#BlackHistory. Meet Kizzmekia Corbett, leader of the team that gave us the Covid-19 vaccine. Thank you! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kizzmekia_Corbett
One of the things that continues to baffle me is how willing so many people are to just *believe* the things that corporations tell them unless disproven.
Even if you believe that some corporations are truthful, clearly *many* corporations must be structurally lying (even if you don't know which), otherwise the world couldn't look like it does today.
Isn't that an obvious reason to be more skeptical of corporate claims by default, rather than giving them the benefit of the doubt...?
@Luczeproblemen Het doet me denken aan een vriendin bij een andere verzekeraar. Alles digitaal, tracking-app op de telefoon. Sport zich in ruil voor wat spiegeltjes en kraaltjes een slag in de rondte, terwijl ze dat eigenlijk niet aankan. Maar het extraatje kan ze wel goed gebruiken…
Dát is wat prijsprikkels doen.
"Prinsenbeek ligt aan de snelweg A16 [...]. Staat het verkeer ergens rond die wegen vast, dan kiezen automobilisten vaak voor een rit door het dorp. Ook verkeer tussen Zevenbergen/Etten-Leur en Breda ziet het dorp als een makkelijke of kortere route dan het nemen van de snelweg."
Gemiste kans om de rol van navigatiesoftware zoals Google Maps hier aan te stippen, die er nogal een handje van hebben om mensen door sluiproutes te sturen bij files.
uspol, trans, yikes
Friends, the whole thing with trans erasure is very deeply sinister. Like, they're going to murder us level sinister.
Allies, you need to be super clear that you support trans rights. Your civic organisation, religious group, union, workplace - every organisation needs to be putting out messaging that you support trans people. Issue a statement. Speak from the pulpit. You can do this. It's ok to take initiative. Step back if a trans person wants to lead, but if they can't, you can. If you need help writing a statement, DM me. You can do this.
Put trans stickers on everything. You car, every surface in public spaces. Fly flags. Make support visible. Sew a patch on your jacket.
Put pronouns in your email signature, in your messaging app, in every profile. When you introduce yourself, say your pronouns.
Write letters to government officials, to your local newspaper, to every place that will print a letter. Thank officials doing the right thing.
Find out when demos are and show up. Organise a demo. Get some mates and a few flags and stand on a corner in your town's centre on a weekend afternoon, waving signs saying you support trans rights. You can just do this. You don't need trans people to organise this. You can just do it. Print out some leaflets from trans orgs and hand them to people.
Put a big banner on a freeway overpass.
Donate to trans rights groups. And to clinics that offer care. Give money to planned Parenthood and your city's free clinic.
Have you fantasised about what you would have done in a historical moment? This is that moment.
And I'm not just talking about the actual libraries that run on the target device here, the build tools are just as horrendous
i dunno. when someone makes a post that's only like "pass it on!" or "this!" no cw, with an image that contains the actual information of the post, without alt text so it's both inaccessible and unfilterable, i feel like that person doesn't respect other people enough to be worth hearing from
(This toot brought to you by me reading back the issue thread about Fedora fucking up the Bottles packaging)
the politics of aesthetics
The main thesis of this article is sound: the far right loves image generators because they hate art and artists. https://newsocialist.org.uk/transmissions/ai-the-new-aesthetics-of-fascism/
There are a few cringey errors and a wee bit of overreach, but I really think his main point is solid. Indeed, I would go further on a few examples he raises.
The author discusses dictator hair, saying it's ugly on purpose. He describes Trump's hair as a microagression of ugliness. While this is largely correct, I think he's missed some nuance, especially in terms of gender. Women of the far right have impeccable hair and carefully chosen wardrobes. It's only the men who dress badly, wearing ill-fitting suits and inexplicable haircuts. Therefore, bad hair is a gender expression, and I would argue, one rooted in homophobia. There is a lingering stereotype of hairdressers and stylists as gay. So Trump and Milei and even Boris Johnson all have hair that symbolises neglect.
In actual fact, Trump spends a lot of time on his hair and makeup, but the result symbolises contempt for the workers who prep him for the public. He uses their labour but disdains their craft. The symbol of his hair as anti-hairdresser supplants the reality.
When a symbol becomes more important than the thing it represents, it's called a "fetish". In that sense, Trump's hair is a fetish for utilitarian masculinity and compulsory heterosexuality.
I’m fucking tired of people working at the same company reviewing and merging each others PRs. I’m fucking tired of corporate interests putting their own capital gains ahead of the project. We need to actually give them resistance when they do this, instead of worshipping them and putting them on a pedestal and contributing to their personality cult. They are fucking cancerous to nix/nixpkgs/nixos and everyone that gives a shit about those and have power in the project have a duty to start speaking up louder against this shit.
God forbid you’re not employed by them? Get a spine. Most of these places are shitty employers anyways.
Domen, creator of devenv, recently added telemetry to his devenv thing, as part of adding AI to the product, and when nixpkgs contributors removed the telemetry, he reverted the change, with a self merge, without a fucking review even.
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/381981
This is a clear conflict of interest. We need to stop this from happening in the NixOS organization, corpos need to have some respect for users.
Discussion thread: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/should-commercial-actors-ship-telemetry-in-nixpkgs/60279/8
American readers with an interest in #cooking, hear me out - I have a proposal!
I know that the next few years are going to suck a lot for anyone who is not a TechBro billionaire and their chosen cronies. Which means that a lot of people have to get rather thrifty with their dwindling finances.
Which brings me to my idea: There are a _lot_ of old cookbooks in the public domain - published during WWI, the Great Depression, and other times - which focus on "economic" or "thrifty" cooking.
Thus, a writer with relevant interest could revisit all those recipes, update them for the modern area, and publish them together with economic analysis of what aspects of meal preparation were cheap and which were were pricey then, along with what makes them pricey _now_ - including how late-stage #Capitalism screws the consumer over!
The end result would be a book that combines advice for thrifty cooking with increasing political awareness in these trying times! How does this sound for a book idea?
#USPolitics #writing #WritingCommunity #history
Sources for the covers:
https://archive.org/details/war-cookbook-for-american-women
https://archive.org/details/practicalcookboo00howa
https://archive.org/details/food-economy-images
https://archive.org/details/left-overs-13
@aparrish Every single time I hear the sentiment "like it or not, ______ is here to stay", I like to take a moment to reflect on the overwhelming majority of "things we were told would be permanent" that now, *shockingly*, no longer exist.😮🫢🤗🙄
apparently amazon is removing zhe ability to download kindle ebooks starting two weeks from today (so, on za 26zh).
zhis is a reminder zat tampering wizh any kind of DRM is ILLEGAL, like for instance using zhe excellent free and open source ebook library manager calibre (https://calibre-ebook.com/) wizh za readily-available DeDRM plugin which automatically strips all DRM from ebooks you add to za library, including amazon's encrypted AZW/3 format zat all kindle ebooks come in, and zhen converting zhem to any format you like including epub and pdf, is ILLEGAL and you definitely SHOULD NOT download any and all kindle ebooks you may have and do zis to all of zhem in za next two weeks. definitely not.
and you definitely SHOULDN'T check out zis guide zat explains step by step how to set zat all up: https://drm.bytelet.dev/60250b34105e482c96dfe9605100354c/
Super scummy for microsoft to auto upgrade (at the added cost of an extra £30 a year) people to a AI plan, and not offer a "actually I don't use any of that stuff" can I not pay that £30 a year?
And then only when you are at the cancel page, it's like "🥺 oh sorry do you want the old deal back? 🥺"
For anyone else, you don't even have to get that far into the cancel page for this. So it's easy to save £30 a year with this.
@maartenpelgrim @janvlug @Kletskous @bassjobsen @PvdA @groenlinks
Het is niet ‘mastodon’ of ‘the fediverse’ wat moeilijk is. Het is moeilijk om daadwerkelijk inhoudelijk aandacht te geven aan een ander.
Echt luisteren, je echt verdiepen in anderen, dat is ontzettend moeilijk! Zo moeilijk dat het bijna pijn doet als je het moet proberen.
En de algoritmes van bv Bluesky en Facebook geven je instant gratification.
Technical debt collector and general hype-hater. Early 30s, non-binary, ND, poly, relationship anarchist, generally queer.
- No alt text (request) = no boost.
- Boosts OK for all boostable posts.
- DMs are open.
- Flirting welcome, but be explicit if you want something out of it!
- The devil doesn't need an advocate; no combative arguing in my mentions.
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
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.