Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

Today I got a personal message from a co-worker that was in large parts written by AI. We had a short back and forth.

My concerns regarding personal messages that are written with the help of AI:

Who wants to read what somebody else didn’t want to write? It feels like receiving a birthday card with no handwritten notes on it.

In our culture, we value authenticity. What does that mean in the age of AI? It feels like receiving a serial letter.

When receiving a text that seems personal, I feel betrayed by the part that was written by a machine. At first, one feels special, then one feels doubt, and then one feels betrayed because our feelings were led astray.

How do we feel about people who want to make their personal interactions more efficient? It feels somebody who would like us to invest more into the relationship with them even though they don’t want to invest much. It feels exploitative.

How do we feel about getting a message that required a lot of extra energy to make it longer for all the wrong reasons listed above? As the Earth is burning? All of the electricity demands, economic disruptions, exploitation of the creative and the poor, and many more things besides, all to deliver the kind of message I didn’t want.

Don't write your personal messages with the help of AI.

How is Mozilla doing you ask? Firefox VCS has completed the move from their own infra to checks notes oh yeah, GitHub dot com

https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox

is there precedent in the linux kernel for how to treat Signed-off-by lines wrt plurality

Yesterday after I performed, maybe I had less of a reaction than I secretly had hoped for. I guess my previous piece was energetic, defiant, a battle-call when people are scared and need the idea of fighting back; so always brought great responses, with multiple people coming compliment me afterwards, asking where to read more... While this one is about genocide so of course it cannot be boastful, because how do you cope with the weight of the existence of genocide. "Sombre" doesn't begin to describe its mood. I get the sense that people wanted to move emotionally away from it after I finished and yeah, that is in itself a type of success, if I did my job correctly they *should*.

But there was this one cute girl who came tell me that my piece was important to her and it touched her and made her cry, and she didn't have the words to put it but I got it, I got that she got it. And she was looking at me with so much yearning and admiration that it felt basically heartless of me to not give her my socials on the spot, knowing that inevitably she'd give me her number, and I would ask her if she always comes to these events and does she write too and oh I love your style that's such a cool outfit... You know? I mean I may be wrong here, it's easy to misread signals when you're tripping on recent luck in love and feeling like a sex goddess, but I doubt it, the silences in that conversation were too expectant, she was waiting for something from me.

Only she wasn't actually crushing on me, not really. Maybe she had thought so, she was looking up in the direction of my face a lot, but what she was really looking at was Art.

I don't remember talking before with a fan. I mean with people who follow my mastodon posts yeah all the time, I mean my masto behaviour is basically that of a rockstar with groupies, but it's different, it's not like my toots are art meant to touch the soul it's just a spontaneous diary, my flirty mutuals aren't really fans in the proper sense, it's just people who think I'm hot. I joke about being a fediverse influencer but the parasocials here are a pastiche, I get like, 3-10 likes per post and my selfies are low-effort cellphone photos, so there's a good sense of realness when you meet fediverse ppl, they know I'm just some girl. But talking with that girl from the audience, having this contradictory feeling that she's waiting for something from me, and that it would be wrong of me to respond to that... I got it then, the problem with parasocial. It's not so much that her consent would be invalid because of power imbalances—that was a tiny poetry meetup by and for queers, half the audience were the poets themselves the other half their personal friends, it's not like I'm rich or famous or will ever be—but it's more like, seducing that girl in that situation would be like impersonation. Dating under false pretenses. Whatever she was longing for with those big wet eyes wide-open with amazement, she wouldn't find it in me. I'm mundane, I lurk on the sofa reading comic books, her longing was for the transcendent we experienced together as performer and audience, and it's not like I can connect her to that at will. I'm as amazed as her at the power of those words, the words are not me and they don't feel "mine" in any way that matters, they have their own spirit, I just know how to let it manifest in a way that resonates, how to be a medium. On a good day. Once every eleven months.

There's a part of my introduction for this piece where I make a joke like, "after all, what was poetry invented for if not to seduce lesbians? right??" which did manage to get a few chuckles from the audience. It's a reference of course to the OG from Lesbos, but this joke was part of a running shtick where I'm performatically trying, and repeatedly failing, to compose a poem about light-hearted, fun, sexy themes, until I'm compelled despite myself to write instead on the topic of the Shoah.

But now I come back to that joke, to the idea of seducing someone with art. I mean it's one thing to woo them with a guitar and a love song or something, but like, art from the very wellspring of being, type of art. What a dangerous thing that would be. How much like getting someone drugged. Or, more accurately, in a cult.

anyway so bluesky continue not to fix this nonsense so i am going to keep abusing it until someone does something about it

If he's ever called one of his ex's a "crazy bitch", do not have sex with him. Do not have children with him.

Do not move in with him.

Do. Not. Have. Sex. With. Him.

Ghost him immediately and don't walk home alone at night for the next few months.

He's not safe and he doesn't respect women. He's dangerous. Treat him as such.

Also I've met a lot of people who are like
Surprised and delighted or sometimes alarmed when I do this

Like their only experience of friendship is through the lens of trying to meet the expectations put on them, live up to standards that they have to guess at

People who apologize for liking things that they expect I won't think are cool

People apologize a lot for being themselves, especially trans people

Our survival can depend on meeting other people's expectations

Hey y'all I'm gonna strongly recommend that when you date or make friends with someone that you uh

Listen to them, watch them, learn who they are and take joy in that process

I see so many people trying to find someone who matches their idea of who they want to date, and then learn a little bit and make up the rest

And when it turns out that the rest of their partner doesn't match the made up person, they get scared or angry or resentful

I love learning new things about a person??
Do that

#Benefits #Disabled #Welfare #Poverty

Oh shit happy 45th birthday Pac-Man

(it was yesterday)

@joepie91 i just skip that and go straight to the source code to read the TODO there instead

Any tips for a privacy respecting, free event organization platform? I'm thinking about features like:

- Some rich text + images hosted online for the event
- Subscription form to get updates
- Stats about expected attendance
- ??? (this is my first time)

Edit: I don't charge anything for the event, so percentage commission can work.

Today Melissa Lewis over on BlueSky pointed out that the font used nin the infamous "You wouldn't steal a car" anti-piracy campaign was actually designed by Just van Rossum, whose brother, Guido, created the Python programming language (bsky.app/profile/melissa.news/post/3ln7hx5rhcj2v)

She also pointed out that the font had been cloned and released illegally for free under the name "XBAND Rough". Naturally, it would be hilarious if the anti-piracy campaign actually turned out to have used this pirated font, so I went sleuthing and quickly found a PDF from the campaign site with the font embedded (web.archive.org/web/20051223202935/http://www.piracyisacrime.com:80/press/pdfs/150605_8PP_brochure.pdf).

So I chucked it into FontForge and yep, turns out the campaign used a pirated font the entire time!