Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

in general i try not to dunk but i can't believe that this is something that a mozilla tech lead actually wrote down about the nearly silent introduction of an aggregated advertising system into a browser that is plastered wall to wall in its promotional materials as being dedicated solely to privacy

I think that everyone who cares about the health of the web should probably read some of the posts around here, if it is representative of the attitudes of the mozilla development team at all https://mastodon.social/@Schouten_B/112784434152717689

personally I think the MONA thing is hilarious, especially in the context of the Discourse.

for non-Australians, the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Tasmania had an area called the Ladies Lounge, where men were not allowed. They hung several fake Picassos, an antique mink rug that was actually polyester, and a bunch of fake tribal spears. The idea was that it was a criticism of the general idea of the patriarchy where men typically have a lot more opportunities for... pick a thing. Even when women were allowed in, what was actually inside were cheap replicas devoid of any amount of authenticity. It's ripping on token inclusion.

In an eye-watering display of self-awareness deficiency, a man then sued MONA for not being allowed in, claiming discrimination due to being a man. He claimed that as he had paid admission to the whole of MONA but was not permitted to this specific exhibit due to his gender, he was being discriminated against.

The Tasmanian Civil Tribunal agreed, and MONA was directed to admit men into a women's-only area. The irony is thick enough that you could cut it with a knife.

MONA, in response, dismantled the exhibit except for the fake Picassos. All the bathrooms at MONA are single-occupancy all-gender, but it turns out having a women's bathroom from which men are excluded *isn't* discriminatory, so they converted one into a women's bathroom and hung the fake Picassos in there, an exhibit of itself.

The art exhibit was basically a criticism of "turns out the only safe space for women away from men is a bathroom, and people will still claim that you're getting special rights because you get to see something nobody else can. Even if what you're seeing is a cheap replica, someone somewhere will claim that you have it good because you're getting something they don't."

Picasso's estate, however, took a rather dim view of unauthorised replicas being displayed in an art gallery in Tasmania, even though it was literally years between putting up the artwork and someone noticing. They've since been taken down with no further action.

MONA has declared that the Ladies Lounge will return as something where S26 of the Sex Discrimination Act doesn't apply, such as a church or boutique glamping experience.

They've also expressly stated that the Ladies Lounge includes ALL women, not just cis ones.

I love everything about this story. Fucking classic stuff coming out of the art world.

If you really wanted to "democratize creativity" you'd argue for every human being to have paid time off to find, follow and develop their creativity, their perspective and their voice.

Creativity is the work that allows people to bring forth their own selves regardless of who pays for it. It's part of the essence of being human.

We know that many people just don't get the resources, the freedom, the time to explore that part of being human. And we're all poorer for it.

A phrase I use often - you've probably seen me use it before - is "the characteristic reductiveness of bigotry".

When I use it, it means trans people are seen as only trans, and not as anything else.

And it's why JK Rowling can get away with attacking rape survivors, and it's why Wes Streeting can get away with attacking kids. The 'trans' qualifier is used to obscure membership of those other cohorts, as a justification for that heinous, evil cruelty.

Research by UK LGBT+ young people's charity Just Like Us showed that people who know a trans person are nearly twice as likely to support trans-inclusive policies, while, conversely, nearly three quarters of those who don't support trans-inclusive policies don't know anyone trans: https://www.justlikeus.org/blog/2023/03/31/trans-day-of-visibility-ally-lesbian/

If you know a trans person, you cannot reduce them to being 'only' trans. You have no choice but to see them as a person. It is unsurprising that cruelty dissipates in the face of that.

Early on in my journey I decided that convincing people that "trans women are women" or that "trans men are men" was secondary to convincing them that "trans people are people," and that, years later, depressingly remains true.

mistake: letting @puckipedia and us near a thermal printer

In a classic for our local community Facebook group folks were getting all concerned about youths in hoodies stealing bags of clothes that folks had put out for charity collection. Turns out they were the charity collectors though.

Huh TIL that Source's physics engine was implemented all the way back in 1999, they licensed Havok before it was even bought by Havok, it was called Ipion Virtual Physics at the time

Also apparently Source 2 ditched Havok for Valve's custom engine though, and I wonder how much of that is Valve building on top of Havok like Bethesda's Creation Engine building on top of Gamebryo, and how much is actually completely original

All of us who blocked Threads when they announced fediverse integration saw this.

We told you so.

https://www.macstories.net/stories/lgbt-and-marginalized-voices-are-not-welcome-on-threads/

@spacehobo It is! I get people's old laptops given to me sometimes so I refurbish them and donate them onwards to a few local charities I'm in contact with.
I have 0 need for them, but a person being supported through homelessness can do a course and their admin on it if it can browse the web and do word processing still. There's simply too much tech out there now, and distributed all wrong

In which I get mad about sloppy use of AI in a way that can actively endanger people!!!
https://thisisimportant.net/threads/ai-duty-of-care/

(thx to the American Alpine Club for their amazing work publicizing climbing and mountaineering accidents and identifying patterns in the causes)

Hello privacy-forward friends. You might want to uncheck this checkbox that comes pre-checked in the latest iteration of Firefox (if you are still using it. I realize you may not be, yes I still am). The vibe I get is that it's like "cookie trackers lite" and still not cool.

What Firefox says: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attribution

Hat tip and read more from @mcc https://mastodon.social/@mcc/112775362045378963

Mozilla shuts down its location services because of a patent troll : :ablobdundundun:

https://github.com/microg/GmsCore/issues/2237

Every time you reduce diversity and increase centralization you introduce choke points, bottlenecks and single points of failures that *will* come back to haunt you.

A #degooglification lesson, AKA "centralization is bad" even when the Good Guys™ do it because it makes you less resilient:

One of the key piece of many (but not all) degooglified Android systems is a tool called "microG". It basically "pretends" to apps that you have Google Services installed, emulating the many system APIs basically all apps depend on.

One of these APIs are Location. In fact, you used to be able to install "add-ons", download a CSV of cell-towers and run mobile cell tower-based approximate geolocation fully locally. Well…

https://github.com/Helium314/Local-NLP-Backend?tab=readme-ov-file

> Note that microG has stopped supporting UnifiedNlp backends with 0.2.28.

https://github.com/microg/GmsCore/releases/tag/v0.2.28.231657

> The new location stack does not support UnifiedNlp modules anymore. This was a step necessary to take to get locations properly working on latest Android versions. […] For now, the new locations stack is relying exclusively on Mozilla Location Service for network based location.

You know what comes next?