Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

To make things a little shorter: fucking mask, wash your hands & encourage ppl to do so as well

Are you marginalized in some way, and have you had a poor experience in the #NixOS community that was not handled properly by the moderators?

I'd like to talk to you about it! I'm not a moderator, but have spent years (behind the scenes, as a community member) trying to resolve the safety issues in the NixOS community.

I've reached a point where I think it's time to start documenting incidents publicly, pseudonymized if needed, given the apparent tendency for them to be "handled" (or rather, not handled) privately.

I'm reachable on Matrix as @joepie91:pixie.town, or by e-mail as admin@cryto.net. I won't publish anything without your agreement, but please talk to me about this before sharing your story, to make sure that we have the same expectations!

"The (mistaken) idea seems to be that any hypothesis—no matter how bigoted—can be safely postulated and tested because the ‘scientific method’ weeds out untruths and leave the truths stand. This, however, overlooks two important false assumptions: that hypotheses themselves are value neutral, and that we have unlimited resources to debunk misconceived ideas." By @Iris

https://irisvanrooijcogsci.com/2024/03/03/the-myth-of-value-free-science/

"It turns out that generative AI companies don’t like it when you steal, sorry, scrape, images from them. Cue the world’s smallest violin."

In Moment of Unbelievable Irony, Midjourney Accuses Stability AI of Image Theft

https://www.themarysue.com/midjourney-accuses-stability-ai-of-image-theft/

More about the hacker community's shitty gender politics and cleaning.

As much as I'm a great fan of joining communities and fixing them from within, of exercising my privilege (in this case, masculine nonbinary, etc.) to bring other problematic folks into the fold, I'm also so fucking tired of masc and other disconnected folks just letting spaces go to shit, cleaning-wise, and of those folks manipulating their privilege to guilt those more responsive to mess into cleaning up for them.

The optics and gender politics of masc mess are absolute crap, they buy into the whole system of gendered unpaid emotional labor, and for those with hygiene and/or immunological concerns who cannot wholly ignore it until the people causing the mess clean it up, it's even more intensely shitty.

For the love of pete, people, learn how to clean, keep house, and tidy up your own messes. One of the reasons I'm on the fence about Noisebridge is that part of the advice on the tour was "If you want to solder, first clean up an area, then solder, then clean up after yourself". Not a great default behavior there, esp when it's clear that the last step is often skipped (or there wouldn't be a mess to clean up, to start).

"De-anonymising data is surprisingly easy: if you know Tony Blair’s date of birth (a matter of public record) and the two dates during his term in office in which he was treated for a heart condition (ditto), you can pick him out of any “anonymised” pool of NHS data in seconds, and then discover all those facts about his health that aren’t a matter of public record... Dr Ben Goldacre and his team at Oxford created OpenSAFELY, a “Trusted Research Environment” that allows researchers to write programs that analyse NHS data in situ. These programs would be dispatched to run against the data held by NHS trusts, and then the system would return the results to the researchers without ever letting them handle the data – which never left the trusts’ own servers."
https://goodlawproject.org/cory-doctorow-health-data-it-isnt-just-palantir-or-bust/
#dataProtection #research #NHS #privacy

PS #Palantir, ... is literally named after an evil, all-seeing magic talisman employed by the principal villain of Lord of the Rings (“Sauron, are we the baddies?”)

i wonder if anybody's ever noticed how i never use words like stupid, dumb, idiot, etc. outside of quoting song lyrics and such

i generally try to avoid insulting peoples' intelligence, because that has ableist implications. i usually go for chiding their malicious willful ignorance instead

the reason zip and unzip are seperate commands actually has to do with the proprietary origins of compression algorithms.

originally, a common scheme was that the decompression command would be free, but compressing files required buying a license.

so companies with deep pockets who want users to be able to download their software quickly can shell out the cash, while users don't have to pay for a seperate piece of software to access the file they just bought.

commands like tar never went through this weird licensing scheme, so don't have to deal with this odd split (and also, a physical tape archive would be a lot more annoying to deal with if you didn't have access to stuff like appending and deleting files)

Direct action is the insistence, when faced with structures of unjust authority, on acting as if one is already free.
-- David Graeber

#anarchism #quote #bot

Also not a great range of diversity. Lots of white dudes around 20 - 30, abled, apparently cis and heteronormative at Noisebridge. Some women. A few non white folks of various demographics. I get the sense that, like playing Minecraft, I would be their senior on average by 10 or 20 years.

Queerious Labs when we visited was 3 white folks, probably in their 40s. One femme-ish, two mascs (one specifying masc pronouns).

Their discords seem to be more diverse but I haven't attended any formal organizational meetings. Oh, and according to Discord discussions at least one regular at the Noisebridge organizational meetings has outbursts and interrupts and talks over other attendees and requires moderation and still meetings can run 4 to 5 hours long. So that's not ideal from an ability/access standpoint but is also often what you get in anarchic style governance with an aim of decision making through consensus.

They've both been around for a long while so I assume they get through it often by the skin of the teeth.

Queerious Labs on the other hand, apparently I'm already a member just because I showed up. Small. Still anarchic. There were three members there when we arrived at 7pm. They were watching Star Trek Discovery Season One (the Harry Mudd episode) when we arrived and then started watching Galaxy Quest.

It seems like a great chill spot so I may return again. Also Beka there seems to be a fully involved member and responded to an inquiry email the same day so that was nice. Smaller space means less chaotic and probably fewer struggles but also fewer raw materials and fewer machines and tools.

I'm still thinking about Noisebridge. They have a lot of fascinating things to figure out and fix but I'm cautious about all their drama. And would probably care deeply if I got involved. Also someone (friendly but not kept in touch) from my past is their.

2/2

I forgot to say, I went to check out a couple of hacker/maker spaces in SF with a couple new Mastodon friends on Thursday, Noisebridge and Queerious.

Noisebridge seems very much a potential inspiration for the video game, Watchdogs and Watchdogs 2. Very busy and chaotic, lots of big industrial machines sitting around waiting for folks that want to use them/know how to use them.

From hints dropped by our ad gov your guide and joining their Discord it seems like they're having some culture clash issues with some new and existing members, some safety issues, some access management issues, and some issues getting members and guests to do needed cleanup in the space.

Like with SudoRoom, apparently, some masculine members and guests try to guilt some feminine members and guests into cleaning up, apparently based on the premise that many women in the space are not there to directly participate but as wives and girlfriends of the guy using the space. That dynamic is super duper not my favorite. In their parlance, it's shitty behavior.

So as much as joining Noisebridge appeals from a geekery standpoint, I'm on the fence.

1/

Would you be interested in a website that had articles comparing books to their movies and movies to their remakes? This would include a breakdown of plot differences, tonal changes, character/plotline additions and subtractions (and combinations) as well as an analysis of what works and what doesn't, and why it might have been done that way.

I would appreciate boosts.

Yo, folks... PSA time: if you're gonna accuse someone of posting AI-generated art, you need to do a _bare minimum_ of three things:

1) Look for the artist's profile / gallery / etc to see their history
2) No really, go find it, look at it, make sure you're not about to throw hate at someone who's invested years or even decades of their life into their craft
3) Find and document the AI markers in your report

Ask yourself, who are you trying to protect when you call out AI-generated art?

If your answer is "artists", then please take that extra time and do those extra steps so that you don't drive skilled creatives out of the public sphere.

#art #MastoArt #FediArt

#EMERGENCY

We have a neighbor who has homebound... since before our pandemic... with a skin infection that makes it painful to wear clothing. She does not leave her apartment and relies on us and others to help her with things.

There are presently five police officers outside her door demanding she go with them. Our local social services non-profit is refusing to get involved, saying to let the police handle it: "They're professionals."

Anyone in #NYC who can intervene as a patient advocate?