Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

The main thesis of this article is sound: the far right loves image generators because they hate art and artists. https://newsocialist.org.uk/transmissions/ai-the-new-aesthetics-of-fascism/

There are a few cringey errors and a wee bit of overreach, but I really think his main point is solid. Indeed, I would go further on a few examples he raises.

The author discusses dictator hair, saying it's ugly on purpose. He describes Trump's hair as a microagression of ugliness. While this is largely correct, I think he's missed some nuance, especially in terms of gender. Women of the far right have impeccable hair and carefully chosen wardrobes. It's only the men who dress badly, wearing ill-fitting suits and inexplicable haircuts. Therefore, bad hair is a gender expression, and I would argue, one rooted in homophobia. There is a lingering stereotype of hairdressers and stylists as gay. So Trump and Milei and even Boris Johnson all have hair that symbolises neglect.

In actual fact, Trump spends a lot of time on his hair and makeup, but the result symbolises contempt for the workers who prep him for the public. He uses their labour but disdains their craft. The symbol of his hair as anti-hairdresser supplants the reality.

When a symbol becomes more important than the thing it represents, it's called a "fetish". In that sense, Trump's hair is a fetish for utilitarian masculinity and compulsory heterosexuality.

Zou het helpen, zo’n antidiefstalbordje?

I’m fucking tired of people working at the same company reviewing and merging each others PRs. I’m fucking tired of corporate interests putting their own capital gains ahead of the project. We need to actually give them resistance when they do this, instead of worshipping them and putting them on a pedestal and contributing to their personality cult. They are fucking cancerous to nix/nixpkgs/nixos and everyone that gives a shit about those and have power in the project have a duty to start speaking up louder against this shit.

God forbid you’re not employed by them? Get a spine. Most of these places are shitty employers anyways.

Domen, creator of devenv, recently added telemetry to his devenv thing, as part of adding AI to the product, and when nixpkgs contributors removed the telemetry, he reverted the change, with a self merge, without a fucking review even.

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/381981

This is a clear conflict of interest. We need to stop this from happening in the NixOS organization, corpos need to have some respect for users.

Discussion thread: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/should-commercial-actors-ship-telemetry-in-nixpkgs/60279/8

#nix #nixos #nixpkgs

American readers with an interest in #cooking, hear me out - I have a proposal!

I know that the next few years are going to suck a lot for anyone who is not a TechBro billionaire and their chosen cronies. Which means that a lot of people have to get rather thrifty with their dwindling finances.

Which brings me to my idea: There are a _lot_ of old cookbooks in the public domain - published during WWI, the Great Depression, and other times - which focus on "economic" or "thrifty" cooking.

Thus, a writer with relevant interest could revisit all those recipes, update them for the modern area, and publish them together with economic analysis of what aspects of meal preparation were cheap and which were were pricey then, along with what makes them pricey _now_ - including how late-stage #Capitalism screws the consumer over!

The end result would be a book that combines advice for thrifty cooking with increasing political awareness in these trying times! How does this sound for a book idea?

#USPolitics #writing #WritingCommunity #history

Sources for the covers:
https://archive.org/details/war-cookbook-for-american-women
https://archive.org/details/practicalcookboo00howa
https://archive.org/details/food-economy-images
https://archive.org/details/left-overs-13

@aparrish Every single time I hear the sentiment "like it or not, ______ is here to stay", I like to take a moment to reflect on the overwhelming majority of "things we were told would be permanent" that now, *shockingly*, no longer exist.😮🫢🤗🙄

apparently amazon is removing zhe ability to download kindle ebooks starting two weeks from today (so, on za 26zh).

zhis is a reminder zat tampering wizh any kind of DRM is ILLEGAL, like for instance using zhe excellent free and open source ebook library manager calibre (https://calibre-ebook.com/) wizh za readily-available DeDRM plugin which automatically strips all DRM from ebooks you add to za library, including amazon's encrypted AZW/3 format zat all kindle ebooks come in, and zhen converting zhem to any format you like including epub and pdf, is ILLEGAL and you definitely SHOULD NOT download any and all kindle ebooks you may have and do zis to all of zhem in za next two weeks. definitely not.

and you definitely SHOULDN'T check out zis guide zat explains step by step how to set zat all up: https://drm.bytelet.dev/60250b34105e482c96dfe9605100354c/

Super scummy for microsoft to auto upgrade (at the added cost of an extra £30 a year) people to a AI plan, and not offer a "actually I don't use any of that stuff" can I not pay that £30 a year?

And then only when you are at the cancel page, it's like "🥺 oh sorry do you want the old deal back? 🥺"

For anyone else, you don't even have to get that far into the cancel page for this. So it's easy to save £30 a year with this.

@maartenpelgrim @janvlug @Kletskous @bassjobsen @PvdA @groenlinks

Het is niet ‘mastodon’ of ‘the fediverse’ wat moeilijk is. Het is moeilijk om daadwerkelijk inhoudelijk aandacht te geven aan een ander.

Echt luisteren, je echt verdiepen in anderen, dat is ontzettend moeilijk! Zo moeilijk dat het bijna pijn doet als je het moet proberen.

En de algoritmes van bv Bluesky en Facebook geven je instant gratification.

Please boost for research reach!

Community moderators and event organizers:

📊 What challenges are you facing in Code of Conduct reports or community moderation?

LB I didn't wanna derail that thread but if you're looking for sewing patterns and you have the measurements of who you're making something for (and tbh a size chart might work too), please check out https://freesewing.org where patterns cost exactly how much it costs you to print them! Unless you have a projector because they also have a mode for that, so you can save paper and spend $0 more than what you already paid for the projector
#sewing #freeSewing #freeSewingPatterns

I'm ending this debate on this point and, honestly, this last entry is more for myself than for Robin Sloan. It's a reminder to myself that "AI" is part and parcel of the ongoing right-wing political project.

Now I'm disappointed.

https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/notes/2025/now-im-disappointed/

I've already put way more effort into this than I should have

@zacwest For any readers who go "huh": It is possible to download all your Amazon ebooks, remove their DRM with DeDRM, make some backups and, if desired, delete your Amazon account. Well, until February 26th it is possible, so do it now before they are lost forever.
https://umatechnology.org/how-to-de-drm-kindle-books-using-calibre-2024/