@abrasive @mcc does the buffer flush the other way in Australia?

@mcc does it rotate in the other direction in RTL text?

@mcc if you accept showing all the frames at once, Japanese Windows is 90% of the way there with ¥

Proposing that in order to resolve the / vs \ issue in pathnames we introduce the first animated unicode character, a single codepoint that on display alternates between the four frames

/
-
\
|

@mcc @mmcknett @vathpela @jcoglan now, VC has run out of places to deploy, "risk/reward" isn't a fixed ratio where you can get higher and higher EV by giving your money to larger and larger numbers of progressively more deranged scammers, it's a factor of the underlying technology and economic environment (hello, ZIRPs). they're literally incinerating their wealth on all these doomed datacenter projects. now, they have a LOT to incinerate; it will take a while. but there won't be much left

@glyph Maybe… I do think the demand for high-return investments will continue to exist and someone will try to build supply for that demand even if they have to resort to scams and hoaxes to do so. Maybe *tech* will no longer be the "9 investments fail, one makes back 20x investment" area and maybe that money will go chasing returns somewhere *else*, somewhere they believe the 20x investment can still be had. The possibility I really dislike is that the area they settle on will be weapons

@mcc @mmcknett @vathpela @jcoglan I think we are going to see this culture shift, in the wake of the AI bubble burst. Venture capital was a culture that made sense in the late 90s, the fiber bubble notwithstanding; there were a bunch of genuinely transformative opportunities to build things. Investing in 5 risky startups when only 1 would succeed was a rational thing to do, and not particularly evil. That metastasized into private equity, where you would buy 5 going concerns and destroy 4

@mmcknett @glyph @vathpela @jcoglan problem is investors don't want profit they want *growth*

and investors have learned growth is exponential so they're ok with killing four businesses if the fifth is "growing". They think the one growing business will grow faster than the other businesses (the ones tearing themselves apart chasing "growth") fail

@mcc anecdata and related to your bsky post about framing: I've had success convincing family that these ballot measures are 'gross and weird' by taking the angle that the state has no reason to see what's under a child's clothing. The framing 'it's about fairness in sports' is surprisingly effective but it is equally effective to change that framing.

I've been able to continue using Mastodon post the version 5 flip by using https://masto-fe.superseriousbusiness.org/ as my frontend. But I guess that's not enough, I need some kind of… nitter for Mastodon, so that I can show a non-embarrassing view of my own posts to someone who doesn't have their own Mastodon client. I guess is this just what gets me to move off mastodon.social? So I can link myself with a non-embarrassing UI? Seems weird. I've been on this server since before there were any alternatives.

Ohhhh, this sucks. This sucks bad.

One of the load-bearing UI features making Mastodon usable is the little "eye" in the corner. It unrolls all CWs in a thread at once. Coulda called attention to itself better, but it's critical.

https://mastodon.social/@mcc/117560205767246346

Mastodon 5 it's just gone. No replacement. I wanted to link this thread I wrote on Bluesky, but like, I'm gonna have to explain to the Bluesky users how to unroll the posts and attachments. Can't just say "click eyeball"

It's important both to stave off the giant looming despair but also because there's a potential strategy here. We can *convince* the cishets they were tricked. Think about how people reversed themselves so fully on gay marriage when the wind started blowing the other way. It is actually possible to get the cishets into a place where six years from now nobody will admit they supported the 2026 anti-trans ballot initiatives.

It would help if the NYT went out of business. (3/3)

We can't, ever, abandon trans children. We can't accept the Democratic Party compromise of "ok, you trans freaks can do whatever it is you're doing, but you can't have childhoods".

But we also shouldn't let transphobes claim a bigger win than they actually got. Especially not in our own heads.

They did this via a cheat. A trick. They distracted the cishets by talking about "kids" and "sports". They can't go about what they want openly yet, not quite. That's important. (2/3)

There's one other thought I had, that I couldn't make fit into Bluesky's 300-character boxes.

I wrote this post, with intentionally provocative language, before the election. I think this frame is still useful. "Wedge strategies". What we saw last night was that Republicans failed to use trans people as a wedge against Democrats. But they *succeeded* in using trans minors as a wedge against trans people in general. (1/3)

I'm gonna try to word this carefully.

@mcc it's been really weird here because everyone is elated except for literally every trans person i talk to

Wrote a thread on Bluesky here about the results last night— where American voters repudiated transphobia in every human-vs-human election, and embraced transphobia in every ballot initiative…

https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:2aebn3xk5t63net43eeepire/post/3mzj7fctslt2j

…and what people (specifically, cis people) need to do right now.

This thread assumes the WA transphobia measure will pass. As of 4PM ET the numbers look real bad. Here's some analysis if you care about numbers. https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:eez4vedmpryrsq2ee4xwbrdn/post/3mziqvemy522x

It's merged! The "recipe" files that comprise the Redox package manager now all have descriptions (well, the 10% of them not in "WIP" jail do, but presumably this sets a precedent so the next person to publish a package out of WIP will include a description field). https://gitlab.redox-os.org/redox-os/redox/-/commit/7aaea1939c570e3c2d9bc8de134368025c01614a

you could almost view this as an addiction pathway: the only way to deal with having previously consumed AI output is to consume yet further AI output

also the anti-DRY-ness it tends to produce makes it incredibly difficult to know if you've covered everything that needs changing b/c the same concept has dozens of representations. this directly leads to more bugs

RE: https://mastodon.social/@jcoglan/117558987210071026

to spell this out a bit more forcefully: AI tools attempt to achieve lock-in by actively making non-users less productive when forced to engage with AI-derived artefacts