Notices by William Pietri (williampietri@sfba.social)

@strypey
The way I make sense of it is that they aren't doing distributed moderation in the style that Dorsey wanted. They're just doing standard centralized moderation where they ban sufficiently awful people/content.

In contrast, Dorsey is now backing Nostr, which doesn't do that, and is consequently full of awful stuff. That's the natural outcome of building stuff to free-speech-absolutist ideals.

@stinerman @fifilamoura @davetroy

One of the ways I think about software is meaning vs mechanism. We make software for people. It serves somebody in some purpose that they have. That's the meaning. But beneath, we have these very simple-minded machines, CPUs, and everything has to be expressed to them. That's the mechanism. In between there are many, many layers.

As developers, we have to love both. And as we work on software, our perspective has to shift all over that spectrum. But ultimately I think the we get the best software when mechanism is in service to meaning. And I think a lot of software goes wrong when mechanism is honored over meaning. When convenience to a programmer working on a deeper layer ends up more important than convenience to the user.

If you're wondering what a leaky abstraction looks like to a user, this is a great example: https://ohshitgit.com/

It's a set of human needs plus the `git` incantations that satisfy those needs. I've had people try to explain to me that if only I understand [sounds of modems screeching] about git I'll be fine. But if to get a common user task done I have to understand the depths of the implementation, then it's a bad UI.

As the right freaks out about women voting violating the "sanctity" of marriage and being the "downfall of the American family", I want to remind people that they're not being hyperbolic here. They mean it literally. Under patriarchy, the women in a family are property of the men. Things like gay marriage and women voting are absolutely destroying patriarchy, because it depends on women having no other choice. On not being able to *even imagine* a choice. 1/

Is anybody maintaining a collection of these "why this Mastodon instance is shutting down" posts? Because when I get some time I want to walk through and write an analysis of them with some proposals for help: https://muffinlabs.com/posts/2024/10/29/10-29-rip-botsin-space/

@jargoggles @jacklaridian

Yeah, Jack, I think you would benefit from reading about at least the basics. Because that sounds an awful lot like this: https://sfba.social/@williampietri/113272015035785441

If you'd like to actually learn something, there are several good articles, and Manne's "Down Girl" very clearly lays out the structural forces and the gendered problem that it's part of.

This is glorious.The best time to burn a bridge is when you never, ever want to cross it again. #genai (Edit: This is a notice explaining why somebody is shutting down a long-running project to measure word frequencies.) https://github.com/rspeer/wordfreq/blob/master/SUNSET.md

@inthehands @nightdream For anybody interested in this, I think Loewen's book "Sundown Towns" is very much worth reading. The way he weaves together hard census data with history and anecdote really changed my understanding of America.

Does anybody need a terrabyte of historical ship movement data that I'm about to delete? It's from aishub.net, circa 2016-2023. I'm done with the project I was collecting it for, but thought I'd check in case anybody else wants it. Yours for the cost of getting it out of AWS.

@inthehands That's where I've got to as well, but it can be a long road. Trauma takes time in safety to heal. With so many loud Christian voices lining up behind state enforced harm right now, safety can be hard to find. Nothing wrong with asking for generosity, but I hope nobody's expecting it.
@suzannealdrich

I've been staying out of the discussion over Biden's candidacy, and I probably still will. But I wanted to express my gratitude for him defeating Trump last time, and for a term that was more productive than many, me included, expected. His deep contrast as a person and a leader to Trump was a huge relief, and I'm thankful for it.

So I'm moving permanently across the country. I could happily keep my 415 phone number, or I could switch and get a local one. For people who have tried either path in the last few years, any thoughts?

Jack Dorsey is a world-class fool. Is this the sort of brain rot you get from being a billionaire surrounded by yes men? Or was he always somebody who seemed, as my grandfather would put it, like he was kicked in the head by a butterfly? https://www.piratewires.com/p/interview-with-jack-dorsey-mike-solana

I am soon moving to Chicago, which is generally great, but it looks like my only ISP option is Comcast, which is not. Do people have tips on what plan to choose and tricks to wrangle what seems like an adversarial relationship? I'll be working from home doing programmer things.

@mekkaokereke One thing that strikes me here is how little white people ever hear that testimony directly. Twitter was the first time I heard the frank, unmediated thoughts from a wide variety of black people. Over time it really changed my perception of many things about American society. But I had to seek it out.

@thomasfuchs In case anybody can't quite figure out why the students are not taking the path of "reason to persuade others", it is time to reread MLK: https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html

This is such a great example of why corporations shouldn't ever have "privacy".
https://blockclubchicago.org/2024/04/26/city-of-chicago-amps-up-its-legal-battle-against-citys-worst-landowner/

@mcc People were once afraid that computers would suck all the magic and mystery from the world, so good news?

Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail.

@mmasnick Glad to hear it, but I think that pivot is too quick. I think it's an open question whether protocols can solve for systemic harms. Looking at the history of email, the web, and the cryptocurrency world, I'd say the track record is at best decidedly mixed.