Notices by Eleanor Saitta (dymaxion@infosec.exchange), page 5

@akareilly
Also? Even if you've always just rented, landlords for expensive apartments [mostly] do not pull that shit when they know their tenant's lawyers have lawyers.

The bit where if you ever need a receipt from a square merchant (for, say, business expenses) you have to give them an email address, which they then use to let merchants spam you unless you opt in to creating a "profile"? That's wildly illegal and will absolutely make me avoid them when I can.

Why is this not happening in every European country, as an absolute minimum?

https://www.thelocal.fr/20230407/france-plans-70-supertax-on-fuel-for-private-jets

Really enjoying @debcha's talk here at #theconference in Malmö — a great introduction to the ethics of care at infrastructural, tied to her wonderful upcoming book, "How Infrastructure Works".

@feld
The fact that it's occasionally true does not justify using a misogynistic stereotype that does real harm to women in the industry. If you feel that it does, you're part of the problem.

And no, as someone who talks to a lot of exec teams, I would only say that the majority of CTOs are technically-inclined, and even then, a lot of them are tech managers, not engineers.

@feld
What is 100% right?

Tech speakers, it's 2023. Stop using moms as your example of a non-technical audience. It's wrong, its not funny, and whatever you were saying, now most of your audience is not thinking about it.

Just use the exec team as an example instead and get on with your life.

@e_urq
Yes, exactly that about the truth. And I guess what I'm thinking about here is how letting that truth in changes you. If you keep going and keep fighting, yes, but then you create that quiet space in the part of you that looks at the odds and sees how the chips may land, and you put the mourning down — you can only mourn so much before it gets in the way of living. And then what? What does it mean to try to live with that space with honesty and care? To accept being an endling of a sort and to try to live that well, for yourself as well as those who come after.

I have no idea what my answer is, other than perhaps committing to work more with physical media — to write letters and paint, etc. To leave better ruins.

While pandemic, fascism, and onrushing genocides, not to mention the billionaire-class's efforts to steal even that which is nailed down are taking the headlines, the climate news keeps ticking by in the background. Some of it is good, very good even — this is really entirely a question of political will now — but most of it isn't.

As someone in her 40s now, looking at the likelihood of a 4°C 2100 continue to creep up, what does it mean to live in probably the last generation that will not see the end of globally-organized civilization?

Not in terms of offsets or recycling or all the other things we're supposed to do to be good people instead of doing something useful like shooting an oil executive, but culturally. What does it mean as an artist, an intellectual, a person-who-lives-in-culture? What does one do differently if one is going to be last?

@cstross
We absolutely did that with the native American genocides. Hell, it's mostly still taught in glowing terms.
@pettter @yogthos

"Your work would be more useful if you did things that solve the problems the people you want to help say they have" is a sentence I feel like I shouldn't have to type as often as I do.

"This is effective" is not an argument saying that a thing is necessary, proportionate, legal, acceptable, desirable, or even that it leads to better outcomes.

Unrelated, did you know that engineers are more likely to become terrorists than any other profession, by a large margin?

@pettter
That's pride week! Couldn't possibly, sorry
@mlowdi @dekaminski @rysiek

@pettter
When the choices are "devote hundreds of hours to trying to manage direct democracy for one single communication system out of a dozen I use in an ecosystem where the tooling is actively not supporting good outcomes" that's... really not great? I already run a web and email server and I'm well aware that this is already a very dumb choice, adding not-well-hardened complex, heavyweight services that I need to deal with HA for is wildly more expensive than any reasonable payment into an established instance. That's why I'm here, on a server where a bunch of my professional community is local. A bunch of small instances are also blocked any large instance, either for the mods not reading every post and instead relying on reports (laughably unscalable), or simply because they're large. Which means eventually they'll block any instance that allows people to just sign up. Fragmentation and the governance and technical structures that encourage it as a first resort are a critical vulnerability to the health of the ecosystem.
@stribika @akareilly

@pettter
But it won't be, because virality exists in the context of the medium it came from, including all of the API affordances like boosts, follows, RTs, etc. If you turn it into torrents, you e.g. eliminate the possibility of someone editing or deleting a viral post, which are critical safety features. So no, it isn't easy and there basically are no shortcuts. @akareilly

@pettter
In terms of power usage? A lot if those systems are going to be able to deal with content getting even mildly popular. And let's not forget that that degree of micro-federation really wildly doesn't scale, so you're not just paying the penalty of having to overspec the hardware, you're also dealing with geometrically more requests.
@akareilly

@akareilly
Hell, create more account attribute types. Instance allowing company accounts that don't have the corporate type attribute? Sure, defederate for a clear governance violation. There are so many ways to do this properly.
@pettter

@pettter It would be trivial to have a version of masto that maintained addressability and allowed people to see content and maintain subscriptions if they wanted to while still allowing community moderation decisions. They chose not to. This was dumb.
@akareilly

@pettter
People collaborate with companies here? It's a tech support medium? People do work together in public? It's a lot of different things.

One of the big mistakes about designing a social tool is thinking that you can dictate what your users are going to use it for. Yes, you can ban certain kinds of behavior, but there are limits to how much that will work without extraordinary mod efforts.
@akareilly