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I feel like visual programming right now is where text-based programming used to be several decades ago; every environment has its own entirely custom language with questionable ergonomics and that doesn't really interoperate or work like any other environment's language

liberal trolley car problem, uspol 

Trump goes to jail but a homeless person gets to pee in your small business's bathroom.

Hi all!

If you don't know who we are, Streetmix is an open source street design tool where anyone can play with and "remix" streets, with the goal of making streets better and safer for everyone.

Here's a great recent example of what our community does with Streetmix:

youtube.com/watch?v=7G3hw4IJdm

hot take, FOSS 

FOSS as a mechanism for the commons has been a complete failure from a legal perspective, for reasons that would have been obvious to marginalized folks from the start: you do not actually have the money to send lawyers after license violators for enforcement.

The only reason any of it works *at all* is because the concept has established some sort of shared understanding of a commons and the social norms within it, as a side-effect. The legal component is a no-op there.

And even that barely works; it's not intersectional at all, leading to a 'big tent' approach, which frequently results in exploitation of the commons, and the gradual erosion of people's understanding of the "public commons" part.

covid, looking for resources 

Does anyone know of good sources for up-to-date info on covid risks? Especially interested in:

comparative risk of different types of activities (indoors vs outdoors, unmasked vs different types of masks, etc)

risk of long covid in vaccinated people, especially chronically ill people

"Ad block"
Painted on a broken ad space during a demonstration in Paris

For artists who include AI 'art' for sale in their portfolio 

With all the constant talk of how generators like Stable Diffusion and MidJourney trained their AI on other artists' work without their permission, if you're in the art scene *at all*, you know. You KNOW. You know it's exploitative and infringing copyright and morally and ethically wrong. You *know*.

Just... do better. Have faith in the quality of your own hand crafted work, and drop the AI. You have a choice not to be a shit person.

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For artists who include AI 'art' for sale in their portfolio 

(Disclaimer, I used to do stuff with MidJourney. Then I stopped because I realised that they, too, had training data that included people's work without permission.)

If you're an artist yourself, you should know better. If you're an artist who crafts their own artwork from a learned skill, you should know better. If you've had other people or companies stealing your work, or work of artists you know, you should know better.

(cont)

I mean, seriously. Have you ever met a single academic talking about their research interest, really? 😂😬

It's called a single user instance because 5 people use it

A gentle reminder: as recently as 15 years ago, Elsevier, everyone's least favorite and most predatory academic publisher, was also a LITERAL ARMS DEALER.

theguardian.com/business/2008/

(h/t @researchfairy)

I’m Jewish. I’m trans. I’m queer. I’m disabled. I’ve seen the fascism warning signs for a long time now, and have written about it at length. Fascism is here. Now. All the anti-trans legislation, removal of reproductive rights, etc, IS fascism. If you’re waiting for them to forcibly load you on trains to take you to camps for you to recognize that it’s here, that will be too late.

PSA: Redbubble 

If you buy things from Redbubble, please be aware that they changed their business model so that they now get over 85% of whatever products they sell. If you are interested in buying something from a creator, you may want to check whether they have an alternative outlet that won't scam them this way.

If you are a creator who has used them...I am sorry.

#Redbubble

The worst thing that ever happened in software engineering was when Kirk asked Scotty how long something would take and Scotty said thirty minutes and Kirk said you’ve got five and Scotty got it done in five and impressionable children watched this and grew up to become managers.

To be clear, I'm not promoting anti-intellectualism here, we should listen to scientists and others in their specialized field and the conclusions drawn detailed/rigorous meta analysis on those topics they've collectively come up.

But we have to stop assuming that someone with a PhD in sociology knows more about the struggles of marginalized people than a marginalized person; we have to stop creating vanguards of intelligentsia; and we have to accept that in order to successfully complete that much schooling, you have to have privilege, lots of not insignificant privilege.

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Filtering online product reviews to only show posts from before the public release of chatGPT like im scavenging shipwrecks for pre-1945 steel

BREAKING: "Loud quitting" trend enters explosive new phase as employees looking to leave their job commit acts of sabotage with well-placed explosives

you would not believe your eyes
if threeeeee fireflies
were to need PHP 8.2

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