Notices by Cassandra Granade 🏳️‍⚧️ (xgranade@wandering.shop)

@whitequark That makes total sense. If you have something that actually *uses* SPA stuff, I really deeply don't mind — that's a perfect usecase and very, very cool. I just get get-off-my-lawn kinds of cranky when people very badly reinvent static pages.

@whitequark I can even see it, though I still disagree, for highly interactive stuff, but this was a page that just showed a bank account balance, with a bunch of links to other stuff. There's no reason at *all* that needs to be a client-side SPA.

@whitequark Maybe I'm romanticizing, yeah, but just had to wait about a minute for what was morally a 1 kB static page, but that was so loaded down with SPA interactivity that it took forever.

I used to use the web on a 56k modem... how is shit *slower* to load now, on symmetric gigabit internet?

I think of pretty much everything I learned as a scientist, the one fact I probably make the most use out of in daily life is that the Fisher information of independent experiments simply adds.

That's somewhat of a joke, but also somewhat serious: it's how you get things like that you need quadratically many samples of a binomial distribution with the error you want to achieve — a fact that on its own dramatically changes how I read the news.

https://wandering.shop/@xgranade/114423133476006155

OK, so the stats / scientist brain in my head goes off at this paragraph.

• You'd need to interview 10,000 students, faculty, and staff for the quoted differences between Jewish and general populations to be an error bar apart (they interviewed 4300).
• Self-reporting of feared future consequences is not especially robust as an indicator of what is actually happening (to wit, Christians saying they're more likely than atheists to be physically harmed for their beliefs).

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/4/30/task-force-reports/

Rough thought that I should try to polish up and write:

I nearly died on Tuesday from accidentally eating something I'm allergic to. It takes an exceptional amount of vigilance, hypervigilance even, to avoid when an allergen is so incredibly common as mine is.

I think about that whenever I see something that boils down to a demand for individual vigilance, whether that's victim blaming about sexual harassment, just don't write bugs in your code, or make sure to follow the news closely enough.

If you depend on Discord, I recommend building an exit plan for in case the new CEO goes all OKR-brain on it and makes it unusable or even more hostile than it is already.

That might not happen! But if it does, the best time to prepare is *before* it happens.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/discord-names-humam-sakhnini-ceo-161500361.html

@valkyrie Indeed at that. I suspect that the rush to monetize health data in the form of AI training (something Epic has already said they're "trialing") has largely broken down what few protections even used to exist.

3D printing parts for use with carrying gasoline seems like a very bad idea, unless you know *damn* sure what you're doing, and are quite confident that you're not printing in a material that's soluble in gasoline.

@whitequark Yes, and that's one of my primary problems with the typical advice of "don't obey in advance" (often from the same folks who tell you to pick your battles, but I digress).

Given that, my point is twofold: (1) there's a meaningful difference *for most people* between "my tech won't allow me to do this at all" and "I can do this, but there's a nonzero chance people with guns will show up," and (2) recognizing where we have preemptively obeyed is still a useful analysis, if incomplete.

@whitequark (The "for most people" needed, amongst other reasons, to account for present company being rather exceptional at reverse engineering and circumvention.)

Hot take that is fresh off the brain-press, and that wisdom would probably dictate that I edit first:

Using technological products and services that can unilaterally enforce arbitrary policies against you without you having the ability to dissent or choose differently *is* a form of obedience in advance. In particular, if your choice of products and services means that you cannot meaningfully disobey in the future, you have already preemptively obeyed.

104% is so incredibly far past "catastrophic" I don't even have words.

https://metasocial.com/@jesse/114305302910853176

The only *only* good thing I can see about this level of economic catastrophe is that, unlike destroying democracy, torturing and killing trans kids, disappearing immigrants, annihilating abortion rights, and gutting every part of the government, liberals might actually give a shit this time.

A friend of mine has a saying: "never ascribe to a multiplayer game the motives of a single player."

I think about that sometimes when reading about how some giant corporation or another has a uniform and well-reasoned strategy rather than the emergent outcomes of a few malfeasant owners and upper managers in various stages of conflict and power struggle with any number of internal factions.

Clichéd as it is, I posit that the fix is in: if the VC class stays behind Trump through this stock crash, that's as clear a sign as we're likely to get that the fascism isn't a bug --- it's the feature.

Between AI and collaboration with fascism, a lot of companies and nonprofits are learning about trust thermoclines the hard way right now.

Lying to someone then laughing when they believe you isn't a joke, it's just being mean.

Anyway, before you push that April Fool's post live, some questions to consider:

- Is it a joke?
- Is it a funny joke?
- Is it a funny joke that punches up instead of down?
- Is the joke still funny going into year six of a global pandemic and during the staggeringly cruel rise of global fascism?