to anyone who says that people who don't like being mansplained to, etc. "don't know how social media work", i invite you to read this essay on how public speech and comment "work" to silence women

"My aim here – and I acknowledge the irony of my being given the space to address the subject – is to take a long view, a very long view, on the culturally awkward relationship between the voice of women and the public sphere of speech-making, debate and comment"

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n06/mary-beard/the-public-voice-of-women

#Mastodon

context: [So it is that time every few years that I go #distro shopping for a new /home.
I went from slackware to debian to xubuntu to manjaro to endeavorOS (both based on Arch, btw), and tasted #nixOS but didn't come to the point of making it my everyday personal laptop distro.]

I'm about to try moving to nixos as my main everyday distro. Any incompatibility or significant hassle I should be aware of?
And mostly important: as recently some BDFL and main devs in FLOSS have revealed themselves as suprematists or fascists, I am asking #fedimind if there's some ugly past about nixos and what are the chances they fascistify given the governance and dev power dynamics.

I used to love the #Dune universe, I discovered the first book in a small town bookstore when I was a teenager and since then it has been THE fantasy world refuge of my mind for a couple decades; then I realized (probably read somewhere) that it's just another blatant "white savior" trope.
In plain sight.
I still haven't recovered, and the movies almost made me sick for the fight in my mind, heart, memory.
I loved the new Chani (different from the books) in Dune2, but the changes just rub salt into that open wound.

cannot unsee.

I need "The Dispossessed, but Fremen" to heal.

thinking about #vibeCoding versus traditional (imperative) programming (or for most people I respect, "actually coding"), an analogy has come to mind in relation to #Dune's fictional universe:
"vibe coding is just talking to machines, imperative programming is *using the Voice* on them".

Hey some nerd (me) is quoted here in this Columbia Journalism Review story about how low-power FM radio stations weathered federal funding cuts by being too small to be eligible for federal funding... in contrast to NPR. The invulnerability of the truly grassroots? 📻💚
https://www.cjr.org/feature/public-media-funding-cut-low-power-radio-lessons-community-broadcasting.php

#LPFM #media #radio #PublicMedia

Some reading:

Brock, André, Jr. Distributed blackness: african American cybercultures. New York University Press, 2020.

Fouché, Rayvon. "Say it loud, I'm black and I'm proud: African Americans, American artifactual culture, and black vernacular technological creativity." American Quarterly 58, no. 3 (2006): 639-661.

Fouché, Rayvon. Black Inventors in the Age of Segregation: Granville T. Woods, Lewis H. Latimer, & Shelby J. Davidson. JHU Press, 2003.

+

some of which iteratively turned into technical features. So, upstream, Black collectivities have been hugely impactful in designating as relevant and subsequently shaping the spaces where we’re now associating to talk about #ATProto and #ActivityPub !!

TL;DR erasing Black contributions to the social web is weird behavior, and it’s also wrongheaded in that *it sets all of us up to perpetuate old exclusions, old harms, and old failures* 6/

Yo computer touchers: there's a history of Black invention and ingenuity you may or may not know about, *and* a history of Black inventors' ingenuity being denied at a systemic level

🧵

The subheads on an article I wrote on this date in 2017, called “When Robots Go to Art School” —
1. AI Creativity is Boring.
2. AI Can’t Create, but Can Replicate.
3. Fear of AI is Profitable.
4. Realistic AI Still Has Opportunities.

"From the scientific point of view, we already know what this is all about; but what we do about it is no longer my job. It is disheartening that we do not stop burning fossil fuels, but this is a societal decision and society does not [want to] take that step."
She is right but I find it very hard to accept. I'm still at the stage of "if only we inform enough people they will agree to do the right thing." But a lot of people don't care and idk how to deal with that.
https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2023-06-20/ellen-thomas-paleoclimatologist-its-not-the-earth-that-needs-to-worry-its-humans.html

thread su #diritti e #SmartWork ( #telelavoro ) proposto in fretta e furia da aziende con paura di #coronavirus . Ottimi consigli ed informazioni per il dipendente:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1232137276421005313.html