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Hans Gerwitz

@hans@gerwitz.com

Head of Design at Canonical and King Freret IX

Every word I post here is statistically determined by preceding words.

392 Posts Posts & Replies 337 Following 427 Followers Search
Pinned post

New server means a new

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.

Pinned post

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:

Hans Gerwitz boosted

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

Hans Gerwitz boosted

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

@mz2 👋 What is the tag in your bio?

Naturally: "our experience is roughly that Democratic states allow us in and Republican ones don’t" www.dutchnews.nl/2024/11/dutch

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.

@sylvia_ritter lovely, as always 🫶

Hans Gerwitz boosted

Meet ✨ Oracular Oriole ✨ The Matcha prophet in the family. Emoji blobcat 💚 🧡 Inspired by Ubuntu release 24.10, scheduled for release this month! Created with @krita and @Blender.
www.deviantart.com/sylviaritte

Hans Gerwitz boosted

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.

Hans Gerwitz boosted

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

@lproven @theregister I was hoping this was going to involve synchronizing mirror screws or Nipkow disks for NBTV.

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?

@jimmyhmiller thanks for sharing this!

@ingrid oof Eyebeam. Never a NYC resident, I’ve always known of them only through how often my favorite artists have a history with them. It’s very sad to hear about their decay.

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. www.nature.com/articles/d41586

Edited 45d ago

@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 😢 www.nature.com/articles/s41562

Hans Gerwitz boosted

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

Edited 58d ago

@genmon this seems adjacent to your last post www.instagram.com/reel/C_txoN_

Saving this for later because I'm a bit fatigued by how excited the frontend/UX world is about Linear.
mastodon.social/users/tmcw/sta

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? cruftbox.medium.com/my-years-a

Hans Gerwitz boosted

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 :)

eieio.games/essays/the-secret-

@eieio we need to see your "I crashed the mail server" t-shirt

Hans Gerwitz boosted

finally, analogue CDs

wii shop theme remix by @miunau

Sometimes, in my Amsterdam bubble, I believe this country doesn't have MAGA-style wingnuts. But then there's this: www.dutchnews.nl/2024/08/dutch

Hans Gerwitz boosted

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