Notices by Marco Rogers (polotek@social.polotek.net), page 3

Looks like #cohost is shutting down. I have a lot of thoughts and a lot of questions. But today is probably not the day to talk about it. I respect any and all attempts to bring software to the people that is not wholly owned by capital. I hope we're able to figure out how to make it sustainable.
https://cohost.org/staff/post/7611443-cohost-to-shut-down

I remember being so upset talking to people about prop 22 a few years ago. This was the vote in California to decide if gig workers like Uber and doordash have to be treated like employees instead of "independent contractors". I thought this should've been an easy decision. You wanna make these big tech companies pay right?

Nah. All they had to do was tell you that your rides were gonna get more expensive. And it actually became something we have had to fight tooth and nail for.

What I'm saying is that a lot of American Exceptionalism™ is based on sacrificing people. It is a very long tradition. And up until very recently, Black people were the default sacrifice. That was our explicit role in White American society. As soon as you understand that, a lot of American history starts to make way more sense.

And today starts to make more sense too. This is an America we're it's not so easy to designate groups for sacrifice. And we are finding it harder to get things done.

What's wild is once you actually start paying attention, you find out what we mean by "systemic". There's a story like this in every major city. Once somebody figured out this particular strategy of getting infrastructure built in a way that white constituents would accept, it spread all over.

We talk about how white supremacy requires a visible and identifiable underclass. Part of it is so that there is always a designated sacrifice so you can get what you want.
https://urbanists.social/@getalifemike/113052876190442664

People like to think about racism as if it's full of malicious intent. But often it's much more banal. Most of the time it's nothing more than "if somebody has to get hurt, let it be them. Because who's gonna complain about that am I right?"

Even if you start to get this part, there's yet another societal hurdle ahead of it. Many Americans don't realize how many things they take for granted start to break down if America stops sacrificing people in order to make it happen.

Part of the reason places like SF are deadlocked on building housing is that they can't figure out who they can sacrifice. SF already fucked up and drove out most of the Black population. So that's not an option.

The way you got police put into our schools is that they signaled to everybody that they were really there for the Black people. Because somebody needs the prison pipeline to stay full. Some of the goods and services that you want can only have that low price because some percentage of people are working for slave wages. Not to mention a new prison will bring "good jobs" to your area.

A lot of the things that Americans are complaining about today are because we are slowly making it harder for America to sacrifice people.

@mekkaokereke talks a lot about how football is changing because we decided maybe it's not okay to watch Black men destroy their bodies for our entertainment.

College basketball is changing because we decided maybe it's not okay that Black men hold up this billion dollar industry while being legally barred from making any money from it.

The easiest way to discover an app for a niche use case is to start building it yourself. As soon as you tell people about a little project you're working in, they instantly have recommendations of apps that already do it.

But if you just ask people about a problem you have, they can't think of anything. (Or worse, they start recommending things that they like that aren't actually what you asked for.)

Does anybody else feel like they're relearning web development? Once you decide you wanna get off the The Frontend Treadmill, you realize you need to completely reorient your process for building web sites and applications. I think all of the tools and practices that you reach for need to change pretty significantly. It feels like starting over.
https://polotek.net/posts/the-frontend-treadmill/

Just as an example, I find that I can't even get started in the same way. For a long time now, setting up a new project meant installing a build chain. Webpack, create-react-app, esbuild, vite. Whatever thing is in fashion at the time. But the first thing you do is make a bunch of assumptions about your development environment.

But what we're realizing is that those assumptions lock us into a particular path. And we're realizing that we may want to have other paths available to us.

But once you decide "I'm not gonna install vite", you're left with a pretty big void. What do we do instead? What's the way to start a project after you've made the key decision that you're going to stick close to web standards and low JavaScript solutions? And how do you set things up so that you can thoughtfully expand into js solutions in the future as needed, but without making a mess of things?

Also, CSS is completely different than it was even 5 years ago. I feel like I'm relearning it quite literally. All of the syntax and constructs are familiar. So I'm not starting from scratch. But I wouldn't solve anything in CSS the same way we used to solve it 10 years ago. There are way better tools that are less hacky and more performant. But we're gonna have to learn them.
https://social.polotek.net/@polotek/113012077825811153

We know this because when we ask engineers on these teams, they have no idea how to use most of this shit. The average dev is thoroughly confused by most of this stuff. And they’re still somehow worried that their app is not good because they aren’t using the more advanced stuff. Complexity is becoming the substitute for expertise. And that’s very bad.

My frontend villain origin story was when I started asking people why we needed this complexity. People agreed it was complex. But when I asked people to tell me what we bought for ourselves, the answers were vague and unclear. That’s when I knew we had gone astray.
https://mastodon.social/@tef/112903811292290724

I mean we know there was ostensibly a reason for every esoteric “feature” in these frameworks and ungodly toolchains. But I’m also pretty sure it wasn’t based on problems that most teams were actually having with any real frequency.

I really like this thread. It's much more in line with what I've been saying about expanding our imagination about what's possible with decentralized platforms.
https://hachyderm.io/@jenniferplusplus/112887785292385896

Right now, most people treat each branded platform like it's a place with a cohesive ethos. "I don't want bluesky joining mastodon". But none of these platforms have a personality that's likely to last. They're gonna change immensely over time. Such that choosing between them isn't going to stay meaningful. The only thing that is meaningful is people getting together and creating governance structures. That's the way you exert control over your environment.

@neckspike how do they know what instances to forward to? Does the person reporting have to search? Is some list of options provided to them?

I think this correction matters because it changes the optics of this quite substantially. I still think the person who reported this is probably trash, just based on the content. But I think it downgrades this from an active harassment campaign. In fact it sounds like it's trivially easy for a user to send a report that ends up looking like this to other random instances without even realizing it. That's bad too. But for a different reason than how this thread started.