Dana Fried

Software wizard. Gym rat. Mom. Gamer.

Warning: crush hazard

Also find me at: https://linktr.ee/leftoblique

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Last Notes

2024-09-23 20:04:44

Today is bi day of visibility and based on observations I can confidently say that bi people are extremely cute

2024-09-16 20:25:19

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we've always said, it's way better to let a few rich people get a benefit than put in the infrastructure to means-test it, because the latter will always both cost more and exclude people who actually need the program.
(Also giving everyone a benefit makes it much harder to characterize as "welfare" and therefore politically more challenging to gut when conservatives get into power.)

2024-09-12 22:15:44

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what exactly is your goal for working out your upper body then?
I can probably answer this if I know what you're aiming for.

2024-09-09 21:11:13

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Finally, while I'm sure there's some technical reason why it wouldn't work, I personally don't see why you couldn't build an open-source, fedi-compatible midi-blogging service with a format like cohost.
Very little of the functionality there is functionality we don't (at least theoretically) have over here, somewhere. That's not to say it wouldn't be a major effort to build it, just that "tumblr, but fedi and with custom CSS" is entirely manageable.
I hope someone does it!
4/4

2024-09-09 21:08:03

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One of the things that makes no-ads, no-profit-motive social media possible is *acknowledging* that creating a social space is demanding and expensive - that some communities might dissolve - and planning ahead of time for that.
I've been on a number of message boards and moderated newsgroups. Nothing lasts forever. The important thing isn't a forever service; it's a combination of preserving what's there (which Cohost is doing) and providing people a way to exit gracefully.
3/?

2024-09-09 21:05:32

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We make fun of Website Boy, but the idea, "people will pay* us to create some cool software; we'll run servers with economies of scale but other people can run their own servers and provide their own moderation if they want; if someone burns out or runs out of cash people can just migrate to another server" is brilliant.
Because the fact is, running a social media site is exhausting and expensive. Not everyone can do it, certainly not forever.
* I am also a Mastodon patron.
2/?

2024-09-09 21:03:01

I was a Cohost Plus member for a while. The format is neat, even if it wasn't for me.
The thing is, I kind of expected this. The maintainers had been talking about being broke and burned out for a long, long time.
Not gonna pass judgment. It was a good idea. It's still a good idea, even if the format isn't my fave. They bit off more than they could chew and/or overestimated people's willingness to pay for it.
That said, I think something like cohost could exist on fedi.
1/?

2024-09-09 01:02:43

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The options are:
1. Accept that kids are just gonna get randomly shot in school.
2. Construct and operate our schools like prisons.
3. Stop giving everyone guns.
If we were any other country, the answer would be both immediate and obvious.

2024-09-09 00:58:04

The fact that the police and FBI knew about the kid, his mother called the school to warn them the day of, there were at least two armed cops (sorry, "resource officers") stationed at the school, and somehow a 14-year-old still managed to walk in with an assault rifle, kill four people, and injure a bunch more suggests that the "we need more cops", "it's about mental health not guns", and "let's arm school officials" people may all, in fact, be incorrect.

2024-09-06 17:57:09

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it's awesome how you said the exact same thing as me but less correct and with more words

2024-09-06 17:00:27

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there's a reason ラーメン is written in katakana lol

2024-09-04 19:43:03

Gentle reminder that all programming languages have their uses; they are just tools, and you need a big toolbox to be able to solve a wide range of problems.
Anyone who insists that a specific technology is the One True Way to succeed as a software developer is the proverbial guy with a hammer who thinks every problem is a nail.
Corollary: any developer worth their salt should be able to learn a new stack relatively quickly. It takes far longer to master a large codebase than a new language.

2024-09-03 23:46:12

Fuck Microsoft but if you're like me and can't just move off of Windows we'll all figure out how to disable their nonsense together.
I've killed Cortana - and now Copilot - a million times on various hardware and you can bet your ass I'll do it again.

2024-08-29 22:35:15

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The existential risk posed by AI is that we as a species will no longer be able to transmit and build on generational knowledge, which is the primary thing that has allowed human society to advance since the end of the last ice age.

2024-08-29 22:31:09

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The existential risk is that the incredible repository of nearly all human knowledge that is the internet will be flooded with so much LLM-generated dreck that locating reliable information will become effectively impossible (alongside scientific journals, which are also suffering incredibly under the weight of ML spam).
The existential risk is that nobody will be able to trust a photo or video of anything because the vast majority of media will be fabricated.

2024-08-29 22:27:55

Just a reminder that the "existential risk" from AI is not that somehow we'll make Skynet or the computers from The Matrix.
Nobody is going to give a large language model the nuclear codes.
The existential risk is to marginalized people who will be silently refused jobs or health care or parole, or who will be targeted by law enforcement or military action because of an ML model's inherent bias, and that because these models are black boxes, it will be nearly impossible for victims to appeal.

2024-08-25 02:36:05

Who decided to call them "Doritos minis" and not "Dorititos"?

2024-08-23 18:36:49

New CW indicator on web sucks

2024-08-18 00:15:14

Fuck everyone who uses "unalive" with zero sense of irony. Fucking socmed algorithm brain poisoning.
Say "kill". Say "murder". Say "suicide". Say "rape". Say "pedophile". Say what you mean. If people need to not see or hear those words they'll use a filter.
(Or if you're on a platform where you feel like you're forced to elide a word, make it obvious you know you're being censored and don't use stupid euphemisms like it's a totally normal thing to do.)

2024-08-12 16:32:33

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I have several theories on this one. In order of increasing tinfoil hat:
1. Trump is saving his limited resources for a big push later/when he has figured out his line of attack.
2. Trump's campaign is actually broke and is lying about its donations and cash on hand.
3. Trump is setting up for massive embezzlement and maybe fleeing the country after November.
4. Trump is funneling the money into militias and paying off local politicians and is effectively planning a coup.

2024-08-04 04:58:30

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Everyone says they want "mid-century modern" but when they get a house that was modern in the mid century, all of a sudden they start complaining.

2024-08-04 04:53:09

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Bonus house type:
4. Something about this house makes it deeply inconvenient but not in a way that $150,000 and an interior designer can fix in a thirty-minute episode. We are deeply sorry, but you will have to continue to live in your nonagonal house that occasionally weeps blood from the walls.

2024-08-04 04:51:07

There are three kinds of houses on Ugliest House in America:
1. This is a death trap unfit for human habitation; I feel for the poor sods who were duped into buying it and now have to figure out how to survive here.
2. This house is just old. It needs a coat of paint and some new carpet. Why are you even on the show?
3. This house fucks and the tasteless beige losers who begged to be the show don't deserve the unique gem they frankly underpaid for.

2024-08-03 16:05:13

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as a trumpet player, it is technically possible to play the instrument softly.
You know, in a Ron White, "I had the right to remain silent but I did not have the ability" sort of way.

2024-06-20 18:30:35

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like, "oh yes, now that my linux no longer allows me to get anything done effectively, I will be happy to use my broken system to fix my broken system, great plan, A+, no notes"
Honorable mention to "we're creating a library that (at some unspecified future point) you can compile into your application to fix the problem; no, this will not fix every other application on your system or any legacy software, why do you ask?"

2024-06-20 18:29:25

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accessibility is a P0 feature for any product; you shouldn't ship a product without it; a product without accessibility is fundamentally broken.
If X11 is a "security concern" then maybe creating a whole new product and launching it in a broken state wasn't the right answer (Wayland is an absolute nightmare for me, but for other reasons, so I share some of your pain).
Also the fucking _gall_ to ship a broken product and then say, "well, you could always contribute patches to fix it".

2024-06-16 04:34:52

Women on deadlift day:
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/624/430/805/728/336/original/089a1de3d66f9702.jpg

2024-06-11 17:38:48

Reading the article about the woman who secretly recorded Justices Alito and Roberts and, honestly, they both gave kinda legit responses that were sensitive to what they perceived as her [extreme] political positions?
I love a gotcha moment, and I think Alito is indeed a piece of shit, but honestly, this ain't it.

2024-06-08 19:56:02

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hope everybody is okay?

2024-06-08 15:04:44

The four Israeli hostages freed today will have to live with the fact that tens to hundreds of civilians - many of them children - were slaughtered in the operation that freed them.
And this was after their government backed out of a cease-fire agreement that would have had them come home peacefully.
That's a lot of weight to carry for people who have already been traumatized.

2024-05-31 22:48:57

2018: Deeply skeptical of companies plastering rainbow flags all over everything for one month a year
2024: Deeply suspicious of companies that don't plaster rainbow flags all over everything for one month a year

2024-05-24 18:47:28

Say what you want about Google's AI search results but you have to admit that at least they're funny
They've automated the shitpost

2024-05-23 04:59:36

Amused at how Altman helped himself to a woman who denied him multiple times, because he was fond of her*, and despite the fact that she was literally the only person in recent history to sue Disney and win - and that no one else in his circle tried to dissuade him (or had enough pull or made enough effort to be successful).
Says a lot about the people at the helm of the "AI revolution".
* or perhaps I should say, "Her"

2024-05-22 20:05:22

A streamer I like got her account hacked, so if anyone knows someone who works over at YouTube well enough to ask for a favor, send me a DM.
The hackers deleted a decade of videos and turned her channel into scam Tesla content (unsurprisingly).
(responses which are not specifically to help me connect with someone on the inside who will help will be muted/blocked)

2024-05-15 18:39:29

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these also seem like excellent anti-cop measures if you're afraid of having your phone seized or being forced to unlock with your face/fingerprint.

2024-05-08 20:56:56

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or as we like to say: violence is always an option; the goal of society is to put a lot of other, better options in front of it.

2024-05-08 20:45:02

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sometimes I think we need to realign incentives between the investment and working classes.
If not with pitchforks and guillotines, at least with regulation that makes it hard to profit from short-term valuation spikes and ties investment income to long-term performance.

2024-05-08 20:45:02

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2024-05-01 20:58:23

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Perhaps I shouldn't dance around the point.
It is true that many Jewish zionists dishonestly equate anti-zionism with anti-Semitism.
However, this only works because Nazis, the KKK, and other anti-Semites have been using "zionist" as a dog whistle for "Jew" for literally longer than I have been alive (I am in my 40s).
This is why anti-zionist Jews are tetchy about non-Jews calling all violent counter-protestors (many of whom are anti-Semite fascists themselves) "zionists".

2024-05-01 18:22:46

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It's a difficult argument to make, in the same way it's hard to argue against calling all anti-trans activists "TERFs" despite the fact that many (most?) of them are right-wing agitators and not in any way "radical" or "feminist".
But I would like to avoid muddling terminology around "zionist" because there are a lot of people who aren't actually zionists being called "zionist" because they are Jewish or express sadness over the suffering of Israeli citizens while still supporting Palestine.

2024-05-01 18:18:53

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Rather than "zionists", better terms for this mixed group of allies-of-convenience might be "violent reactionaries", "pro-genocide", "anti-human rights", etc.
They're all terrible people, but in markedly different ways and I think we should recognize that (and also how they are similar as well).

2024-05-01 18:17:09

I think consistently referring to counter-protestors as "zionists" is probably misleading; I suspect that while there may be many genuine zionists doing violence to pro-Palestine protestors, there are also probably a bunch of fascists mixed in there who are very much not "zionists" in the traditional sense (other than perhaps that Israel's continued existence provides a potential avenue to ethnically cleanse the US of Jews).
Using that broad brush actually plays into the fascists' agenda.

2024-04-25 20:42:40

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I see... so they're not doing BlizzCon; they're doing WoW FanFest
(image marked sensitive for flashing lights)
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/333/794/854/247/913/original/6c50a324f9fc2546.mp4

2024-04-19 15:36:28

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no jury would convict them

2024-04-01 20:22:04

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came here to say this; it's a vehicle that can get as little as 12 MPG depending on driving conditions and fuel type (and that's with an empty bed and not towing anything) 🙃

2024-02-22 00:12:11

If your EVs aren't selling maybe that's because you're making giant fucking trucks and SUVs and hyper-expensive luxury sedans and the kind of people who want EVs mostly just want a compact car for getting to work and running errands.
Just sayin'.

2023-12-24 01:01:09

On fedi:
- we have CWs
- we have the ability to mute words
- there is no algorithm
Therefore, it is bad form to censor words (e.g. "r*pe", "k*ll") because that evades people's mute lists. These censoring conventions were created to evade algorithmic moderation on other platforms, which, again, we don't have here.
Instead, just use the words and apply an appropriate CW if you think it's needed.