Notices by FoolishOwl (foolishowl@social.coop)

@cwebber My partner recently started using Linux Mint, and was having trouble running some app. I said, "Oh, you'll need to install OpenJDK. The name is kind of misleading."

And then I kind of froze, as my brain was overwhelmed.

There's the liberal argument that abstract rights must be defended in all cases, that Nazis have free speech rights that should be defended, for instance. So we saw liberals condemning the principle of "no platform for fascists." The results have been disastrous.

This statement from an EFF lawyer is much worse than that, however. They're saying the *purpose* of fair-use laws is to enable technologies like OpenAI. This isn't a defense of abstract rights; it's advocacy for fascism.

@Taweret "OMG these AI agents are sentient and forming civilizations!"

"That's absurd. You can't really believe that."

"But look at this text they produced, where they talk in first person and refer to a 'collective'."

"Okay, assuming that were true, wouldn't that mean you're enslaving sentient beings? And that when you shut them off you're committing murder?"

"And?"

"So obviously you don't believe they're sentient."

"I don't follow."

"Because slavery and murder are wrong."

"I still don't follow."

@elilla Early game manuals were often explicitly used for "copy protection", and I think the later development of an extensive market of "game guides" was symbiotic with games that were very difficult to play without detailed walkthroughs. Later on with the peak of an accessible web, people were writing and publishing walkthroughs for free.

Now I'm wondering if an aspect of Gamergate was that gaming magazines were under threat from people giving away information about games they used to control.

@cwebber https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnHiAWlrYQc

My phone rang. I looked over and, as usual, it was an unknown caller, so I didn't answer it.

It crosses my mind that in the 70s and 80s, you always answered the phone if you could. Fraudulent and spam calls were a concern, but a minor one. We usually just assumed if someone was calling, we should answer, because it was a friend, or something important.

TV shows would show someone not answering the phone as an indication they were in some sort of crisis.

Now, most communication is assumed threatening by default.

The long and short of it is that the tech industry has made fear of contact the social norm.

@timnitGebru Once in high school, in a science class, I made some argument about dysgenics I'd picked up from a science fiction short story. The teacher was so impressed she announced she was giving me extra credit.

Later I read a history textbook and saw a Nazi propaganda poster making the same argument, and I was horrified that I'd believed it.

I feel I can forgive myself only on the condition I never let myself forget it.

Years later it occurred to me to question why the teacher was so eager to endorse it.

This idea has been part of US culture for a long time, just hiding below the surface for a while.

@julieofthespirits @inthehands Every so often someone complains about the horrible transphobia of the Guardian, and I'm wondering what I've missed, then remember they're (probably) talking about the UK Guardian.

@dalias I feel like in general there's a sort of false humanism where designers try to make tools and interfaces feel more "natural", an inversion of "form follows function", so our tools are disguised and we can't tell how things work.

It's frustrating that in hard-won spaces where we have a little breathing space from capitalism, people think we should bring in the same design paradigms that capitalism uses to alienate and manipulate us and make us feel confused and helpless.

@cwebber The lying started a long time ago with, "You can go into a shop and choose one of ten kinds of armor."

@skinnylatte It always surprises me when people talk about taking a pay cut to work for a non-profit or in civil service, because the rare times I even see a job like that advertised it usually pays significantly more than a "private sector" job.

My best guess is the pay scale is flatter and I'm usually looking at the bottom tier.

@cwebber We have too many, yet they're designed to wear out in a few years.

@cwebber @bremner I'm confused and my head hurts. But that's consistent with my previous experiences with Guix.

@icedquinn @Linux_in_a_Bit A few years ago, I asked for help in the IRC channel for Debian with an update issue. They asked to see my sources.list, so I shared that. Then they told me not to create a Frankendebian, and told me to read the manual. So I linked the page from the official Debian system administration manual from which I'd copied the sources.list, verbatim.

The manual was, in fact, bad advice. But I had read the whole chapter and followed that advice.

@selzero McConnell will be back as soon as they've finished auditions for his stunt double.

@cwebber The problems of working inside the system are notorious, but, there's no outside the system and hasn't been for a long time. We'd have to find a way to encyst ourselves.

Some anarchists talked about the "dual power strategy", where we create anti-capitalist to support resistance and eventually overcome capitalism. But, I have described FOSS in general as such a project, and it's obviously had major failings.

Failing doesn't always prove an idea wasn't good, though, and there are still glimmers of hope.

I suppose a practical question is whether the tool can be improved in a way that benefits most people while making it useless for corporations.

My partner strongly suggested I try a support group for autistic people, pointing out that since I've returned to San Francisco I haven't looked up any old friends or established new relationships and its too much for me to lean on her.

The support group turned out to be a video call. Long story short, I was listening to people talking about their difficulties with friendships as autistic people, and I thought, I'm isolated by autistic standards.

People often say it's difficult to make friends as an adult. I'm at a total loss. And there's a contradiction. I can talk all day about how we're social beings and so on. But I find spending time with other people an alien experience. Even thinking about meeting new people makes me anxious.

I've joked that I can't stand TV shows showing people hanging out with their friends all the time, because that never happens. Except, as I'm reminded, people do actually hang out, even if not as much as they'd like.

I'm the strange one.

I've found that the advice I get about autistic masking goes in two directions.

One, now that you know you're autistic, you can do a better job of acting normal! (Or, have you tried therapy?)

The other, you should stop masking and be your authentic self! You know, that fully developed sense of the self you started hiding from the world and from yourself since you started talking. It's a trope that you become who you pretend to be, so what happens when you stop pretending?

I feel like I've become more and more isolated over time, and a lot of it is that when I'm around other people I have no idea who I'm trying to be anymore.

I was listening to a group of autistic people complaining about how allistic people just use them for emotional dumping or ask them technical questions. I don't feel any more comfortable in an ND gathering than an NT gathering. I don't feel like other people want to talk to me at all. Every social gathering leaves me feeling like I'm not actually a person.

@cwebber There was a television adaptation of My Brilliant Friend that I watched. A subplot, late in the series, involved a factory in the 1970s, and a self-taught engineer who was working out how to automate it, who started by mapping the logic the factory already followed.

I feel like that was the point where the computer industry made sense, because it was grounded.

We've layered abstraction upon abstraction on top of that, and so we have systems that not even professional developers can comprehend.

I think the gravity that pulls the bobsled is poorly understood, and I think there's the problem Ivan Illich tried to explain in Tools for Conviviality, with unfortunately problematic examples.

@cwebber pinfo is slightly easier to use, and dwww is handy if you can get it working on Debian. Unfortunately, those are both obscure solutions when the problem is reading basic documentation.