Notices by JP (jplebreton@mastodon.social)

14 years ago my marriage ended suddenly, and it was a traumatic blow to my self concept and overall mental health. i felt like my life was falling apart. i made it through only because i had friends, family, and a steady job. if i hadn't had even one of those, there's no telling how far down i might have spiralled. from that point on i understood how close i am, most of us are, to being unhoused and without support. that is a message we must carry to the rest of society all around us.

i think it would be a useful long term social project to make "homeless people deserve to be homeless because they made Bad Choices" as socially unacceptable and hateful and backward a view as a racist or sexist one. i think that could be a cornerstone for building broader political consciousness.

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a62875397/homelessness-in-america/ brutal, devastating, eloquent account of life while unhoused in the US. there are countless stories like this; this one just happens to be by a professional writer.

@jwz it's got a nice Amiga Bouncing Ball Demo patterning and everything

"The abundance agenda has also offered shelter to effective altruists, who have been searching for a flag to rally around that isn’t associated with one of the largest frauds in world history." https://prospect.org/economy/2024-11-26-abundance-agenda-neoliberalisms-rebrand

@phaedral oh hm, i ran across this a long time ago and always meant to read it... quite a historical document!

In addition to some important user safety concerns others have already pointed out, I feel reasonably strongly that "starter packs" could have certain negative cultural effects over the long term:
- people bulk-following bunches of accounts lowers the perceived value/relevance of the average connection
- getting on the right lists becomes a vector for clout-farming dynamics that turn otherwise decent posters into terminally online goblins (pejorative)
- drama over who's being disincluded

just to state things plainly, conservatives are against sex education for kids because they want kids to grow up ignorant and terrified of sex, of sexuality in general, of gender nonconformity, and without understanding consent, because that creates a world where conservatism's fear and shame based arguments are most persuasive, a world of darkness where people are afraid and ignorant and easily manipulated.

wikipedia vandal who goes around adding elaborate "Discography" sections to pages for various non-musician historical and current public figures

@hisham_hm @mwl exactly. it's a framing exercise about de-centering everyone in the paths of the trolley and centering + identifying with the decision maker holding the lever. no surprise that it's come up a lot recently, with the powerful refusing to accept accountability for their failures and writing off millions of lives.

@tante done

@clarity i love my win+drag whole window move in gnome but sometimes if i'm really lazing i want to be able to do it using only my mouse. no-titlebars aesthetic gets diluted when the top is filled with crap anyway... personally it feels like a "streamlined, but didn't actually improve" step back to me

@clarity titlebars have been hunted nearly to extinction, it's disgusting

every tech worker out there whose "i donate to democrats" CEO is taking off his mask today to muhaha and show his true class solidarity: the thing that would ruin his life the most is for you to help unionize your workplace. do it for the very real benefits to you and your comrades, or do it out of spite, or any combination of either. but it's time, now (overdue, in fact!). tech must become the next major labor battleground. & for those who've already been in the struggle for years: thank you.

rude, dismissive: "touch grass"
enigmatic, affirming: "remember that you are a creature in a world"

@nemobis that's what i figured. does Pleroma not support account migration at all?

Moved @lucasarts_places@botsin.space to @lucasarts_places, which took it from 2,032 followers to 1,952 - I forget, why does this happen? Is it because some of the original account's followers have defederated from mastodon.social?

at least one teenager has killed themselves after being very directly and explicitly talked into it by a chatbot from https://character.ai/about. these people killed this kid, and their company should be obliterated.

"but what if people want to donate to an abortion fund but live in a state that is trying to eliminate the right to it? but what if people want to donate to a BDS movement in a state/nation that's criminalized doing so?" - these are great use cases! they are important enough that connecting them to a massively unstable, oligarch-controlled fraud industry is far across a moral red line.

it suggests a belief that the overlap of "people who want to send messages to one another securely" and "people who want to exchange cryptocurrency" is much, much larger than it really is. i think reality is against them there