Notices by Glyph (glyph@mastodon.social)

@SnoopJ having maintained a package that has direct support for I/O Completion Ports for well over a decade at this point, I understand the "I don't want to work on that" a _lot_, but like, fuck y'all I _did_ the work even though I didn't want to, for exactly this reason

I suppose I should have some kind of solution-shaped conclusion to this thread, so here goes. My own contribution here is not that policy & governance solutions are actually stopgaps, and we need to do something else. To the extent that policy & governance — i.e. "politics" — can solve this, it's just regular old politics to do things like institute a wealth tax. We should do that, of course, but it is, as the kids these days say, a "big lift".

But not everything has to be policy.

One salient cultural attribute of "free software" that you may notice this calls into question is one's affect with respect to windows support. It seems like "windows support" is doing free work for Microsoft, supporting a proprietary platform rather than getting users to install Linux or whatever, but in practice, projects that support Windows are projects that individuals without full control of their technology stack can run, but Linux-only means "server-only" for a huge majority of people.

I think that one of the major things to do here is actually to focus on applications, to talk to users, to do usability studies, to focus on documentation, to make sure everything scales *down*, to put scaled-down "runs on a busted 5-year-old laptop" environments a gating requirement within CI. This doesn't mean the infra people (like myself) should stop doing infra, but we need to find ways to explicitly serve audiences *not* doing enterprise-scale cloud deployments.

It’s not like this is a surprise either. The OSD specifically contemplates the possibility of this type of abuse, and worse, and decides that systemically it’s good, actually, because in a deontological framing any other set of licensing rules could create worse problems for the movement. Even worse: I agree. I still think this is correct and “ethical source” licensing is a dead end. But we can’t stop the conversation there! “Licenses can’t solve ethics, so, I guess we can’t have ethics”

Stallman wrote “the right to read” and then spent decades volunteering to build billions of dollars worth of infrastructure to make it possible for a company to do this — https://ncac.org/news/blog/high-school-student-sues-amazon-for-deleting-1984-from-kindle — all the while screaming invective at anyone who dared to criticize his priorities or motives. I don’t think the community has really reckoned with that. I am still struggling to.

By all means the FOSDEM attendees should throw rocks at Dorsey until he leaves and work to fire the leadership that took his money and allowed this talk to happen. But longer term, somehow we need to figure out a way to be a movement that is appealing to kids learning to code and activists empowering their communities and NOT personally interesting to billionaires because it aligns with and furthers their goals.

Deontological ethics are great but can we have a little consequentialism, as a treat?

re: FOSDEM, I think a robust discussion of effective forms of protest is great, but after this is over and Dorsey’s talk has been evacuated due to a fire alarm, the even harder and more important conversation that we as a community are also not really prepared to have is “why does a fascist grifter billionaire like ‘free’ software so much that he sponsored our flagship conference and thinks he will be well-received by speaking at it”

I was going to post something about how the For You page was our generation's leaded gasoline but nope I'm juuust old enough that leaded gasoline was my generation's leaded gasoline

oh my god. the auth flow here presented me 3 options, all of which grant the same authentication authority:

- send me an email
- send me a text
- register a new hardware key

🎶 one of these things is not like the others 🎶 one of these things is not the same 🎶

today, in "fucking up passkeys", we have this amazing error message from a website designed for _parents of schoolchildren_

"quisling anti-woke zuckerberg streisand-effects fediverse into increased relevance via shadowbanning pixelfed hyperlinks" sure is a sentence

Every time I see some public figure complaining on their YouTube channel, or their blog, or god forbid on twitter itself, about the nightmare of algorithmic social media, how twitter is bad, how instagram is bad or whatever it feels like an Eric Andre skit

I do want to be clear that what I am saying is not “the fediverse is uniformly better than corporate social media in every possible way”. Mastodon has interesting problems, some of which are quite bad! What I am frustrated about is that the mainstream progressive discourse about social media is frozen in this inaccurate static framing of all “tech” as right-wing because left-leaning pundits are mostly ignoring what left-leaning technologists are doing. I don’t know how to bridge that gap.

Standing outside the fence of the Fediverse next to an open gate screaming “LET ME IN, LET ME IN” and then a dozen people in the comments are like “uh, sure, come on in” and then they’re like “no thanks I am good”

I trust Jason, and I know he knows the wordpress ecosystem very well, but still, I saw this and I thought “how much more damage could Photography Matthew really do at this point, surely this is just another incremental rung in his ladder down to hell at this point” but I read it and reader I am telling you it is ABSOLUTELY WILD and you do, regrettably, really need to read it

https://vmst.io/@jalefkowit/113807537180371510

A blue orchid petal.

@robey @SnoopJ and don’t talk to our cousin dscl, he is too crazy for rhymes

It is a fascinating and delightful affordance of mastodon that when I want people to pay special attention to something I can just say "boost this please" and then people boost it, and it's fine. This behavior on Twitter was a taboo and no matter how earnestly I had good reasons for emphasizing certain tweets over others, begging for retweets felt like the most pathetic form of engagement baiting and I was _extremely_ reluctant to do it.