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:
1000 richest people are approched. "The end of the world is here. Time to go to your doomsday bunker", they are told. The billionaires nodded. They knew this was coming. They were prepared.
So they gathered their loved ones and locked themselves in luxury bunkers. No contact to outside world.
10 years later they emerge. The world has healed. The air is breathable, people are happy. "What was the catastrophy?" they ask the first person they meet.
She screams: "THEY GOT OUT!!!"
So, cis Americans, you're now living through the first day of a federal genocide against trans people, as defined by the Lemkin Institute for the Prevention of Genocide. As happens almost without exception unless stopped, it is both likely to proceed to mass murder and to expand to include additional social groups, possibly including you.
What are you going to do about this? Are you going to take up arms and fight to prevent your friends and neighbors from being murdered by the state? Are you going to harbor fugitives, get them medical care, and help them leave the country? Are you going to disrupt the function of state offices and destroy records to make their work impossible?
Or are you just going to hunker down and go along with what's asked of you, in hopes they don't get around to killing people like you? Are you, in other words, going to be a good Nazi?
If you think you're going to maybe go on a few big nonviolent protests and be angry on social media, like you did last time, but you know money is tight and you just started a new job and... congrats on failing to understand the situation and choosing to be a good Nazi.
History is unfortunately quite clear here. There are no other options left. Either you literally, physically fight this, or you collaborate.
If you think this is extreme, well, you've made your choice. See you in hell.
In the way the dismantling of USAID is a practice run for DOGE dismantling the US government, I’m growing concerned the birthright citizenship attack is just a first step towards weakening the 14th amendment.
In the way the dismantling of USAID is a practice run for DOGE dismantling the US government, I’m growing concerned the birthright citizenship attack is just a first step towards weakening the 14th amendment.
@ia I can no longer use Writer because my system thinks .md files are "Genesis Games". I have no clue what app could have caused this registration (I have not recently installed any emulators) and it happens even selecting a document from within the app's library view. How can I kick Sequoia into understanding .md = text/markdown?
@thclark any chance that elevations API you built is hosted somewhere for public use?
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