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i wish people would be more conscious about the proprietary nature of podcasts offered by apple and spotify. it's like f*cking google who stole email & xmpp from the open web. apple and spotify are stealing podcasts as rss feeds from the open web.

please, make an effort and post links to podcasts on sites that offer rss, like many/most podcasts on apple/spotify are also on
podcastindex.org or
podcastaddict.com
where one can subscribe to rss feed with their own client.

I’ve finished Deviations now but I wanted this to be my last quote in particular because of the mention of Hirschfeld. The Nazis shut his institute and burned his research but what he’d already published stayed out there for later generations of queer people to find and to build on. It’s easy to focus on loss - repression, censorship, the loss of communities - but it’s never total. And so the voices get passed down, for us to add our own and pass them on in turn

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LLMs, your usecase is labour exploitation too 

Actually, I want to point something out here. The exact words vary, but I often hear the same kind of argument: "I just need a few assets for a game", "I just use it to help me do art, I'm bad at it", "I just have it do the hard parts".

That is labour exploitation too.

It's not any less labour exploitation because you're small-time. You know how there's landlords that 'only' own 3 buildings, and they let them rot and screw over tenants, but if you say anything about it, they're just an uwu smol landlord and they just don't have the money to do it right? That's what this is.

This is how LLMs are *intended* to diffuse responsibility and immoral actions; and they're not the first tech products to do so. Remember how Uber called itself a marketplace, claiming they don't control the market's desires, they just facilitate it and the responsibility for labour exploitation lies with the nebulous cloud of their 'customers'?

This is exactly what OpenAI and the like do. They build the tools, knowing full well what they are going to be used for, and then go "oh well you'll have to talk to our users about that" when someone calls out the labour exploitation and worker abuse, and all of the users believe they're not doing much harm because they don't use it *that* often, and boom, everyone is complicit but nobody is responsible, while OpenAI or Google continues to rake in the cash.

Stop being complicit in this. Stop being the moral fall guy. Stop being the small-time landlord. Stop using these services, and trying to excuse it away by making it "labour exploitation but cute".

If you have trouble doing art, commission an artist. If you have trouble writing, pay someone to help you with it. If you cannot afford these things - and I mean *really* cannot afford these things, not just assume that you can't or dislike spending money on it - then find someone who is willing to help you out for free *with their consent*.

And if you still choose to do labour exploitation, then yes, I *am* going to judge you for it.

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LLMs 

I just summarized my view on LLMs to someone this way, and figured it might be worth sharing here too:

The two options for using LLMs are "weapon" or "labour exploitation" and that is why I treat people advocating for them with extreme suspicion.

73% van de agrarische grond in Nederland wordt gebruikt voor de verbouw van veevoer.
Plus 3 miljoen hectare grondbeslag in het buitenland voor veevoer. (vooral soja)

I pulled this lipstick plant out of a skip outside the vet over a decade ago when I was living in London - there were three of them but I could only carry one and a feisty cat in a carrier. It plodded along for years in various places I lived in the interim until I left it at my parents' house last year, and some magical combination of light and conditions there mean it's now thriving.

#HouseplantsOfMastodon

looking for a quote, queerfeminist scifi author 

Elephant brain, please help: I remember one of the queerfeminist scifi authors I like having said something along the lines of:

"Whatever I write, I will never write about queermisiac violence. I want my readers to feel safe that I'm not going to hurt them like that."

It was in a podcast or a panel talk, and most probably Annalee Newitz, Becky Chambers, or Martha Wells. Does someone know for sure?

Signal messenger, disappearing messages 

I use Signal on a google-free LineageOS device, installed directly from the official apk. For a couple of months now, I'm struggling with disappearing messages. Sometimes it's just individual chats, sometimes all of the chats at once, and I have no idea what to do about it.

It seems to happen mostly (but not exclusively, and not always?) after phone reboots and/or after the Signal backup process ran. Most of the time, messages that disappear from the phone are still synched to the linked desktop app, so it's most definitely a phone thing. When it's individual chats disappearing, I couldn't find any pattern. Sometimes it's older chats, sometimes one of several from "today's chats."

A Signal re-installation and restore from backups didn't help. I run LOS 20 on a LG G5. I believe the pioblem existed already on LOS 19, but not as severe.

Any ideas to what I can do? :boost_request:

unfinished idea, mutual aid 

I currently charge more for my work so that I can divert part of my income to mutual aid requests, but I don't like that this whole scheme depends on my decisions as the middleman?

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unfinished idea, mutual aid 

(Underlying reasoning: implementing 'mutual aid' as "mostly poor folks supporting other poor folks" is not really sustainable and it's about time that the people with the money start doing their part without hiding behind charitable institutions)

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unfinished idea, mutual aid 

Thinking of offering discounts on my (generally pretty well-paid) freelance work in exchange for customers sending money directly to people asking for aid (eg. on fedi), to cut out myself as the middleman, but this feels like something that could have unintended effects if not thought through carefully...

The idea being to normalize sending money directly to people who need it, as a part of business procedures

boosts appreciated!!! :boostRequest:

does anybody in #seattle wanna trade my ukulele and case for a laptop of some sort?

as long as it can run linux and browse mastodon/the web without too much difficulty i'll gladly take it. portability is a bonus since i want this to bring with me places and work on writing and such while out

this uke is too small for my hands lol

queer porn, plagiate, porn moguls, probably anger trigging 

some years ago I participated as voice over in the film "sex toy story" by emanoelle kant. this film was a group no budget production, we just gathered to make the film happen in joyful sessions which took years, because, you know, no money, so doing it in our free time. . it uses animation, made by hand, and is about sextoys feeling neglected when their owner finds a new monogamous girlfriend who doesn't like sex toys.

this film took years to be finished, and was from 2022 in many festivals, porn film festival berlin, Barcelona, Warsaw, Vienna, etc.

a film was released this month by Erika Lust with the same name (well, one letter was replaced by a 3 in the word sex), same story concept (except that it is a straight story) similar animation etc. in the release post, pride in such an original world is mentioned.

instagram.com/p/CZC_czgtFf3/?i

#queerporn #copyright #mainstreamporn #diy

drivers: if you don't wanna get hit, wear bright colored clothing!
pedestrians:

STOP. YARN-BOMBING. HANDRAILS. Some cottagecore numbnut just made my trip to the school bookstore way more dangerous than it needed to be.
#yarn #yarnBombing #disability

moving all the UI elements a few pixels in random directions so the site gets a fresh new look

Bit disappointed that most of the news coverage around the death of Dries van Agt, former minister of Justice and former Dutch prime minister, kind of skips over the fact that, while he fought against legalising abortion, euthanasia, and same-sex marriage, chose death by euthanasia together with his wife, at the age of 93.

That and the fact that he was apparently a champion of the Palestinian cause, which I also didn't know about.

So, yeah, fuck him for the damage he did while in power, while simultaneously being an example of the fact that even old people can change their minds.

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