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

I reckon this is intentional. By placing massive friction around exercising consent, you make any worker who understands consent seem like a source of friction in the workplace.

It takes a worker who understands consent 10x as long to do anything in tech compared with a worker who simply taps [ALLOW] every time.

This effectively purges workplaces of any workers who assert their own right to privacy, have any boundaries or are generally in the habit of standing up for themselves.

We don't talk anywhere near enough about how the tech industry is fucking with the general public's understanding of consent.

Fairly often I will opt out of something that would have been obviously reasonable a few years ago, and people will look at me like I drove a truck through the room.

Things like:
- I won't be appearing on camera today
- I don't wish to speak on a recording to be published on the University website
- I won't be giving my personal details to an overseas third party just to use a notepad tool in one meeting

I see this seeping through into attitudes about consent in other everyday life contexts. People are so used to being walked all over by their tech that they're increasingly shocked by boundaries.

Today I learned that East German chemists created almost unbreakable consumer glassware in the 1970s. They produced hundreds of millions of drinking glasses, expecting significant exports to the west because the product was just so much better than regular glass.

Those exports did not happen. If you're a western marketer of glassware, you *want* your products to break so you can sell new ones.

Outstanding job, capitalism. This is why we can't have nice things.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfest

@futzle

When we went to remote and then hybrid conferences during the acknowledged part of the pandemic, I was struck by the disability community voices saying, "Finally we can participate!"

I'm furious at how eager the organizers have been to return to exclusion.

Edit: Just got the little survey about the (no longer hybrid) conference I attended last month and BOY HOWDY DID I HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY.

I need to move somewhere safe within the span of a few weeks. If anyone can offer me a place in Germany (preferably within 1,5 hours of Munich - though that is optional at this point) give me a shout.

My housemates have started behaving in a manner that makes me afraid to live in my current home and makes me worried that I'll lose this home soon.

Seattle's big brother camera network is being deployed along Aurora and in two very dense deployments in the Central District (CID) and a swath of Downtown.

16 on Aurora
17 in CID
30 cameras downtown

The police have self reported the locations of sixty cameras so far on the dashboard below:

https://www.seattle.gov/police/community-policing/community-programs/cctv

#Seattle #CID #Aurora #PNW #WA #PoliceState #Privacy #acab #stopcopcity #CCTV #AI

Gezocht: (elektrische) #step voor een #toneelvoorstelling op 24 en 25 mei in #Nijmegen - en liefst een paar keer daarvoor tijdens repetities.
Beloning: vrijkaartjes voor de voorstelling in de Lindenberg. #dtv

Dutch:

Ik ben op zoek naar nieuwe vrienden in #Elst, tussen #Arnhem & #Nijmegen.

Hobbies: boardgames, videogames, schilderen, tekenen, dierentuin, zwemmen.

Verder: autisme, ADHD, fibromyalgie, hond, kat, vogels, glutenvrij.

Wie komt er een boardgame met me spelen?

I think the Doctor Who fanbase has developed the same issue as the Sonic fans: when there are so many different versions of that thing, many successive groups have their particular version that is their first and their favourite, and they're all in the forum threads being upset about the new one not being as good as their favourite era of the franchise.

celebrate earth day by closing a gas station

celebrate earth day by ribbon cutting your project of turning a parking structure into housing

celebrate Earth day by making a street carfree. permanently

Is anyone manufacturing custom slide rules?

This is not a subtoot, I just don’t want to hijack someone else’s post.

People are asking about the future of in-person academic conferences in the US now that <gesticulates> this. People who are unable or unwilling to travel are going to miss out.

This is not a new problem. People from some countries, notably in Africa, but also South and Southeast Asia, have found themselves arbitrarily denied entry to the US for decades.

People from geographically remote regions must pay significantly more for their longer-haul flights. [Why was WorldCon 2010 so tiny? It was in Melbourne.]

People with disabilities get to play all these games on the Extra Hard difficulty level.

Carers. Queer people. Immune compromised people. Single parents.

In-person conferences _already have been_ selecting against many groups of people.

I commend the organizers of conferences talking about how they are going to retain the attendees they’re accustomed to having, but I’d like them to give a thought to the many participants who have already been excluded.

We have CEOs telling junior developers to not bother learning how to code, try to vibe code. That’s scary! You don’t learn much with vibe coding. Learning is the best part of the job!

I tell my junior engineers to not outsource their learning. AI can’t do the modeling, the architecture, the understanding. Can it do boilerplate? Sorta! But the job isn’t writing boiler plate.

We knew this way back with the no silver bullets essay on incidental vs necessary complexity.

#workersrights #ai

When Delilah Bun (aka Lauren Tate, the 20-something front woman formerly of Hands Off Gretel) released a 2022 song called "Dead Men Don't Rape", men wrote all sorts of disgusting things to her on the advertising platform Instagram.

When my angry boys in Dimmu Borgir, the Norwegian black metal band, released a 2023 song called "Dead Men Don't Rape", not a single person attacked them.

Funny that. It's almost as if .. no, I can't quite put my finger on it.