Notices by Wren Reilly (akareilly@hachyderm.io)

@mekkaokereke

"People who deserve security use linux and learn to use the command line"

/me goes off to scream for an hour

Home automation and open source software acceptance is a usability problem.

Example: even if your vision is 20/20, when you’re turning on a light you are a low-vision user of the device.

Light switches can be found by sweeping your hand in any direction. They’re tactile.

Hue replaces this with a flat piece of plastic with three options you can’t distinguish in the dark. It’s a remote that comes out of the wall, so you can knock it to the floor while trying to find it. Needs batteries, too.

But you could download and install an app, then find wherever the hell the tinkerer put the little box with a button to press before the app works, then as long as you can find your phone in the dark and it’s charged, you can simulate the action of flicking a switch!

Listen to yourselves.

Unless this process solves a problem, you will face resistance.

Another use case:

It’s not that I *can’t* do the thing.
I *can’t be arsed* to do the thing.

Dearest tinkerers, my soldering is neater than yours. I can put on SMDs without flux, in a pinch. Get off my lawn.

“I’m happy for you that you want to solve a riddle to turn on a light. Follow your bliss. I want a godsdamned BUTTON” is a use case.

Home automation can be more accessible. A light switch at wheelchair user height? Fabulous. Voice control for people with mobility issues? Fantastic.

The thing about accessibility tech is that, since disabilities vary between people, and can change from time to time, people who use the tech need to be consulted.

Even if everyone in your house is not disabled (yet), go through the same process. Your obstacle is not a lack of tech savvy, it’s a lack of product management.

@Daojoan

With alt text

Voting with a strategy in mind is not a moral failure.

How does your vote lead to someone *in office*?

What funding, what awareness, what actual impact does your vote have?

At what level does your vote count the most?

Even if you want to dismantle the whole system, that may start with the school board, not the national level. The fascists understand this. The people doing the work opposing book burners face to face understand this.

Even if you're going to hold your nose and vote blue, make those bastards nervous. Maybe them your vote depends on concrete steps to stop the genocide.

And don't demand a vote from the people who have friends and relatives in Palestine. Shut it. Seriously. No one directly affected by war crimes paid for with your taxes owes you a damned thing. Even if you think Trump would be worse for Palestine. Not your lane.

Save your outreach for swing voters who might vote for blatant fascism AGAIN.

It's the Florida of Germany.

Before you select Linux, spend a day trying to get simple tasks done without a mouse.
Try Linux with speech to text.
Try Linux with a screen reader.

Frustrated? Either pick up some issues from an open source accessibility project or give them money.

...and stop being an ass to disabled people.

Oh sorry, *GNU/ass*

Universities should divest from war profiteers.

Everyone should divest from war profiteering.

War shouldn't make profits.

If you want many eyes on your open source project, you need to get rid of assholes.

Bad community management is a security risk.

Assholes bully sole maintainers.
Assholes gatekeep and keep maintainer numbers low.
Assholes waste time on the mailing list with petty bullshit.
If you fundraise, assholes are bullying your grant writers and community managers.

Some of the best security contributors don't write a single line of code. They yeet assholes.

Hey funders,

You know you could just... give... the money... to projects that need it. Like software libraries that ARE IN EVERYTHING.

No grants. Don't make tech nerds write grants.
Don't make the tech nerds hire grant nerds to write grants.

FFS don't fund research into this problem with a budget of double what it would take to SOLVE THE PROBLEM for a significant number of open source projects with code that is, again, IN EVERYTHING.

#xz

Hey there software developers who complain about managers as a concept,

Maybe devaluing glue work and only promoting surly software developers or MBAs to management is the issue, not the concept of having someone coordinate efforts and be a bridge between you and other teams.

A bad implementation of a good idea
doesn’t make
the good idea
a bad idea.

If you don’t officially have project managers, someone is doing the work by trying to gently prod you to do something and they are burning the fuck out doing it.

@theogrin People get tired, sick, injured, etc. Multiple systems to avert disaster assume that someone with the very best training is still human. This is one of the things disabled people don't forget, which is why accessibility in workplaces = more safety.

THIS IS NOT A POST PRAISING NAZIS

THIS
POST
IS
NOT
PRAISE
FOR
NAZIS

"Fun" fact:

Anyone blaming DEI for the erosion of Boeing's safety record is less informed on diversity in STEM than the German engineers who were whisked away to the US after WWII. The bar is in hell! If Werner Von fucking Braun is more likely to judge someone based on their engineering skills, that regressive right-wing asshole who can't meet the standards set by war criminals should not be anywhere near a plane.

The problem with Boeing is that a bunch of bean counting assholes from McDonnell Douglas were allowed to take over a company run by engineers.
McDonnell Douglas planes were on my "oh hell no, rebook my flight" list for years. Now there's a Boeing plane on that list.
People who paid attention to the lessons learned from Challenger and other aerospace engineering disasters were pushed out by the same MBA-toting football bats who enshittify everything they touch.

Diversity in STEM is good.

Boeing executives think they know better than their own engineers and NASA how to make planes.

They are not smart people.

Elon Musk thinks he's better than NASA.

He is not a smart man.

http://nalfl.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Karl-Sendler-Biography.pdf

https://www.nasa.gov/people-of-nasa/women-at-nasa/rocket-fuel-in-her-blood-the-story-of-joann-morgan/

"In spite of working for all of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs, and being promoted to a senior engineer, Morgan was still not permitted in the firing room at liftoff — until Apollo 11, when “Karl Sendler went to bat for me.”

Without her realizing, Sendler had had to go all the way to the top to ask permission from Debus. When Sendler called Morgan into his office to share the good news, he was “practically gleeful”