Notices by Glyph (glyph@mastodon.social), page 3

Of course the problem is that there are a zillion downballot candidates and it's hard to know which ones are really high-leverage without doing a bunch of math. My uncle, Dr. Joel Lefkowitz, a professor of political science, has done that math to find those downballot races whose voter mobilization efforts will have maximum impacts up and down the ballot.

Subjects such as the appropriate criminal sanction for offenses such as statutory rape, necrophilia, zoophilia, sexual assault, are things that society needs to reckon with. That is true. But it is NEVER, EVER APPROPRIATE TO DISCUSS *ANY* OF THESE SUBJECTS IN A PROFESSIONAL CONTEXT. It does not matter if your perspective is complex, nuanced, or even objectively correct. *Bringing up* these subjects in an inappropriate context is itself part of creating a hostile work environment.

There is a point which appears to be getting lost in the noise of the Stallman thing which I would like to highlight, in the hopes of helping some reply guys understand why they are receiving such a furious response to what they believe is a principled defense of freethinking and open debate:

The mailing lists where Stallman was making his objectionable posts were mailing lists *for free software projects*. That is to say, they are a *professional context*, for a specific activity.

am I experiencing 'brain fog'? perceptually, I would say no, but then, I do have a tab open to https://xon.sh and I'm contemplating the benefits of investing a bunch of time in changing my login shell

Just for the record, Richard Stallman should resign in disgrace, then retire entirely from public life. Then, everyone involved in any way in reinstating him to positions of authority within FSF or GNU should also resign and apologize. If there is *any* hope for the positive elements of the movement that he tried to build to survive (for what it's worth, I think chances of that are slim) both he and the faction he represents must be removed from it entirely.

I don't know if I've mentioned this before but this is the keyboard that I use and I highly recommend it

https://keeb.io/products/cepstrum-keyboard-pre-built

@grimalkina Consider this narrative: An author creates some software. A consumer then starts using this software. Author gives gift, consumer receives gift, consumer should be grateful. All rejoice. This (simplistic, wrong) model of open source social relationships is a single gift-giver to gift-recipient relationship, frequently gets described as "gift economy" in the early aughts. The giver-to-recipient relationship is transactional, and ephemeral.

@luis_in_brief @grimalkina I think the love for the "gift economy" model and language is that it spun the subtlety of the bidirectionality of the relationship, where the gift-giver receives some kind of "status" or "honor" but it sort of gave up after vaguely gesturing that some maintainers eventually got good jobs. so yeah it _is_ functionally unidirectional but it is mischaracterized as an equitable exchange

@luis_in_brief @grimalkina (and we don't do that, and instead everyone has a bunch of different, unarticulated, implicit assumptions about how these relationships are supposed to work, and that leads to a lot of bad feelings, and basically I wonder if anyone has done like a serious ethnography before I try to just vibe it out on my blog)

@luis_in_brief @grimalkina (although I could talk all day about how actually, it _is_ bidirectional, but the referents we have for gift cultures in anthropological literature actually explicitly acknowledge status and honor in a bunch of ways that we don't in open source, with literal rituals and ceremonies and whatnot)

@luis_in_brief @grimalkina the edge being the social relationship, and each edge being classifiable as a specific type, with a direction. once you have this graph grammar, you can impose it upon a particular project to ask "is this the role *you* are *trying* to inhabit with respect to *this* person and/or company? is this the role you *are* inhabiting"

@luis_in_brief @grimalkina so, okay, to get back to the question here: the "social relationship" in my thinking is a pair of roles that actors participating in a social fabric may occupy with respect to each other. I am really trying to avoid using the phrase "social graph" because of the connotations, but I am talking about constructing a model of open source that is a graph, and that has explicitly labeled roles for nodes and edges

@luis_in_brief @grimalkina that’s actually my question, really, is the taxonomizing of the relationship types. have there been any in-depth attempts to construct such a typology, or just the same shallow disagreements about entitlement vs. responsibility over and over again?

@powersoffour no worries, any info is better than none here, and these are good references to follow up on later! I wouldn't say no to more detail either, though :)

@powersoffour okay not at all sure who Howison is, but this looks like <https://s3d.cmu.edu/people/core-faculty/herbsleb-james.html>?

@powersoffour never even heard the name before so I am very glad I asked.

So, here's a proposition: those of us smart intellectuals in the open source world are constantly saying brave, insightful things like "open source is a social construct" and "software is made of feelings" or whatever, but has anyone sat down to actually *diagram out* the social relationships in the open source ecosystem? To straightforwardly analyze the social construct in concrete terms, rather than abstractly gesturing at its existence and lamenting that nobody pays attention to it?

Fellow #ADHD -ers: if you do time-blocking, do you have any tricks to make it effective? It seems like *sometimes* I can do it, but my attempts break down like:

"I time-blocked, and:"

1/3 "it worked, great, A+"
1/3 "I felt some resistance, forced myself not to switch tasks, and ended up sitting and fretting uselessly"
1/3 "felt some resistance and did some *other* thing, but I was time-blocking in the first place because that first thing really needed to get done and now I'm panicking"

I felt like Apple was playing catch-up in the AI space because they didn't seem to really talk about it in the same way as its other boosters, but thus far their AI offering has been a bunch of vague promises about "getting things done effortlessly" without saying what "things" are, and generating text and images to ambiguous poorly-described ends, the word "ChatGPT" awkwardly disconnected from everything else, then failing to ship anything. Now I think they understand AI better than anyone else

I feel like there's a weird dynamic in Millennial vs. Zoomer discourse because most generations kind of gradually age and get to experience life stages (for lack of a better word) "naturally" whereas Millennials were squeezed on both sides, on one end late to start families and late to own homes (for those of us even lucky enough to do those things) thanks to 2008, and on the other by a pandemic where we entered it as Kids These Days and emerged from it as Olds while it seemed no time had passed