying things like, "I tried GitHub copilot this weekend" or "Had chatGPT write some code for me" and have really positive things to say about the experience.

Like, it probably says a lot about how much boilerplate there is in a lot of modern development, but we're about to enter an era where every bit of software gets crappier and buggier.

A lot of people seem to view ableism as just not saying certain words, and this is tremendously over-simplified.

Ableism won't be stopped by climbing the euphemism treadmill and searching for "replacement words". Just like calling someone an "idiot" isn't really an improvement over calling someone the R-slur, calling someone a "dipshit" isn't really an improvement over calling someone an "idiot".

Actually put thought into what the ableist language you're using means. A lot of the time the answer isn't to find a "replacement", it's to stop using that language at all and say something else. This is especially true because most ableism isn't actually saying anything substantive, but just expressing a kind of vapid dismissiveness.

Consider: have you ever actually thought about why "stupid" is ableist? It's certainly not from its etymology; the origin of the word "stupid" is just "in a stupor", as in, unresponsive or dazed. It morphed into an ableist term because of an ableist idea that people are unresponsive because they're "unintelligent" or otherwise lesser.

If you replace "stupid" and "idiot" with "foolish" and "dipshit" now, guess what will happen a few decades from now? They'll just take on the exact same meaning, because you're using them exactly the same.

There's some nuance with ableist metaphors (like calling situations "crazy" because they're extreme or out of the ordinary), but even those uses just getting replaced with a different word can easily turn into just yet another euphemism train. Today, referring to someone as "wild" to mean that they're unusual or mentally ill wouldn't register, but that can easily change if people transfer over this replacement "wild" metaphor to people.

Words matter, but you can't solve ableism just by playing whack-a-mole with designated "ableist words", and cutting off what you consider to be ableism at "idiot" and "stupid" is no better than what most people do, which is to cut off what they consider to be ableism at the R-slur. You need to consider your language holistically and actually deconstruct what you're saying. There is no immediate, easy fix to ableism, and until people accept this, it will continue to be ubiquitous.

🦇

Let me give you an example of a fake Instagram influencer finding his way onto the Fediverse.

Look at this guy:

https://www.instagram.com/mronevibe/

He has 253K followers on Instagram. Mostly fake.

He also has a Pixelfed account right here:

https://pixelfed.social/i/web/profile/444567745991109534

Zero posts, but 76 followers.

Who are his followers?

Take a look at this screenshot. They're all fake Instagram influencers who buy fake followers.

@mjgardner

So many people citing Henry Toureau and his Walden to evoke the idea of running away from social media and hide from trackers. To isolate and reconnect with the environment. “Walden-ponding”

I’m sorry to break the illusion but according to his diaries, his mum and sister visited him daily to wash his clothes and cook lunch. The cabin was 15min walking distance from the family house, it was built in his friend’s land for free and the lake next to it had swimmers in summer and skiers in winter 😂✨

@thufie the pixie town economy depends on it's lustrous posting fields and rich content mines

if a service gets OOM-killed and restarts without anyone noticing, did it ever really happen?

I have a feeling this will appeal to multiple people for multiple reasons.

[original source: https://www.reddit.com/r/comics/comments/10rukp8/oc_magic_coding/]

#ttrpg #magic #coding

What are they planning

"Can you explain this gap in your resume?"

"Yes, I used LaTeX and couldn't fix that bit"

The best time to start wearing an n95 (ffp2 for thise of us in Europe) or better mask in public was spring 2020, but the second best time is now #CovidIsNotOver