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!
> Maybe it’s useful to know that Sam Altman uses a knife that’s showy but incohesive and wrong for the job; he wastes huge amounts of money on olive oil that he uses recklessly; and he has an automated coffee machine that claims to save labour while doing the exact opposite because it can’t be trusted. His kitchen is a catalogue of inefficiency, incomprehension, and waste.
more of this, please. you can learn who a person really is by how they do housework and carework.
https://www.ft.com/content/b1804820-c74b-4d37-b112-1df882629541
If you can stomach an AI generated placeholder image, this post about WiFi only working when it's raining is similarly hilariously strange, again with a logical explanation.
My apologies, it was 500 miles. Anyway, if you haven't seen this story you owe it to yourself to give it a read. It's absolutely absurd, and yet there's a perfectly logical — if strange! — explanation.
When I see something like this, or the "I can only send an e-mail 300 miles" post, or the "my wifi only works when it's raining" post, it's tempting to think of ordinary computing as being something like AI: subject to mysterious and seemingly random behaviors.
The difference, though, is that these *incredibly strange* bugs all have explanations rooted in an understanding of how computers work. You can go find those explanations by using logic!
Baby steps.
I made a little #rustic step-ladder for the living room using a maple yoke piece that I ripped down the middle. And I added a removable slide for the junior woodworkers to have a some indoor playground fun.
I don't think #spooncarving will ever be my main thing but it's such a nice way to practice and experiment. This little spoon is for the sugar bowl. It was a piece of birch around a knot that I almost threw in the compost but then I thought it might be worth trying to work that swerving grain.
And there are lots of other examples where folks seem to bargain with extractive technologies and avoid the debate about environmental damage by talking about the good intentions and organization of the makers.
Heb ik volgers die zich bezighouden met de front-end van veel bezochte Nederlandse websites én affiniteit hebben het beperken van energieverbruik van het totale internet?
Ik help @fershad met het vinden van partijen die mee willen werken aan zijn grid-aware websites project
My own testing has shown it outperforms the others *and* doesn’t box you into weird licenses and questionable leadership promises.
https://mastodon.social/@SteveFaulkner/114497582785089366
angry at fatphobia
my sister has been desperately dieting and losing weight and has lost 63.5kg over the course of a year and she booked a consultation for some cosmetic surgery, video consult, doctor said it was fine and she should drive from Wales to Birmingham to get this done. she gets there today, sees another doctor who tells her she's *too fat to get the surgery* and then slams the door in her face when she starts crying.
Huh, got a 'data processing notice' e-mail from a B2B marketing / "contact database" company telling me that my freelance site had been indexed, and... they seem to actually be seriously trying to follow the GDPR in spirit?
Apparently they delete data from their database when it disappears off company sites, and they have a *very* long document explaining in detail why they feel there's "legitimate interest" and it's actually a credible argument ("you made a company site to market your company, and our business directory has the same goal").
Didn't think I'd ever see this.
Technical debt collector and general hype-hater. Early 30s, non-binary, ND, poly, relationship anarchist, generally queer.
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
Feel free to flirt, but if you want to actually meet up and/or do something with me, lewd or otherwise, please tell me explicitly or I won't realize :) I'm generally very open to that sort of thing!
Further boundaries: boosts are OK (including for lewd posts), DMs are open. But the devil doesn't need an advocate; I'm not interested in combative arguing in my mentions. I am however happy to explain things in-depth when asked non-combatively.
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.