politics, personal PSA
Just a personal heads-up for everyone I interact with: we've reached a point where if I see you in *any* way aligning with Trump or Musk, you are immediately going on my mental 'fascist' list with no further discussion and I will not speak to you anymore.
I don't care if you "didn't know how bad it is". The time for learning that is well past, so if you still "don't know", then I'm going to conclude that you didn't *want* to know and decide accordingly.
Time for the - I guess yearly by this point... - toot again:
No, I will not be at #38c3. I *could* have squeezed it into my schedule despite an upcoming transplantation, but they have *once again* failed to implement any COVID safety measures.
A few days of Congress is not worth the risk of brain damage or (in my case) severe illness or death.
If you want to see me at your event, push for appropriate safety precautions like sufficient ventilation/filtering and (particularly where that is not possible) mask distribution and ideally masking requirements.
PSA: personal health, surgery and risks, availability
If all goes to plan, I will be receiving a kidney transplantation on November 12 (2024), followed by an unknown recovery period. What to expect:
After the transplantation, I will not be around online for a while; this could be anywhere from a few days to a few months depending on how well (or not) the surgery goes. Even after I return, I will likely be avoiding stress for a while, which also means I may drop out of things unannounced.
In the time leading up to the transplantation, I will become less and less consistently available, and you may see me around less, as I deal with the preparations for the surgery.
I'm receiving a kidney from a living donor, under pretty much best-case circumstances (no dialysis), so the chance of success is high, and the chance of complications is low, but it is not zero. Likewise, survival chance is high but not 100%.
If the transplantation succeeds, I will be able to live a mostly normal life, but I will be on immunosuppressive medicine for the rest of my life. Among other things, this means that you're probably only going to see me at (hacker) events that take sufficient precautions against COVID and the like.
So if you want me and other immunocompromised folks around at those events, ask organizers to take those precautions! Ventilation/filtering and CO2 measurement is a good baseline.
If you have any questions about all this, feel free to ask, but I may or may not have the spoons to answer them.
Why I do not like hanging around liberals anymore
Because they're like oppression lootboxes.
The liberal viewpoint is not one of intersectionality; they might sound very progressive and recognize one or more types of oppression, but do not (wish to) recognize the way these interact, or the structure and patterns that underlie all of them.
This means that it's only a matter of time before I hear them say some extremely shitty and/or bigoted stuff about a topic that they don't recognize as a form of oppression, but I can't know upfront which topic it will be, or when it'll happen.
With my intersectional friends, I could then just point out that it's a form of oppression, and they will take it seriously, introspect, and work (over time) to understand it. Mistakes happen, but they will try to learn. All I need to do, is remind them.
With liberals, however... they do not recognize it as another occurrence of the same thing, and so I am left having to "prove" from whole cloth that yes, it really is a form of oppression, before they are even willing to put in *any* effort to understand the problem.
Every time this happens, it takes hours of my time, and energy that I do not have to spare.
I am already running on fumes most of the time, and I honestly just don't really want to hang around people who put that sort of price on not being shitty.
I've actually been here for a while already, though mostly inactive! The Birdsite Situation prompted me to pop in here again. And I'm terrible at writing introductions, so I usually just say "I do stuff on the internet".
But uh, I do all sorts of activist-y stuff, work on radical FOSS (see http://cryto.net/~joepie91/manifesto.html), write (educational) stuff, am more or less a lonely polyamorous gender blob of indeterminate sexuality who likes both cuddles and kinky things, and I always have 10 times as many projects as I have time for, as is customary with ADHD brain :) Sometimes I even finish some of them!
While I'm an introvert and need plenty of time to myself, I *am* happy to meet like-minded people and spend time with them, and as long as you're not a bigot or apologist, you should feel free to interact with me and/or follow me!
Also, I live in Rosmalen (near Den Bosch) in the Netherlands, and honestly would like to get to know more local folks, and I also have some vague intention to start a queer hackerspace around here if I can find enough interested people. Eventually!
I vaguely recall hearing about when Visa went after Fetlife. My memory is fuzzy and there's some gaps in the story clearly though. I absolutely recall they nuked a bunch of groups to immediately comply with their payment processor's demands, then when forging a more permanent policy on such things, I think they decided "You know what? Screw them, come what may"
But now that I look at them now, they ban those topics so I guess they tripled back on that?
I was saying elsewhere I knew of exactly one site that told payment processors to go heck themselves when told to ban certain content from their site. Turns out that didn't last, or I misremembered.
Anyone have more detail on that entire story?
@joepie91 maybe that is GoingTooSocial
@joepie91 missed opportunity "GoToSetup the gts instance"
⚡️lest someone read this in, I’m not saying you specifically *must* persuade them. Nor am I saying that we should tolerate bigotry or treat bigots like special boys who get treats.
No. I’m saying you need to destroy their fundamental views about the world.
If you’ve ever had a moment of revelation where everything you believed in collapsed, you know that’s a *far* more devestating blow than swearing someone out.
⚡️when encountering a bigot, if you are going to try to persuade them, I think it behooves you to ask the question of *why* they are bigots. Don’t assume it’s a lack of information. For casual bigots who obviously just don’t understand I think that works well, but for the committed bigots who yell at us in replies neither education nor beratement cuts it.
Taking out anger on them can be cathartic and it helps those they are attacking feel safer, but it can also reinforce the cycle of self loathing and escalate the conflict. It’s situational of course. Berating someone can be persuasive! If not to them, then to other people.
But legitimately… ask yourself what your core objective is. If it’s persuading *them* then you need to get into their head and break the back of the bigotry itself.
re: "AI"
@joepie91 I love layer 8 attacks
> tell bug bounty program that matching strings is not a secure way to fix an issue, with example that shows that payload A is mitigated but payload B isnt
> they add payload B to their list of strings to match and pay a bounty for that
> ???????
> tell bug bounty program that matching strings is not a secure way to fix an issue, with example that shows that payload B is mitigated but payload C isnt
free money glitch
It's rude to show AI output to people
https://distantprovince.by/posts/its-rude-to-show-ai-output-to-people/
re: In defense of misunderstanding as a plot device, speculation on a culture not my own
@joepie91 A lot depends on the details like how likely this misunderstanding/miscommunication is for that world and its characters, and as I've discussed, misunderstanding plots are frequently handled so poorly they turn people off the whole idea. I think that ties back to a misunderstanding, as it were, about misunderstanding on the part of the creators, as something that happens because people are thoughtless or careless and not because of compelling circumstances with a lot of structural issues, as in my examples of Shakespeare and Austen.
In defense of misunderstanding as a plot device, speculation on a culture not my own
It seems fashionable in the Anglophone literary world to deprecate plots that depend on misunderstanding and I'm not sure why--aren't they a staple of white Anglo classics like the works of #Shakespeare and #JaneAusten? 🤔 I guess there are a ton of cases where the misunderstanding is kind of meh and written in for plot convenience more than anything intrinsic to the characters and the world, but like any other plot element it can be handled well or poorly.
Personally I love a compelling misunderstanding where misinterpretation and crossed signals arise out of circumstances central to the story like "civil blood mak[ing] civil hands unclean," (Romeo and Juliet) or because honest communication about subjects like romantic yearnings is so high-stakes it's basically impossible, especially for women (much of Jane Austen).
And maybe there's a tendency to kind of sneer at this because these stories took place in the Olden Days(TM) of whalebone corsets and slavery and people are supposed to be above all that now. The last time I checked misunderstanding didn't die out with the advent of industrialization, though, unlike passenger pigeons and dodos (too soon?). Despite the enlightenment and freedoms constantly touted to us, how much goes unspoken and undared, dropped, forgotten and (un)missed in the odd spaces that open up between our fragile forms? Which, and whose, silences and misapprehensions do the loadbearing work in our lives?
I think these questions of misunderstanding and miscommunication are worth exploring in any age, especially if books are optimized for exploring inner lives as seems to be another common consensus in Anglophone lit crowds. (Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Beowulf among others might disagree, but hey, they're old news and drawn from oral tradition so they get filed differently maybe? 🤷♀️)
That's incredible.
Part of registering a business for payroll in California is a phone verification.
They will call from a random-ass number that might or might not be 916 area code, or might have ID blocked. 🤷
Caller will identify as a government employee. 🤷
You must then provide your business' tax IDs and other credentials.
Including the officers' social security numbers.
For reasons that are not obvious to our legal team or our vendor, many of our clients are not completing this process.
Technical debt collector and general hype-hater. Early 30s, non-binary, ND, poly, relationship anarchist, generally queer.
- No alt text (request) = no boost.
- Boosts OK for all boostable posts.
- DMs are open.
- Flirting welcome, but be explicit if you want something out of it!
- The devil doesn't need an advocate; no combative arguing in my mentions.
Sometimes horny on main (behind CW), very much into kink (bondage, freeuse, CNC, and other stuff), and believe it or not, very much a submissive bottom :p
My spoons are limited, so I may not always have the energy to respond to messages.
Strong views about abolishing oppression, hierarchy, agency, and self-governance - but I also trust people by default and give them room to grow, unless they give me reason not to. That all also applies to technology and how it's built.