Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

TV shows do a timeskip without one of the main characters growing facial hair to show time passing challenge (impossible)

Teen Vogue is the only publication that, to my knowledge, always points out that the SAT was created by a eugenicist.

@welshpixie This one is a fan of birdcam but he was getting too rambunctious so I had to turn it off so he could go nap.

My goodness, but I would love if File Explorer / Nautilus / Finder style apps would display README.{txt,md,rst} files similar to how GitHub does it. Would love to be able to leave reminders to myself as to what the fuck a folder is for.

Single sentence, double standard

These days my go-to example of "you cannot bet on having access to better technology as time progresses" is "I used to have an app on my phone that could predict the next hour of weather with startling accuracy and that is no longer an option"

(I am talking about Dark Sky)

Edited to add: I only want to hear suggestions for services/sites/apps if they offer the same ~10min interval microforecasts for the upcoming hour that Dark Sky used to, because that is the thing I am lamenting

they told me that sonnets needed to have a "turn" in them 🤷🏻‍♀️

Open source bros, we need to stop shaming people for not using your inaccessible, unreliable, annoying software.

If you want to tinker with broken things for fun, stay in your bubble as much as you want!

If you are trying for widespread adoption, then yes, you need user research, usability, accessibility, testing, and documentation.

If that means having a code of conduct and getting rid of assholes so you can recruit a wider range of contributers, deal with it!

None of this is off topic.

This is kind of interesting... It seems as though the Sydney chatbot was experimentally used in India and Indonesia before being unrolled in the US, and manifested some of the same issues with them being noticed. Here's an issue filed on Microsoft.com apparently in November (!) that seems to describe the same issues that have only come to wider public notice in the last week. The Microsoft service representative has no idea what's going on.
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/forum/all/this-ai-chatbot-sidney-is-misbehaving/e3d6a29f-06c9-441c-bc7d-51a68e856761?page=1

This whole train of thought started a few days ago when I was playing on my go-to Minecraft server and one of the members used the r slur. I was like "bruh fam no", and their noncomittal response made the topic stick in my head for a bit.

So later when I overhead my younger brother in the other room say something to the effect of "that's so stupid", I paused for a minute and realized that he was basically saying the same thing, just swapping out the slur with a more socially acceptable snyonym. While it is undoubtedly better that he didn't use the r slur, there was still the implication of "i dont like it = it's bad = it's [redacted]/stupid/dumb/other synonym"

Now, this had being super mindful, and I realized just how prevalent the speech pattern of "that's [insert some dismissive term]" is, and how frequently it's a synonym of the r slur, similar to what my brother said. Maybe part of that's just the small sample of who I've been around in the past few days and/or is a result of me being hypervigilant about it. I dunno.

Either way, I've tried to actively avoid repeating the pattern in the days since. Instead, whenever I would have liked to be dismissive and say something like "oh that's ridiculous", I try to think deeper about why I'm instinctively feeling the way I am, and just elaborate on that feeling instead. Plus, I've found that avoiding the speech pattern helps keep conversations flowing and helps to make sure you don't accidentally demean someone or their work when tone of voice may be harder to convey.

I hope this train of thought has some merit and isn't just my mind spinning in circles from nowhere near enough sleep. And I REALLY hope I didn't like, do something egregious while trying to talk about such a sensitive topic. If I did, in fact, do a bad, PLEASE LET ME KNOW so I can fix things!

(I'm not a linguist or philosopher or anything, by the way, so do take what I say with that in mind.)

My life has improved immensely since deciding to invest my energy and interaction with others based more or less on the energy they present to me. I'll be sincere and show interest when it's there but if it's not reciprocated or I get aloof/weird vibes I pull back. I think people forget that the way they treat people actually kind of matters and they don't deserve your time/energy/care beyond the bare minimum if they aren't gonna be showing up in kind.

Anyway, you can check out the stuff from last year's Summer School (The Fediverse's academic conference) here:

https://summerschool.scholar.social/2022/

It's all super cool and I'm very proud of the work that everyone put into it

Academics have been on Fedi doing cool stuff for a while!

got myself a visual stim, as a treat

I've encountered quite a few people, over the span of my two decades in the tech sector, who were interested in labor organizing.

On the surface, I think collective organizing is incredibly powerful and has the potential to be very helpful. But I personally feel the the tech scene, in the US, cannot be saved by such efforts. Why?

Because the tech sector is already so skewed to exclude and eliminate the people who actually have the skills to sustain a successful organizing effort long term.

The tech sector is painfully white; the strategies of Black resistance and survival are largely unknown.

Indigenous skills of carrying and sharing knowledge, as well as building affinity and community in the long term, are nowhere to be found, with the white-supremacy-culture of urgency, writing-obsession, and disposability adding up to a constant loss and haphazard, artless reinvention of every conceivable wheel.

The Asian presence is subjected to a truly shitty amount of "model minority" oppression, meaning that solidarity is extremely hard to get, and Asian folx in US tech can't be asked to take all the risk - leaving a lot of that burden to white people with little to no concept of successful anti-racism.

Tech is also painfully male, which means that the skills of emotional labor and support are severely lacking.

Further still, the scene is incredibly hostile to both the poor and the disabled, which means the basic skills of resiliency in the face of material struggle are almost entirely absent from the tech world, too.

Every tech labor organizing effort I've seen has crumbled, sooner or later, because the members either recreate oppression in their collectives, have no clue how to survive together when not being paid, or both.

I'm not claiming I've seen the entirety of the situation, mind you; exceptions to this are totally possible. And I still think collective organizing is an important thing to explore for all of us.

But the tech sector in the US is not the place to look for successful examples.