hey.

don't fucking share rumors about people you don't know. don't magnify that shit. you're not saving the world by doing that. very often with these things, truth and falsehood are mixed together creatively, or true claims are put in a misleading context. furthermore, whether these things are true really doesn't matter to how destructive they are.

Even with the horrible news, we are still attending #pepr22. Next up, we'll be livetweeting a very timely talk, "How Developers (Don't) Think about Gender Privacy", by Elijah Bouma-Sims. The speaker has given some background on gender markers in software. They're now going over an example of a workplace software tool from Germany which chose the user's profile picture based on their answer to a gender question, without warning it would...

We are all in this together.

Never forget that. It's the greatest strength we have, and it's the reason everything is worth it.

We are all in this together. Feel free to take a moment to scream.

Okay! #pepr22 is about to come back from lunch. We all just had the "birds of a feather" breakout sessions, which were a ton of fun. This next block of talks is on consent.

Okay! Today and tomorrow we will once again be live-tweeting #PEPR22, the Usenix conference on Privacy Engineering Practice and Respect. For timing reasons we didn't get to see the first session. The second one, "Expanding Differentially Private Solutions: A Python Case Study" is now ongoing.

Discord's new terms of service have a binding arbitration clause. Our recommendation with these things is ALWAYS to opt-out of arbitration, to preserve your rights in case it ever becomes relevant someday. We'll tell you how! This only takes a minute and you only have a few weeks to do it in, so we recommend just doing it now.

so Google FLoC was the adtech thing that we waited a year after we left for them to announce it, in order to criticize it then we were relieved to see that the EFF was on top of things and had already said most of what we were worried about

so we collect fun words, and we were just reminded of one of our favorites. bear with us, it isn't too much of an explanation. when we say "economic applications of Merkle trees", that's a euphemism. we're avoiding using the "real" word, because we don't want to attract term-searching mobs.

$ du -sh .git
2.6G .git $ git gc
(currently running, we'll share output when it's done)

vacations are nice because when we want to, we can spend an entire day getting x11 to respect our cursor size (... but it *does* now, and we have the relevant settings tested thoroughly and documented in our Nix config, so. victory.)

The lesson to take from this, by the way, is that walled-garden software ecosystems are, fundamentally, centralized power structures which are going to create a conflict over who controls them.

https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1474985481737625606

If something is fully decentralized (an ideal which very few existing technologies or social structures live up to), there is nothing to fight for control of.

well, it's happening: we're trying Gnome. we've been using KDE for a few years... let's see how this goes. we're not people who actually *use* a desktop manager, other than as a fast way to configure certain services that we don't feel like spending time understanding, so realistically we should probably be trying to do without one.

okay! we would like to start a discussion about what it would take to make Linux *fun* for newcomers. please chime in with your ideas! we've personally always found it fun, we're in the crowd where it's more important to be able to tinker with things than for the things to actually *work*. however, we recognize that this is a minority position.

there's a lot of people who are taking firm stances on this latest anthology that's been going around trans circles, and it's just, like... we realize you're convinced of your stance. also, many of you were just as convinced of the *diametrically opposed* stance last year when Isabel's story was published.

The clouds in front of the mountains are pretty today. They only come halfway up, which is always an interesting look. Vancouver's city planners went to great pains to preserve lines of sight for this stuff, and it paid off.

The immediate implication of the Amazon mesh networking thing is that some people won't know where their bandwidth is going. This is concerning in its own right... ... but to us, the larger implication is that once it's deployed, it will no longer be possible to prevent a device from reaching the internet just by not connecting it to the internet.

if reading the words of the Voight Kampff test summons up a big chunk of emotions, pride swirling with fear...

well, there's a good chance you're autistic or otherwise neurodivergent, and had to deal with some crap from the medical system as a kid. it's kind of emotionally incomprehensible to us that there are people who have lived their entire lives and never had somebody seriously interrogate, with high stakes, whether they are a person or not

So there's a thing we want to describe about toxic masculinity and how it flourishes. We think it's important for people on the left to think about because the counters to it are only obvious when you understand what they're for. The pattern we're going to describe is not a universal one, there are certainly exceptions to it. Also, it does come up occasionally in other contexts beyond toxic masculinity. We're just trying to set the stage by describing the place we see it most.

when you're trying to build a sense of group identity from nothing, for a demographic who until very recently have been isolated, never knowing each other... there are a lot of challenges #pluralgang there is no single "plural culture", nor will there ever be. ask one system what their culture is, and you'll get five opinions.

The reason hate is flourishing in the world today... is largely the lie of its own inevitability. (This is an adaptation of a line by an author we like. It was too good not to borrow.)

hey, this is a really basic kind of household question, but does anybody have tips on how to not have our liquid soap dispenser accumulate soapy water on the counter under it? it seems like putting a dish under it would contain the water, but still require frequent cleaning