Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

i really think we need to acknowledge the existance of „network pain“. the pain of leaving connections behind. social networks are not just tools or apps, but means of connecting to other people, thoughts, information we care about. it actually hurts to lose that. https://mas.to/@meganL/113794498411810949

Hashtag threat model

some guy is gonna be here between 10 and 12 to check the heating, so now i'll be cycling my idle animation while waiting next to the door for two hours

Ask people for the calendar date they think the pandemic ended and show them the wastewater charts spanning 2020–present challenge

how do people remember names of ppl irl when like. there's no nametag floating above their head at all times

Hearing about a young hacker whose being extorted by the University of Washington, not cool UW.

The student claims they built an app to help kids get the course schedules they want, a hack as old as time, and the university decided to expel him until he ports his app to the university's internal systems.

This would be unpaid labor.

Until then his class registration is on hold and he can't register or attend his last few classes. 🥴

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jdkaim_github-jdkaimhuskyswap-huskyswap-project-activity-7282891503142641664-nA8Y

#UW #Seattle #HuskySwap #CS

Gone is the clause saying you cannot compare women to "household objects or property." Also removed is a prohibition on claiming that there is "no such thing" as a trans or gay person.
Added in to the policy are new clauses apparently designed to explicitly allow common anti-trans arguments, such as advocating for trans people to be banned from public bathrooms, school sports, or certain jobs.

"We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation," reads one exception. The same section previously said that users couldn’t call protected groups “freaks” or “abnormal”.

Meta also replaced language banning “generalizations” about a protected group’s “inferiority” on the basis of “intellectual capacity”. Now the new language merely bans “unsupported comparisons” between protected groups’ on the basis of their “inherent intellectual capacity” — seemingly opening the door to scientific racism.

Fucking awful. Absolutely do not want to hear "good thing I don't use Facebook" etc. Because your parents probably do and most of the people you grew up with do too.
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/facebook-fact-checking-hate-speech-meta-b2675311.html

Got a button

a reminder to US folks that you can see how much your doctor has been bribed at https://openpaymentsdata.cms.gov

#PSA

As an antidote to all the horrible US Tech Bros in the news, what are some nice, encouraging stories about thoughtful/ slow/ kind/ humane tech catching on and doing well?

you know, I used to be someone who thought of violence as something that happens away from me, in distant warzones and history books, or at most that war might happen *to* me, like a hurricane. I didn't think of violence as a thing I might ever *be*, the way that traffic doesn't happen to you, you are traffic.

and later every time I was before the enemy I was still struck by this feeling of surreality, of how all these images from hero fantasies and corny action movies and animes—how *not* different it is from real life. how cringe and ridiculous both my and the enemy's posturing felt like, up until the moment I had my face covered by heavy bleeding, up until the moment I saved someone by going after the enemy with lethal force...

even *during* the scenes I was struck by this feeling, like once when trapped I texted my family, "I love all of you very much", just in case, and I turned to my comrades and said something pep-talky like: "I think it's time to come to terms with the fact that we might die here, this position isn't defensible, and if they break in we should go hard and take down as many nazi bastards with us as we can..."

...and every time something like this happens part of me thinks, what are you doing you're not a soldier you're some nerd who watched too much anime, are you quoting some videogame right now. but also the enemy is banging at the door and if they come in they'll try to kill us and I was ready to do the same. with things like this, you just know it for a fact. you'll know it, too, when your turn comes. it feels surreal and also it's the most real thing there is. violence is part of the human experience, always has been, when you have to deal with it it just becomes one more thing you do.

last year I read a lot of Weimar literature and Weimar queer culture, and early 3rd Reich too, to try to cope with all surreal it all felt, how disconnected it made me from people that aren't looking at how far the enemy has already come. and when I read this literature, it's so clear that the OG Nazis, too, nobody took them seriously. Hitler felt like a clown, way too extreme and caricatural to ever become hegemonic ideology. the Nazis didn't rise up by voting like many think but, to use a Brazilian expression, eating quietly from the margins. Isherwood in his less fictionalised diary (Christopher And His Kind) says he remembers not giving much thought to these headlines like, Hitler travels to city X to meet industrialist Z, Hitler makes deal with judge Y...

by the time people understood that the Nazis weren't just bad people or harmful people but the enemy, the Gleichschaltung had already gone too far. too many switches had already been flipped, hegemony had changed before everybody's noses. the inn owner lady, contrary to her fictional counterpart in "Cabaret", didn't really adopt Nazi ideology or antisemitism. she just kept living her life best as she could and, at some point, almost imperceptibly, started referring to Hitler as Der Führer.

this is way scarier to me than the moral fable in the musical.

violence does not come from nothing, it has to be imagined, idealised, sung, this is how the revolver is cocked. ("Tomorrow Belong to Us", the satirical Nazi folk song from the musical, is now unironically a hit with modern Nazis). this whole process of normalisation always feels dorky, simplistic, unrealistic, kitsch, cringe, funny, ridiculous. up until the exact moment that it doesn't.

which is to say, all the people around me who are looking at this and saying this is kayfabe, this is a distraction from real things like the economy and laws and the other aspects of the neoliberal routine. that this couldn't happen here, this isn't real. headlines like this feel an lot different to me now.

It's funny to see how Eugen went from "shut up, Zuck" to "omg yes, we're federating with Threads 😍 " back to "Zuck is a threat"

If you are planning to attend the event, please do make sure you're vaccinated, mask up, take rapid tests.

Most importantly, if you have any suspicion that you are starting to get sick do not hesitate to skip the day's talks and stay home. It is unlikely that any of the talks will be good enough to justify spreading covid and any of the other pathogens that tend to spread during this season.

#covidIsNotOver