Notices by Shauna GM (shauna@social.coop)

It's very long so there's basically no chance of doing this all in one sitting but...whatever, let's see how far I can get this afternoon with @fedify's "build a federated microblog" tutorial: https://unstable.fedify.dev/tutorial/microblog

TBH I may get stuck with basic setup, I've written a lot of javascript but I've largely avoided having to learn JS/TS package management. 😂 (Fun fact, I learned Vue over React or Angular etc because you can build absurdly complex apps while still just importing vue via script tag)

Living as a human in this here 21st century is in fact immensely complicated and relentlessly exhausting and most of us want fewer choices, not more. We want to *delegate*, abstract away, and never have to think about it.

Most people only want more choice if (a) it is their area of niche passion and enthusiasm or (b) someone else has made a choice for them that has harmed them.

We don't fix B by overloading everyone with choices, we fix B by building processes and culture to repair harm

"Everybody is gonna be happy. [...] They're actually able to go out & negotiate their own insurance"

This is manifestly stupid but I need people to understand that there is very little in the world so universally enjoyable that you can replace "negotiate their own insurance" in that sentence and everyone will be excited.

This is esp a fallacy in FOSS:

"They're actually able to go out & own their own data"

"They're actually able to go out & choose their own server"

https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3m5ctukbbe52h

This thread makes me so sad:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/forums/contributors/717446

The goal of open source should be to empower people, not to make them feel like they have no agency and their work doesn't matter.

they're like swiss cake rolls for giant worms

Are you part of an open source project with a community of users, contributors, and/or third party developers?

I want to interview people about their projects with particular attention to how codebases, documentation, project management tooling, and community spaces are constructed.

On these "project tours" we'll go through your project together, on video call, and talk about how the structure of the project influences, and is influenced by, your goals, culture, logistical constraints, etc.

Been thinking a lot lately about the deep tension between abstraction and context.

What do I mean by "abstraction" and "context"?

Abstraction to me, fundamentally, is separation. Distance. It's that which can be lifted up out of its context and sent far away. A software library. A bylaw. A statistic. Containerization. Commodification. Securitization.

Whereas "context" is embedded & embodied. Relational. It is tied to a moment in time, a particular place, a person, a feeling. It's closeness.

Neither abstraction nor context is inherently bad. We need both. We need the ability to look at our lives & worlds and see patterns to lift out. There are so many wonderful things abstraction has given us. But we also need a respect for and appreciation of context. Both because our abstractions are always incomplete and often wrong, and because much of the joy in life is in context. The here and now. The specific things that bring you joy, your specific needs, the specific people you love.

What concerns me is how society privileges and emphasizes the abstract over the contextual.

Some examples of this:

STEM vs the Humanities: Employers and society in general tend to favor and admire people with STEM backgrounds over humanities backgrounds. Even within STEM, the "hard sciences" are seen as more valuable than the "soft sciences", where hardness and softness are largely judged by how much abstraction they require (with, for example, physics and math being seen as very 'hard').

Securities Fraud: As Matt Levine likes to say, "Everything Is Securities Fraud". Why?

"When a company harms some class of people in some bad but essentially non-monetary way, it is hard to quantify the damages as money; when a company harms its shareholders, you can just see how much the stock went down."

The more measurable - that is, the most abstractable - the harm, the more likely you are to get justice for it.

Even within the financial industry, a highly abstract domain, securities stand out as especially abstract and thus valuable:

Patrick Mackenzie writes:

"I think our level of awareness is less than where it should be at the moment. Partially this is for Seeing Like A State style reasons. Securities are so legible . They have conveniently surveillable mark-to-market prices and trade continuously. [...] Loans, on the other hand, remain quite illegible."

https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/deposit-franchises-as-natural-hedges/

Speaking of Seeing Like a State, that book is full of examples of overvaluing abstraction and legibility - and it also shows that this preference is nothing new.

For example, Scott documents the rise of fiscal forestry:

"The early modern European state, even before the development of scientific forestry, viewed its forests primarily through the fiscal lens of revenue needs. [...] Missing, of course, were all those trees, bushes, and plants holding little or no potential for state revenue."

In Germany, this "fiscal lens" was imposed on the forest itself. "To this end, the underbrush was cleared, the number of species was reduced (often to monoculture), and plantings were done simultaneously and in straight rows on large tracts. The German forest became the archetype for imposing on disorderly nature the neatly arranged constructs of science."

The neat and orderly nature of the German forests mean unskilled (and thus cheaper) labor crews could carry out maintenance and logging.

Yields were more uniform and easy to turn into standardized products. The forests were easier to study scientifically: "Now that the more complex old-growth forest had been replaced by a forest in which many variables were held constant, it was a far simpler matter to examine the effects of such variables."

These abstracted German forests were better for many human purposes, but worse in one crucial way—they could not survive. Germans had to invent a new term: waldsterben, or "forest death".

Given the long growth cycles of trees, it took nearly a century for the fact that the forests were dying to become clear. Or perhaps I should say, "clear to the people in charge". Who knows what the plants and the animals and the people who relied on the forest knew?

This is a recurrent problem with abstraction. Because it is inherently more visible than the contextual, and because it is more likely to be wielded by those in power, it can be hard to alter.

Ideally, the abstract is valued in equal measure to the contextual. Just as abstractions can help make the contexts of our individual lives better, so can feedback from individuals and contexts about issues with the abstractions make the abstraction better.

But we do not value abstraction and context equally. And so the forests die.

As someone in tech, I am particularly concerned with how tech perpetuates this dynamic.

The tech industry constantly tries to commoditize human needs, replacing real relationships in all their complexity and interdependency with context-less, ephemeral "relationships" mediated by apps. Instead of asking a neighbor or a new friend for help fixing a broken screen door, we hire someone on TaskRabbit. Instead of asking someone we know to cook us something when we're sick, we order a meal online.

Any music theory nerds on here?

In particular I would love to understand how my guitar and piano work and how composition works but honestly I will take recs for anything music related that made you go "wow that's cool!!"

If anyone has a good pasta sauce recipe that's easy and cheap to make for a large group, I could use one! Otherwise I will have to just trust random web search results 😂

What's currently a good way to generate transcripts from long video/audio files? I tried using the speechrecognition python library and crashed my computer 😂