New server means a new #introduction
Hi, I am a design executive in Europe who started as a backend developer in Missouri.
My life has taken many turns, but I’ve always benefited from the advantage of being a white cishet male who is stereotyped as credible. Hopefully, I leave this planet more equitable than I found it.
I strive to apply critical analysis to everything yet also find solidarity with everyone.
While I value “strong opinions, weakly held”, I do indulge in strongly-held opinions on a few issues. I’ll thread them here so you can make an informed decision on whether to follow or block me:
I've come to understand what's happening in frontend's decade-long failure to deliver decent user experiences as a sort of epistemic closure. I'm calling it "frameworkism", and the epicenter is now React.
Here's a lot of words on why we should all reject it, and what the post-React world should look like:
New version of my visualisation of world power networks mapped on OpenStreetMap, with data from today.
I've added power plants to this iteration - although these are covered by power lines in denser areas, I think they give a bit more detail in darker areas.
Rendered from 38.1 million power lines and 85,000 power plants in 86 seconds using datashader.
anyway, "world standards day", to celebrate international standards, was on october the 14th
unless you're in america, in which case it's next week, the 14th of november
It's fucking wild watching consent being manufactured in real time.
Yesterday morning I watched reports of Tel Aviv soccer fans roaming Amsterdam in gangs, attacking strangers who they thought were Palestinian.
This morning I'm seeing the Israeli ecosystem spin it into "Pogroms" after those being attacked fought back.
Just Wild
Naturally: "our experience is roughly that Democratic states allow us in and Republican ones don’t" https://www.dutchnews.nl/2024/11/dutch-observer-heads-to-michigan-for-the-us-presidential-vote/
I’m old enough to remember when voting for local offices required researching the candidates because you couldn’t count on whether the Democrat or the Republican was the batshit crazy one.
Meet ✨ Oracular Oriole ✨ The Matcha prophet in the family. 
💚 🧡 Inspired by Ubuntu release 24.10, scheduled for release this month! Created with @krita and @Blender.
https://www.deviantart.com/sylviaritter/art/1107736015 #art #mastoart #fediart #wallpaper #krita
Time for another lesson from my days fighting in the Mod Wars in one of Twitch's more famous and busy channels
A few years ago, the channel began showing the pronouns of presenters and guests on stream. And toxic gamer types complained incessantly, often in very overtly transphobic ways, regardless of whether anyone on-stream was trans. We banned every single last person who complained. I personally banned hundreds, it must have been a few thousand all together. Anyone who DM'd the mods to apologize/explain it was a misunderstanding got unbanned, but that was a tiny fraction of them; there were more than a few bonus-transphobia parting shot DMs, often aimed at me because I was the first mod alphabetically.
And after a few weeks of this slaughter... the chat became a civil paradise. It was a much healthier environment than before we began showing the pronouns and causing all the most toxic people to volunteer their identity at once. People who are really gross on one axis tend to be unpleasant on all of them.
Hello Sharks, I'm seeking $50bn for my business. My idea is that we build the same business that already exists, but instead of just paying a living wage, we spend 50x that amount trying to replace the employees with extremely expensive and unsustainable arrays of graphic cards that guess sentences
Reading up on what it would take to deploy an LLM that auto fine-tunes on user sessions and we’re still a long way from “consumer ready” with AI agent infrastructure, aren’t we?
Unfortunately, it seems that today’s big LLMs are more like physicists than philosophers. Rather than more knowledge improving their awareness of their own ignorance, it only makes them more cocksure about knowing everything. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03137-3
@adwright oh, wow, that is such a perfect story of entrenched ideologies and sexism it reads like a barely-believable movie. I mean, the guy who dismissed her reviewed her dissertation and then later got credit?
I’d love to learn more about how acknowledgement finally shifted back to her.
All the hate-baiting anti-trans political shit has real consequences 😢 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-01979-5
some google maps engineer could write an algorithm that says, like, if the google satellite imagery shows this bike lane as entirely filled with cars around the clock, it should not be marked as a bike lane
honestly this, and a lot of street infra, is accounting fiction: google shows it as real, the mayor adds it to their "bike lanes built" count, but nothing, really, has happened
@genmon this seems adjacent to your last post https://www.instagram.com/reel/C_txoN_S50-/
Saving this for later because I'm a bit fatigued by how excited the frontend/UX world is about Linear.
https://mastodon.social/users/tmcw/statuses/113040242254960415
I just re-read this classic post about leadership in the metaverse and it strikes me how similar the experience seems, from my outsider perspective, to running a large open source project. Is OSS a metaverse? https://cruftbox.medium.com/my-years-as-a-metaverse-warlord-1f7c830a3173
At the height of One Million Checkboxes's popularity I thought I'd been hacked. A few hours later I was tearing up, extraordinarily proud of some brilliant teens.
Here's my favorite story from running OMCB :)
https://eieio.games/essays/the-secret-in-one-million-checkboxes/
Sometimes, in my Amsterdam bubble, I believe this country doesn't have MAGA-style wingnuts. But then there's this: https://www.dutchnews.nl/2024/08/dutch-town-back-in-court-over-satanic-cult-conspiracy-theories/
the midwest is associated w depression because we grew up inside the ghost of excessive industrious past.
from overgrown abandoned traintracks to empty, crumbling parking-lot sized industrial buildings. overgrown excess all around us. a constant reminder
of a society that could not sustain.
surrounded by the tombstones of a lifestyle we can’t participate in.
it’s honestly solumn and heavy. i think that most midwesterners feel it inside. the empty truth
everything is getting worse
#Missouri Outlawed #Abortion, and Now It’s Funding an Anti-Abortion Group That Works in Other States
==
With millions in expanded #tax credits and direct state funding going to anti-abortion groups, the nonprofit Coalition Life has expanded its operations beyond Missouri and into states where the procedure is still legal.