Notices by Tattie (tattie@eldritch.cafe)

Actually for most of the war it wasn't even that, it was "my grandfather drove around reporting on the crimes that people like you carried out during the war".

I wanna have a zinger to use against Nazis, but "my grandfather drove an ambulance to save people shot by people like you during the war" doesn't have the same ring to it, ya know?

Proud of him anyway.

Garden has bloomed while I was away!

• Pansies blossoming
• Alyssum and I think Snapdragon
• Broad beans nearly ready to harvest
• White irises have blossomed!

#bloomscrolling

#fediblock loaded.sixguns.com; MAGA propaganda instance

Observation 1: machine learning algorithms tend to get stuck in so-called "local maxima" where any intermediate steps towards the optimal solution look less promising than where they currently are. The solution is to throw in some complete randomness so that they can jump to a different part of the solution space.

Observation 2: probably about half of all human inventions throughout history have been made by someone doing something completely boneheaded, then realising the outcome is interesting and promising in its own right.

Conclusion: being an utter ditz is a human evolutionary strategy. Stand proud!

Capitalism is tearing itself apart, with stunning speed. Many businesses close down early. Some try to stay open, taking paper money for payments, recording transactions manually. But there's a shortage of cash to go around-- ATMs hold such a small float these days that they're cleared out in short order, and who has more than fifty quid stashed away in an envelope for emergencies?

Prices begin to skyrocket, and it's barely past noon before the first reports of looting begin.

You decide not to go into work this afternoon. Because yes, you can just about scrape together enough physical change for the bus, but can you trust that public transport is going to still be running by the time you need to go home?

You consider of the paycheck that your work issues every month, incrementing figures in your bank account. Figures which today are rendered abstract and useless, without any way to turn them into actual currency. It's all a mirage, you think giddily, all of it.

You start to wonder what you might barter, and to whom, for tomorrow's dinner.
4/4

"A fix is imminent", the press release from Google says; "we've got our best programmers on it."

And they have. But the programmers in question have never touched this system before. It was vibe-coded on the cheap by a contracting company which has since dissolved. All the function names look helpful, but do something slightly different to what they claim.

A simple rollback to the previous version of the code was the first suggestion, of course. But the last deployment was a month and a half ago. It was working fine, until it wasn't.

"We could just rip this whole module out," someone suggests. But it needs to correctly encode the TLA details in the WTF wrapper, otherwise everything five steps down will break. And none of this is documented anywhere.

Do they continue trying to trace the source of the problem, or do they just rewrite the whole damn thing? Tensions are rising. Management is throwing a fit, obviously, and the programmers are not immune to the affects of the outage themselves. They have friends and family-- some of them vulnerable-- who are starting to worry about how long they'll have to go without vital goods and services.
3/4

You turn to the socials, and learn it's not just you. It started overnight-- a few scattered payments started to stall, and then more and more frequently. At a certain critical point, the entire system ground to a halt as it tried to cope with endless timeouts and retries.

"Why every payment system is affected", reads an article posted by your techy friend Jen. It's some arcane verification module deep within Google. "That's bizarre", reads the first comment. "I don't even have an Android phone!"

Ah, but everything is interlinked, these days. So many steps, so many parties desperate to get a finger in every pie. Once upon a time it was a customer, a merchant, each party's bank, and a single intermediary managing it. Now nobody can tell how many steps a transaction's going to go through.

"You'd have thought if there was anything capitalism wouldn't break, it'd be taking money off people," another comment reads. "Shut up and take my money"; the meme with Fry from Futurama.

Ah. But it has. Capitalism breaks everything, eventually, even capitalism.
2/4

Capitalism has broken.

You're not aware of it until you put in your weekly online shop of a Friday morning. It all works fine until you come to pay, and then the spinner spins indefinitely, neither accepting not rejecting your card details.

You cancel and try the payment via Apple Pay instead. The same thing happens.

"Wow. Some programmer at ASDA is in hot water", you think to yourself, as you head to Sainsbury's site instead with a tired sigh. Why does everything not work so frequently these days?

Only, Sainsbury's site does the same thing. Fuck. Your heart sinks. Must be a bank problem.

You load up your banking app, and click on the chatbot which is what passes for customer help these days. "Online payments not working", you type, tersely. You jump the usual hoops -- no, the card isn't expired, yes, you're using your correct CV2 number.

"Please wait while we check the source of the issue," the bot relents. Then: "hold on, this is taking longer than usual." And: "thank you for your patience while we continue to check the source of the issue". You leave the app open, and make yourself the second cup of tea of the day, wondering what you can put together for dinner with what little you've got in. Tuna pasta bake it is.

The chatbot stops responding. You reload the app, ask to chat to a human instead. "We are experiencing an unusual load", it informs you. "We will aim to message you back within six hours."

Capitalism has broken. It cut too greedily, and too deep. Bots are programming, bots are manning the help desks. Nary a human to be seen, to be accountable. The system has chugged to a halt.
1/4

Beltane Beltane Beltane!

Cis people: I've heard more than one of you tell me that it's "not entirely safe" to go round wearing a trans flag pin, which is why you don't.

And you're right, it's not entirely safe.

But.

If I can go around existing as a very obviously trans woman for four years, then it's safer than your fears are telling you.

When I first started transitioning, I was terrified. Even at the very first step; painting my nails a clear gloss. Would people laugh at me? Would they shun me? Step by step I discovered: no. I started getting supportive comments and compliments. Women started to treat me with trust and openness.

The vast majority of people are kind, decent, supportive

So I challenge you to start wearing that pin that you're scared of. It's just a pin. See how people react to it. You might see some smiles.

Because trans people might be a single percentage of the population, but what about their families? Friends? Co-workers?

Go ahead and take a pocketful of spares, as well. Offer them to your friends, or anyone who asks.

In this darkest time, when every message from the media tells us that we should hate and mistrust those around us, you deserve to discover, like I did, that this mistrust is a lot less well-founded than you might think. So be brave, and wear that empathy on your sleeve. Or lapel. :heart_transgender:

Ugh. I hate waking up in the morning to some patronising bigot telling me my late wife was an "abnormality" and her biological existence less real than others' due to her inability to reproduce.

Horrible, fascist bullshit.

Which one of you Fedi weirdos* was at the Edinburgh trans rights demo holding the sign saying:

private String gender
not
public const bool gender

* affectionate

@mycrowgirl

The absolute certainty that nobody with tits could possibly like or know anything about whisky was breathtaking.

With a face like she'd been sucking lemons for the last three months.

@goatsarah bland meat in a bland carbohydrate. It can only really be rescued by serious amounts of hot sauce.

@halotroop2288 then she has picked her side. But there are a vast amount of cis women, especially in the UK, who think of themselves as feminist but "don't know what to think" about trans rights.

If they don't figure it out soon, they'll be scratching their heads as to how they lost their rights, when all they did was stay silent as the forces of fascism targeted their political dialogue at trans people.

@BugFajita is this Jólaköttur?
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/yule-cat-jolakotturinn-iceland

Reminder to all feminists

If you accept trans people being defined by their reproductive role...
Then men can define all woman by their reproductive role

If you accept that trans teenagers are too young to make decisions about their bodies...
Then men can decide teenage girls are too young to make decisions about their bodies

If you accept medical gatekeeping of trans people's access to hormones...
Then doctors can restrict any woman's access to HRT and birth control

If you accept stripping trans people of legal protections...
Then men can strip women of legal protections

This is the truth of "trans rights are human rights"
Regardless of your personal feelings on whether trans people are "really" the gender they say they are, the exact same human rights protecting us also underlie women's liberation-- bodily autonomy, dignity, equality of opportunity, and protection from harm.
And so many men are desperate for those rights to disappear.

@RickiTarr it's terrifying whenever a video game comes out with a female main character, incels will be screaming into every comment section they can get their keyboards on "I will be cheering for this to fail!" They review-bomb the game, they harass the people who made it, they create fake screenshots and rumours to make it look bad, they try to kill it in every way they can.

And they call themselves "video game fans". 🙃 They don't seem to like the medium at all, or at least not nearly as much as they love hating women.