FOSS commentary
Okay, congratulations everyone! FOSS is now in the hands of the people. Everyone who uses technology interacts with FOSS software at some point, even if they don't know it. We've won!
Right?
Or maybe, looking at the state of the world and the degree of autonomy that people actually have over their tech, it suggests that maybe the "FOSS values" weren't enough, and we're missing something?
More dansup nonsense, racism meta commentary
Another day, another instance of dansup doing something wildly irresponsible and taking no accountability!
@aroacemagicalnerd has said it many times, if people would take action decisively and swiftly against instances of racism (he's been appropriating AAVE for years) they would have SO much less bullshit to deal with.
In a healthier and more antiracist fediverse, someone like dansup would never have been so many people engaging with, using, or funding his projects.
And yet, here we are. With his laundry list of reckless bullshit, from attacking everyone who criticizes him to making posts, deleting them, and then lying about them, and even writing absurd and unacceptable privacy policies for his projects. And this is just scratching the surface!
Listening to Black folks, moderating racism, centering the most marginalized....it really isn't just what's best for us. It's best for everyone.
“A Luddite Criticism of Open Source” at FluConf
On February 1st I had the privilege of getting to speak at the first Fluconf about Open Source and why that whole movement might not do as much good for as as we might want it to. It’s not that Open Source is “bad” but that it is sometimes presented as a solution to sociopolitical issues it is not capable (nor even trying) to fix.
The talk description was:
“People interested in Fluconf will also be interested in Open Source or to be more precise Free/Libre Open Source Software. Everyone has been using Open Source for many years but many from this community have shifted to trying to run their personal infrastructures on non-proprietary pieces of software and some even hardware.
This is already an important shift towards freeing ourselves and each other from corporate dominance but is it really doing enough? Are our licenses protecting the values we actually care about?
Coming from a luddite background I want to dive into a a bit of a critical reading of the values that we use codified mostly as licenses: Are they really enough? Which aspects are they missing and why? And what are the consequences of those omissions?
I’ll try to end up looking at mechanisms of integrating luddist principles in software projects. Can they offer additional safeguards?
This sessions doesn’t claim to have all the answers. But hopefully some good questions and a few ideas of where to go.”
I embedded a copy of the video on Youtube but you can also watch it on Archive.org for less tracking and everything.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ew_MlA5HbA
Liked it? Take a second to support tante on Patreon!This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Proposal: any physical product sold that hard-depends on a server somewhere introduces a legal requirement for the manufacturer to keep that server available in perpetuity.
If the manufacturer does not want to do that, then they will just have to make sure that the product can function without it in some way, whether it is by having default behaviour, or a local fallback, or by making the source code of the server available under an open-source license or in the public domain.
Looking for Minecraft Java servers with:
1. Survival mode, without too many mods/rules
2. Relatively uniform architectural style with specific aesthetic
3. No large redstone machines, item spawner, lots of pillars, beacons and broken ground around the spawn point
4. At least two or three people regularly online every day.
trans
When I transitioned in 2011/2012 I had a lot of respect, gratitude and admiration for those that came before me, especially in the 70s, 80s and 90s. They did the same thing I was doing, which felt hard enough, but in a much more hostile world. They paved the way. And now, with the tides having turned, that’s us too. We will survive and we will thrive and the generations after us will stand on our shoulders. Knowing that gives me hope and strength, maybe it does you too.
@schratze Stress has physical markers in our bodies, chemicals and processes that can hang around for hours or days.
When Gary's cognitive decline was first getting bad we consulted some brilliant dog behaviorists about it, and they told us to think of stress like a bucket with a little hole in the bottom. It's much quicker to full the bucket than empty it, and doing stuff to relax the body (of a person or a dog!) helps empty the stress bucket quicker.
I still think about this all the time.
dansup meta, straight up lying about GTS on FediDB
'I understand there was a disagreement with myself and GtS regarding robots.txt, however, I always meant to add support for them, so I am doing that now.'
Versus:
https://gitlab.com/diasporg/poduptime/-/issues/88#note_2332036988
'Regardless, I have removed Gotosocial from FediDB.org.'
More Dansup meta (bunch of receipts of bad behaviour)
After picking a fight with Tobi and GTS and publicly denouncing GTS because FediDB didn't respect Robots.txt. then getting called out himself for that, he's now adding robots.txt support to FediDB as if nothing ever happened.
From what I've seen there's no apology, no admitting that it should have been there all along, nothing.
Yesterday I listened to a random podcast and they said that you have to two things to deal with stress:
1. Deal with the source of the stress (do the task, solve the problem, settle the conflict, etc.)
2. Deal with the symptoms of the stress (rest, go for a walk, play video game, etc.)
I may not be smart but this has literally completely changed the way I used to think about stress. I thought you just have to do 1. and then you don't have a reason to be stressed anymore
If you're at all interested in the technology behind rollercoasters, I strongly recommend https://www.youtube.com/@ThemeParkScienceOfficial/videos - the videos are in Dutch, but most of them have English subtitles available (proper ones, not machine translation).
twitter, madurodam
Aldus Looopings: "Waar X ooit gezien werd als een vooruitstrevend communicatiekanaal, vieren nepaccounts en haatzaaiende uitlatingen - vaak anoniem - er tegenwoordig hoogtij. Moderatie is er nauwelijks. Toch ziet Madurodam naar eigen zeggen dat "een deel van de doelgroep" nog op X zit."
Tja, ik denk dat we allemaal wel kunnen raden welke doelgroep dat precies is, als het over Madurodam gaat...
Wolfwerend hek werkt niet? Deze cijfers laten vooral een ander probleem zien. Boeren die slachtoffer zijn van de wolf, maken amper gebruik van wolfwerende hekken om hun vee te beschermen.
Bij nog geen 2% van alle wolvenaanvallen die in 2024 in Gelderland plaatsvonden, werden de schapen of geiten beschermd door een goed wolfwerend raster. https://www.bndestem.nl/binnenland/wolfwerend-hek-werkt-niet-deze-cijfers-laten-vooral-een-ander-probleem-zien~a5bd5e06/
we have a reasonable dataset browser... upload process is working... feed generation is working... just need a little more moderation tooling and we are good to start indexing the dispersed dataset purge scrapes. fuck a digital book burning we've got the power of bittorrent and anime on our side.
Technical debt collector and general hype-hater. Early 30s, non-binary, ND, poly, relationship anarchist, generally queer.
Sometimes horny on main (behind CW), very much into kink (bondage, freeuse, CNC, and other stuff), and believe it or not, very much a submissive bottom :p
Feel free to flirt, but if you want to actually meet up and/or do something with me, lewd or otherwise, please tell me explicitly or I won't realize :) I'm generally very open to that sort of thing!
Further boundaries: boosts are OK (including for lewd posts), DMs are open. But the devil doesn't need an advocate; I'm not interested in combative arguing in my mentions. I am however happy to explain things in-depth when asked non-combatively.
My spoons are limited, so I may not always have the energy to respond to messages.
Strong views about abolishing oppression, hierarchy, agency, and self-governance - but I also trust people by default and give them room to grow, unless they give me reason not to. That all also applies to technology and how it's built.