first date

#unix_surrealism #cirno #9front #glenda #comic #docker

I strongly believe fighting to return to the status quo in the midst of this current upheaval is a losing game.

The talent and knowledge the government is expunging isn’t vanishing off the face of the earth. It still exists.

Imagine if that talent could be organized outside of the auspices of the state. Imagine what would happen to the empire if it was starved of our skills and abilities to propagate itself.

Because rich people don’t have skills.

We do.

Remember to draw your protective sigil before interacting with the cache coherency engine, lest you become Invalid or Owned yourself.

it's on like donkey kong

Staying informed in the US is not going to get easier anytime soon, especially as old standbys fall to billionaires or preemptive obedience to the authoritarian regime.

I've assembled a list of 40+ outlets that I find valuable, prominently featuring:

* nonprofit, co-operative, and independent news rooms,
* outlets relevant to Petaluma and the Bay Area,
* international outlets,
* and, yes, a selection of for-profit outlets.

Many of them are on fedi or Bluesky.

https://blog.riley.pub/news-and-information-in-2025/

#News

🌱 faeputing

USpol, trans rights

The Pennsylvania State Senate is trying to introduce a new bill, SB.213, known as the "Two Gender Protection Act".

This bill is meant to erase any existence of trans, nonbinary, and intersex people. And it's absolutely fucking vile and disgusting.

Trans people exist. Nonbinary people exist. Intersex people exist. They all deserve rights and a peaceful existence. Christofascists are trying to destroy society. We can't let them.

The bill can be seen on the state website: https://www.legis.state.pa.us//cfdocs/Legis/CSM/showMemoPublic.cfm?chamber=S&SPick=20250&cosponId=45218

If you're in Pennsylvania, call your reps at 1-866-581-7519 and tell them to vote "NO" on this bill. Outside the state? Call them anyway and give them an earful.

Bills like this should not be allowed to pass! Fight them every time they rear their ugly heads!

The trans community needs allies. Stand up for trans rights; they are human rights!

Be the rust upon the gears of fascism!

#TransRights #HumanRights

I have feelings about AI & the web & my experience being trans "in tech" in 2025 - so I screamed some thoughts onto my personal web log.

I hope for all of us a more queer & humane future. Keep building communities & dreaming better paths.

https://www.miriamsuzanne.com/2025/02/12/tech-ai-wtf/

IT'S ALIVE!!!!

#plan9 #9front

pissing in the men’s as a show of dominance

opacity.ru/rapture projected in the area

External Attachment:

Apparently some tech bros are having to learn the hard way that the creator of #Linux is a leftist

Advanced wife, advanced life

No more pixelfedding for me. Moved back to my own webshit gallery with rss feeds and stuff.

https://ftrv.se/_/gallery/

the integrative tattoo journey continues... give it about a month :>

Me on DOGE for the MIT Tech Review:

"So we should plan for the worst, even if the likelihood of the worst is low. We need to dust off those “in the event of an emergency” disaster response procedures dealing with the failure of federal government."

https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/02/07/1111283/elon-musk-doge-and-the-evil-housekeeper-problem-government-technology/

#unix_surrealism #9front #qr #cirno #diy

Current vibe

The Open Source Torment Nexus

One of the most popular memes when it comes to talking about the tech sector is Alex Blechman’s tweet about the Torment Nexus:

One can interpret the tweet in a bunch of ways. As a comment on the level of reading comprehension that billionaire tech leaders like Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk or some ghoul that Peter Thiel funded constantly show: Calling one’s products or comapnies “Metaverse” and “Palantir” does not express an understanding of who and what is criticized in the respective works of fiction. And we are not even asking for nuance here.

Another interpretation is that the products that are being brought to market as massive innovations seem to be less than stellar. Best case scenario they are just weird stuff nobody asked for (think Juicero), most of the time they are “here’s a thing you kinda want but you have to pay rent for it now instead of buying it and we might shut it down any time”. And a lot of the time they are just bad for you, products that insult your existence as a human being.

Obviously there is no objective way to make these calls, to decide what is dumb but meaningless or what is evil. People have different values, different needs and sometimes can accept different levels of crap for a specific product or service.

We talked about this a bit in the Q&A part of my talk at Fluconf that gave a bit of criticism of the Open Source movement and its beliefs. But while my argument in the talk was mostly that the beliefs that Open Source is based on might not actually be based on or support the actual political values that people might have there is value to having Open Source software. Software that you can use and change to suit your needs and demands (if you can of course).

But Open Source software does not happen in a vacuum, it is written by people. Often to serve their needs, sometimes to serve a community’s needs: To provide a better solution for users. The “Open Source Alternative to proprietary X” thing.

If you’ve been on the Internet for about 7 seconds you will have come into contact with guys (using a gendered term here because they are mostly male) who will respond to any criticism of or issue you have with a proprietary software with “Just use this Open Source tool”. It’s a bit annoying because a lot of the time that answer doesn’t come from a genuine desire to help based on empathy and an understanding of the problem the original post expressed. But It’s also oftentimes better than one might think.

The Open Source community has gotten quite good at replacing proprietary tools with open source solutions. The feature set might not be 100% there and some things might not work but there are totally valid alternatives to Slack or Chrome or Microsoft Office (if you really just need office tools and not something that specifically depends on MS’s ideosyncracies). There are whole websites dedicated to listing Open Source alternatives to proprietary tools with at least one of those alternatives being pretty much a copy.

This has tremendous value and provides a bunch of people with the software tools to do their thing – me included. But when building those replacements the Q&A at FluConf made me wonder: Are we maybe doing a tech-bro? Are we not properly reading and understanding the texts we reference?

Any artifact is a text. You can read for example any piece of software as a document about the beliefs and assumptions of the programmer about the users. The software tells you how the programmer sees and understands the user. It’s just a form of text that is maybe a bit harder to read and it might have animations and sounds and can send bits somewhere.

What triggered this train of thought was me thinking about social media platforms. With Meta and X and all US tech companies finding their love for fascism currently many people want to jump off those platforms to find a better home. And there are Open Source Alternatives to Twitter/Instagram/WhatsApp/etc. Which in general is good. Maybe. Sometimes.

(Quick sidebar: I’m gonna use an example of an Open Source project here but don’t read this as me shitting on that project. People can build what they want and have their reasons for doing things. My feelings and needs are not “right” and other perspectives are wrong. I’m using the project as an illustration.)

I don’t use Instagram. Not because I don’t like seeing pictures or because it is “beneath me” and not even because it’s Meta and Mark Zuckerberg bend the knee to Trump. (In fact I have an account I use to follow tattoo artists but that I only use for exactly that research because tattooers live on Instagram sadly) I don’t use Instagram because it’s bad for my mental health. The affordances and the social practices of Instagram have lead to every picture (and the people and lives in it) looking like an ad. Perfectly designed and sculpted representations of better lives of better people. It just makes me feel bad about myself, my looks, my life. For me Instagram is the Torment Nexus.

Now that might just be a me-problem. But when I see an Open Source project like Pixelfed that basically attempts to provide users with a federated, open source drop-in replacement for Instagram I wonder: Are we just building an Open Source Torment Nexus? Because Pixelfed looks like Instagram. Has all the bones of Instagram. The same basic logic of the app (maybe the recommendation algorithms aren’t as aggressive but you can always patch that). There is nothing that would lead me to believe that – should Pixelfed get very popular – it would not also develop similar esthetics. Would also help people feel bad about themselves (if they are vulnerable to that kind of thinking).

And Pixelfed isn’t the only tool here. Bluesky is basically a carbon copy of Twitter a few years ago (not technology wise but in the way that interactions work, the way in which status is produced). Mastodon isn’t hat different either. Which in this case doesn’t feel as bad for me – but I also liked Twitter.

It feels like too often we are bound to think about what’s possible in the framing of what businesses think is possible. I recently argued against scale and that topic is a perfect example: Meta needs any new product to scale to millions if not billions of users. Amazon needs to scale products to the whole world. Google needs to scale. Microsoft needs to scale. And they all need to do the things you need to do to scale. Build interaction loops that enforce you coming back to an app or platform regularly ideally daily, to make it a habit. Build tools promising you a view on everything, to give you feelings of power, understanding and control.

We here on the open, decentralized, free web don’t need to do that. Pixelfed does not need to scale. Mastodon does not need to scale. At least not in the way that Facebook needs to.

We are doing a tech-bro. Just like Peter Thiel calls his surveillance company after the stones the evil wizards use in The Lord of the Rings because he doesn’t seem to have understood that those are the baddies we are building tools that are built for growth hacks and scamming VCs out of their money because we don’t read them properly. Because we just take what’s there and make it open source.

Just is doing a lot of work in that last paragraph. The amount of work that goes into duplicating those proprietary functionalities is incredible, awe inspiring. Thousands of people put work into building those tools, often without payment, without a lot of thanks. Spending their limited time on this planet contributing to the commons with software.

But recognizing the amount of work and time and life that goes into building this huge pile of software shouldn’t we spend it on something good? Something that is actually good for the people using it? And are we always so sure that the things we build do that, enable that?

We should stop building the Open Source Torment Nexus. Because the problem with the Torment Nexus is not the software license or opaqueness of the code: It’s the part with the torment.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

#fluconf #openSource #tormentNexus

can americans plz: stop pretending that the country turned bad when trump was elected

like you just went through 4 years of democrats orchestrating a genocide and having riot police beat up college students for asking for peace

this country has never been good, and we all fucking know it

stop with the act, it does more harm than good

AC volts per programmer sock

you know who get the worms?

the bird who matched the sleep pattern of the worms

https://opal.lightcrystal.systems/share/benino_earlybird_dub.mp3

#dnb #mashup

honkers gonna #honk

chuck mangione is hiding in the toilet paper aisle

PSA: if you are building something with code, please make it out of composable pieces. Preferably, in the case of an application, build a set of composable libraries that your interactive application uses. You are otherwise very likely to lock lots of useful functionality in an airtight box to which others have no access.

(This post brought to you by a particularly egregious example of not doing this that’s currently causing me great vexation.)

And the grid with go()

let go = (x,y,z) => {
T.penup();
T.forward(x);
T.pitch(90);
T.forward(z);
T.yaw(90);
T.forward(y);
T.yaw(-90);
T.pitch(-90);
};

*neocameralists mouthbreathing*
https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/technocracy.html

the geospatial fracturing of communities is so deleterious... even if we can use comms infra to find our family easier, we need to be able to actually come together and take care of each other... pull each other up and create a better world together

cold out here...

12 seconds to midnight

#unix_surrealism #cirno @khm #comic #mata #flashback #alcohol #tobacco #9front #foss

in the past week and a half i

• drove 3000 miles in the g wagon
• lost my cat the same day orange-kun took office
• got back to parenting a hyperactive 5 year old

i am so exhausted... today is a day of 0 external responsibilities and i cherish it

new feature:
pasting is disabled until further notice

#pastagang

‪women… if you aren't proclaiming “goodness, i must crush them soon”, what are you doing‬

i really wanna do a popup nwc6 session tonight but it's colllllld

You’re being told constantly ‘it’s the end of the world’ by the same people that benefit from keeping you in crisis.