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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.

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Time for the - I guess yearly by this point... - toot again:

No, I will not be at . 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.

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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.

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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.

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:

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 cryto.net/~joepie91/manifesto.), 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!

We hope everyone enjoyed our April Fools' joke. Torment Nexus is, of course, not going to be worker-owned.

A note to our employees: your level of enthusiasm for this idea was noted, and will be discussed at your next performance review.

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I can genuinely say that no piece of portable hardware I've ever owned has got as many questions or compliments as my @mntmn Pocket Reform.

If you let Google Translate guess the language of "croissant", it guesses English

I'm glad that wikipedia has been public about the impact of bot crawlers from AI companies dominating their bandwidth. engadget.com/ai/wikipedia-is-s

this is an impact of generative AI that I haven't seen talked about as much, but every team managing a non-static website has seen in the last year. big companies hoover up data by crawling constantly, creating performance problems that (often small) teams previously didn't have to worry about.

it changes the calculation of small projects on the web.

I've also finally installed a garden hose box, because I am sick and tired of my garden hoses laying on the ground outside and getting damaged and needing replacement all the time (storing them inside is impractical because of frequent use and being wet)...

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"LLM did something bad, then I asked it to clarify/explain itself" is not critical analysis but just an illustration of magic thinking.

Those systems generate tokens. That is all. They don't "know" or "understand" or can "explain" anything. There is no cognitive system at work that could respond meaningfully.

That's the same dumb shit as what was found in Apple Intelligence's system prompt: "Do not hallucinate" does nothing. All the tokens you give it as input just change the part of the word space that was stored in the network. "Explain your work" just leads the network to lean towards training data that has those kinds of phrases in it (like tests and solutions). It points the system at a different part but the system does not understand the command. It can't.

I had no idea that AI therapists were a thing.

This is incredibly dangerous. Please, please, please do not use.

An AI is not embodied and it doesn’t have an unconscious. It also has no ethics.

Do not let one anywhere NEAR your psyche. I beg you. #Therapy #MentalHealth #Psychoanalysis

Also, you know, the classic thing of Consent and Control.
I consent to joining a voice chat. I control when it ends.
A phone call either happens to me with limited if any warning or I call someone due to some need. And I can't really get out of it without specifically establishing both sides have fulfilled their criteria *and* I can't be explicit about my desire for its termination.

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I've also finally installed a garden hose box, because I am sick and tired of my garden hoses laying on the ground outside and getting damaged and needing replacement all the time (storing them inside is impractical because of frequent use and being wet)...

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How can one engage in algorithmic sabotage to poison "AI" scrapers looking for images when one is running a static website? Thanks to @pengfold, I've implemented a quick and easy way for my own blog:

tzovar.as/algorithmic-sabotage

Also thanks to @rostro & @asrg for the pointers and discussion!

#ai #sabotage #luddite

TIL there's something called a southern viscacha and it looks like a cat and a rabbit had a baby

🪭what IS the fascist line here?

“It wasn’t a filibuster, it was just a long speech”

What is the fascist line in general?

“Nothing you do matters”
“You do not matter”
“Protesting doesn’t help”
“Only Trump and Musk matter”
“The world is whatever we say it is”
“Nobody cares about anyone else”
“The people you trust will betray you”
“You are a disgusting freak for being different”
“Hopeful people are fools”

Social isolation. Social isolation. Be anti-social. Social isolation. That is the fascist line.

Do not believe the fascist line.
Do not repeat the fascist line.
Do combat the fascist line!

Go write your own story!

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Tomorrow, when the plant table is fully dry, I can continue with my *actual* project (for which the table and the garage were dependencies): pre-planting seeds for my vegetable garden.

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There's a lot left to do here, but I'm very happy to finally have the whole thing in a usable condition, at least! Instead of having to constantly navigate around all kinds of crap scattered on the floor (instead of being stored where it belongs).

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Wat een teleurstelling dat Hellendoorn een slopgenerator heeft gebruikt voor de nieuwe posters bij de Rioolrat; het doet echt afbreuk aan de anders zo goede thematisering...

youtube.com/watch?v=-sxd4sSQZ2 (CW: flitsende lichten)

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