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

How terribly sad it is when someone on one of the bigger instances *cough mastodon.social cough* is the target of trolling and bigoted harassment and that's their take-away experience of the fediverse :(

Fuck 'official mastodon', making it harder for actual genuine safe space communities to convey that actually fedi can be lovely and you don't need to be on an instance that doesn't take care of its community.

I don't want you to have a Covid policy. I want you to have an infectious diseases policy. I want you to take seriously the risk of spreading norovirus, mono, flu and measles at your event. The timeline is not split into "before Covid, when things were safe" and "with Covid, when things are deadly". You just weren't aware of the disease risk of large gatherings before now. None of the diseases are going away. Account for more than Covid.

Reminder: unionization is the "meeting the employer at the middle" between workers not getting what they want and beheading the employer.

Union busting only tells me that they want their heads removed.

I was asked to review continuing education for a summit on autism and I was ready to be so angry but they're platforming and highlighting neurodiversity-affirming conceptualizations and supports and I feel so happy right now that this is becoming mainstream in my field 💜

@JessTheUnstill: I have a strong feeling about this point. It seems to me that as a society, we've been too willing to allow a hierarchy between "developers" and "end users" to creep into the "software products" that we use, and I believe that technical means encouraging people to see, and treat, software not as black boxes but as systems of rules that can be modified on the fly would help neutralise the worst abuses of this unpleasant development.

I'm not entirely sure how to get there yet, though. In the context of web browsers, adding simple and powerful tools to enforce the notion the user has power over what happens in the browser, by means of easy-to-use archival and scraping and "content" re-formatting tools would probably be a good start.

@ariadne

Been looking at the feedback on mask policies from two separate conferences. People seem to fall into three groups:

1) I'll go with the policy, whatever it is

2) The risk of attending an event without masks is too high, so I will not attend without a strong mask policy

3) You cannot force me to wear a mask, so I will not attend if you require them.

You can always get group 1 at your con. Choose between groups 2 and 3.

My random sampling says that group 2 is nicer than group 3. Group 2 is both easier to hang around with, and safer.

Easy choice.

"just trying to help" is like a very particular flavour of ableism

"don't push my wheelchair without my consent" - "i'm just trying to help"

"don't lecture me on scammy miracle cures" - "i'm just trying to help"

"stop trying to diagnose me with made-up fad conditions" - "i'm just trying to help"

"don't give me advice i didn't ask for" - "i'm just trying to help"

"no, i don't care which diet you think will cure my genetic disease" - "i'm just trying to help"

"please stop making suggestions for jobs you think i could do" - "i'm just trying to help"

"don't make assumptions about our needs without even asking" - "i'm just trying to help"

"please just give me the prescription i need instead of expecting me to somehow magically fix myself" - "i'm just trying to help"

"please stop forcing me into treatments and rehab programmes that only make me sicker" - "i'm just trying to help"

why are we supposed to be grateful for any of that?

one could argue that copyright maximalism is directly responsible for high profile compromises

after all, genesis market spread their malware through fake warez sites, which were and are the only results to show up in google because the REAL sites get removed from the search results due to takedown requests

The opposite of “return to office” advocates isn’t “work from home” advocates. It’s a rich tapestry of “open offices are distracting” people and “I’ve never gone this long without being sick” people and “commutes are a waste of time I don’t get paid for” people and “I’m an introvert and playing house with coworkers sucks the life out of me” people and “I have a family and appreciate the flexibility” people and “I primarily communicated with coworkers through Slack anyway” people and “no one wa…

Ooof. Scholastic, that's a terrible look, and I'm glad she is letting everyone know, but what a shitty, shitty thing to try and do. https://www.prettyokmaggie.com/blog/2023/4/11/scholastic-and-a-faustian-bargain