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

Furry is such an inherently quiet but subversive community. The things we do, while fuzzy and non violent, are often inherently against the arbitrary rules that are forced on us to hierarchicalize and control us in most other spaces.

Consider the sorts of things that go on at furry conventions. You've got kids and adults alike pulling on costumes, playing camp games, sitting in piles of boxes, playing board games, etc.

These are things we are told are "childish things" that need to be put away when we become adults. But these are not things that only children enjoy, which is why we do them. Nor are they things that a person with adult experience would reason lead to some harm or another. They are labeled 'childish' -- with the implication that it is wrong for adults to do them -- because the systems that would control us can't resist any opportunity to draw arbitrary lines and demonstrate what happens to people who step over them.

I wish more people understood that "I want the computer to generate a natural language text that sounds like a plausible answer to a question about x" and "I want the computer to answer a question about x" are two very different problems.

quora is just twitter but for snobs that want to seem intellectually superior

never seen a more toxic qna website, aside from reddit

A light bulb moment for me was realizing that much of the talk about student "motivation" (how to boost it or why a given kid lacks it) is really code for talking about compliance - that is, the extent to which students do whatever we tell them.

Next week Saturday (March 25) it will be Open Day again at RevSpace, the hackerspace in The Hague (https://revspace.nl/)!

Everyone is welcome - entry is free of course, and you don't need to speak Dutch! It's pretty accessible by public transport too.

Do make sure to book a timeslot here in advance: https://pretix.eu/revspace/opendag2023/ - the other COVID safety measures are also explained on that page.

Some more details about RevSpace (in English) can be found here: https://www.nycresistor.com/2019/01/12/hackerspace-envy-a-visit-to-revspace-in-the-hague/

Turns out Mastodon on e-ink is cool af

It’s pretty intense when I play on my kit in the loft.

It’s drum attic.

well, hackaday just died to me. their "report comment" button is officially confirmed to be little more than a placebo. quoth their official fedi account:

The "Report Comment" button is automated, if enough individual IPs click then it will take down the comment and have a human review it. But just one person clicking won't trigger any obvious change, nor notify us.

i sometimes forget that the rest of the world doesn't take moderation quite as seriously as the fediverse does

(screenshot below is just for verification - text is the same as quoted above)

reposted as public - boosts welcome

OPEN DAG - Volgende week zaterdag 25 maart

Wil je onze diverse werkplaatsen van binnen zien? Meld je gratis aan op https://pretix.eu/revspace/opendag2023/

Friendly reminder that using those 'fancy text' generators to make your name or the text in your posts all pretty makes them inaccessible to screen reader users. They can also be a pain to read visually.
to you, they're just cute lettering you can just skip over. For a screen reader user like me, depending on various things, they could come out as
'mathematical small bold k mathematical small bold a mathematical small bold r mathematical small bold a',
'letter 126b letter 17dj letter 13y7dwiz'
or nothing at all.
I'm not sure off the top of my head how they appear on a Braille display but it's bound to be a right mess.
I don't particularly call any of those pretty, do you?
Plain boring text that is accessible to everyone is the new pretty.
#a11y #accessibility