Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

I have been accepted for a talk at #fluconf

My presentation is called "Improving Diversity and Inclusion in the Open Source Community" and you can see the presentation slides here:

https://figshare.com/articles/presentation/Improving_Diversity_and_Inclusion_in_the_Open_Source_Community/28281392?file=51933668

1/3

So I want to provide some elaboration on this fediblock post I made: https://blackqueer.life/@tillshadeisgone/113891510610086508

I want to remind you all of a selection from of my pinned post on conflict with comrades, which I believe is relevant here.

So, I have been rethinking how I interact with this space going forward to better protect myself but also to have a more robust and intentional framework for how to engage with conflicts. I've been learning about how revolutionaries in the past have handled conflict with each other while maintaining unity in their movement. Many of these practices existed within local orgs and communities, and therefore are not necessarily applicable or appropriate for a digital and public space like this. However, I think some lessons can still be taken. So, in light of that, HERE IS MY PROPOSAL: If I am engaging with you and I believe that while we are aligned in our goals for liberation, you are inadvertently causing harm with your words, I may ask you to self-crit. This is not an attack, but is an invitation to reconsider what you are saying. This will also mean that I am available to you, privately or publicly, to explain my thinking and have a dialogue about our disagreement.

This policy is what I was drawing on when I engaged with the user I made a fediblock post about. As mentioned in my fediblock post, I chose to reach out privately to mention my concern and be able to explain my thinking in the hopes that I would be heard. This was a couple of days ago.

The thing is, just as I mentioned in said pinned post that antiblackess destroys unity, ableism destroys unity too. Black disabled folks have been saying for YEARS on this and every other digital platform that they feel excluded from just about every single community space, on the left or otherwise. This is not new information by any means.

Therefore, ESPECIALLY given that as our server's About section points out, 1 in 4 Black American adults are disabled, it is my responsibility as the admin of BQL to make sure that our space does not reproduce that same dynamic. If I want Black disabled people to feel like they can be in our community, I cannot allow ableism in our community. Full stop.

As I feel like I keep repeating, this is something I take very seriously. And sometimes, despite my best efforts, attempts to convince people that they are doing harm are not going to be successful. That is what happened in this case. The person did not listen to me or anyone else who tried to convince her, including Black disabled people who were impacted by her words. She continued, over the course of the past two or three days, to double down, saying that racism is a mental illness. Then, she started defending using the R slur and blaming disabled people for Trump being elected, explicitly referencing alleged decreases in average IQ scores.

When someone is repeatedly insistent on echoing eugenics ideology and Nazi talking points about intelligence, that is several steps past what is acceptable. To steal some language I got from communists, the contradiction between her deeply held beliefs and the presence and value of my disabled users was clearly antagonistic and not resolvable through dialogue.

Sometimes, you have to do the hard thing. It wasn't pleasant, but guess what? That's the job. Do you think it was pleasant for me to suspend instances like tech.lgbt or aus.social where we had a lot of connections, cutting our users off from theirs? To make public posts about it before and after? No, it was extremely stressful and upsetting and brought a lot more harassment my way. But I did it anyway. Wasn't the first time, won't be the last.

Oh, and it is worth mentioning that I have been accused of catering to the "white political gaze" by making my fediblock post, implying that I am doing so for the optics and because I care about getting accolades from white people more than I care about my fellow Black folks. It has been implied that this is all theater, and has no connection to any real beliefs on my part. To that, all I can say is that ableism is a bigger danger to Black folks than ableism is to white people. White supremacy is inextricably tied to ableism, and I have referenced and boosted multiple works by Black disabled advocates and academics in the past two days who discuss that exact concept. In short, disability justice is not just for fucking white people.

To close, I just want to restate that at the end of the day, ableism is a violation of rule #1 on BQL. Anyone who doesn't agree with the existence of that rule or who doesn't like it when we enforce it is no comrade of mine.

Thanks for reading.

Edit: clarity.

#FediBlockMeta

I encourage all the TTRPG content creators to draw a solid line against using AI in running games. There are people out there trying to profit on people's uncertainty about their skills running games by pushing AI. You don't need AI and using it makes you worse at running games not better.

Ik had dit als losse gedachte en nu wil ik het. Europese providers: mogen we opslag bij jullie en in-browser officepakketten? Dan krijgen jullie geld van me en zal ik het nooit meer hebben over dat gedoe met de datakabel in onze straat. Beloofd. https://mastodon.nl/@venite/113899795924795606

Wat zijn drie voorbeelden van geluiden die je door merg en been gaan? (ik schrijf over geluid als kwelling en heb al veel materiaal, maar extra inspiratie is altijd goed)

Even if you think you’re the exception and you will never become chronically ill, wear a mask.

Even if you’re “young and otherwise healthy”, wear a mask.

Even if your last covid infection was “mild”, wear a mask.

Do it for those who may not be as lucky, and do it to protect your long term health

#covidisairborne #covidisnotover #longcovid #chronicillness #disability

So, this is a right to repair rant, I guess. Or a story? Anyway. Some timelines will be redacted for narrative purposes, but everything did really happen, just not in that exact order.

I have an old-ish LG TV. It's way out of warranty, and honestly holding up surprisingly well despite all the scary stories about OLED burn-in (yes, yes, technically burn-_out_, I don't care) on the internet. I like it, and have no real reason to replace it.

So, a month or two ago I see the TV randomly turn off by itself, then turn back on again. I shrug it off, probably a power spike or something. The next day it happens again. And again. And again. AND AGAIN.

OK, at this point I'm willing to admit the TV is not doing so good. Also, somehow it seems to be correlated to me turning the computer on. My first thought is power delivery, since they are on the same power rail. It's, again, a pretty old TV, and maybe there's a bad cap or something somewhere.

So I do what any engineer in my position would - I go online to look for a schematic. There is no schematic. I look for a service manual. There is no service manual. I look harder. There's a service manual for an adjacent model. It says:

- step 1: replace motherboard. did it help? if no, go to step 2
- step 2: replace power delivery board. did it help? if no, call your LG rep

OK, fuck you too, I guess. I call my LG rep, which in my case is just the customer service hotline. They say they'll send out a tech.

Fast forward two days. The tech comes in, pops open a service menu, shows me the error code. I now know there's a service menu with error codes. The error code is "CPU ABNORMAL". Very helpful. The tech says it happens to these TVs, and I need a motherboard replacement. OK, cool. I look up the error online and find a few Reddit threads that seem to corroborate that info.

Fast forward a day. The tech calls me and says they don't have spare parts, and need to order the part from LG HQ. They put in a request and we wait.

Fast forward three days. LG HQ calls me and says they don't have the part. I call the tech (who was kind enough to leave me his personal phone number). He says I should write a formal request for reimbursement (yay customer protection laws). I do that.

Fast forward a week. Somehow, LG HQ decides they don't want to reimburse me for the entire TV, so they dig up a spare part. It's $200, and the tech will be here next week to install it. OK, screw it, I'll pay, that's still a lot less than a new TV.

Fast forward... The techs are here, they install the part, things seem to work. Next day, TV reboots again. At this point, I'm starting to believe it's cursed. The techs drive out again, look at the TV, see the same error, call a higher level tech, I hijack the call, he basically says "we have no idea how those things actually work, if it breaks, we send it to HQ, but let's try another board replacement".

Fast forward to yesterday, when I accidentally stumble onto a new root exploit for the webOS versions these TVs run. I've got nothing to lose at this point, so let's dig. After a few attempts to root the TV, I have SSH in. itsaunixsystem.jpg. More specifically, it's a Linux 4.4.84 (oof) on a custom LG SoC (oofffff). I poke around a few things and what do I find? A kernel panic log. The traceback points to `stmmac`. I unplug Ethernet. The TV has been working fine since.

I don't really have a nice ending to this, especially since I'm not 100% confident that was the only issue yet, and I have not fully identified what exactly is causing the bug (though I found some suspicious looking patches in Linus' tree that are missing from LG's). However, probably an entire week's worth of person-hours has been wasted on a software bug that would have been trivial to identify if LG just gave the user enough information.

P.S. If someone from LG is reading this, DO BETTER. You lost SO MUCH fucking money on this. I lost SO MUCH fucking money on this. Hiding this information doesn't help you, and it sure as hell doesn't help me. I don't care about your giga proprietary AI picture improvement algorithm, just give me _something_ I can look at next time my computer (and yes it's a computer) shits itself.

You know what I "love"?

When people who were previously openly bigoted towards me feel a shift in attitudes and start appealing to my humanity or sense of community or empathy or good political sense without owning up to, or even acknowledging, their past wrongdoing.

Pretending to be the "bigger man" when no longer allowed to be shitty has got to be amongst the most disgusting tactics out there.

The first step of creating a #wheelchair model that isn't a total disgrace is to not forget about the human.

Step zero might be having friends in wheelchairs or having seen actual wheelchairs.

(if you want to know why this trot seems a bit salty, look for wheelchairs on sketchfab ...)

Feel free to give feedback if you use wheelchairs.
#3dart #blender #modeling

saying “LLMs have their uses” is like saying “Agent Orange has its uses” - technically correct. more correct than LLMs often are, even, but folks, I hate to break it to you: “technically correct” is not actually the best kind of correct except in a very very narrow set of circumstances that you’ll rarely find yourself in. “technically correct” is just another version of the Torment Nexus.

I wrote a CDC Archive Archiver to pull public information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website. Just in case people get weird ideas of removing science from the public discourse. This is part of a larger effort that, among others, @lavaeolus initiated. You are welcome to chime in if that's up your alley.

- https://codeberg.org/antifascistDH/academia-preserver/src/branch/main/cdc_archiver
- https://fedihum.org/@lavaeolus/113882207119609662
- https://codeberg.org/thgie/antifascist-archives-action-sticker

#AntifascistArchives #DigitalHumanities #ArchivalPractices

Nieuwsartikel dat Buienradar en co het KNMI aanklagen omdat ze een 'te goede' app hebben gemaakt. Dat vinden ze concurrentievervalsing.

Ik wist helemaal niet dat het KNMI een goede weerapp had, maar nu wel, dus nu gebruik ik die i.p.v. Buienradar. Bedankt, Buienradar!

Something I've been noticing lately, in a lot of different places, is that as economic conditions get worse, things start getting stolen more often.

I'm not talking about shoplifting here; I'm talking about people stealing from their own communities. I've noticed increased reports of this in a wide variety of communities, across countries.

Please be mindful of who you are stealing from, and don't let it be your community. And conversely, if you are still doing well financially, look for people in your community who are financially drowning and how you can help them.

Massive tech companies have invested absurd amounts of money into "AI" systems, recentering their whole business around it.

It seems to me that one of the most effective ways to hurt these tech companies, would be to sabotage their play by making "AI" as socially unacceptable as possible, so that their investments turn into useless bricks that nobody wants or trusts.