Realizing that my strategy for surviving in the capitalist hellscape really hasn't changed: Be inexplicably indispensable.

As an engineer, I'm constantly being asked to justify my existence and to justify where and how I'm spending my time. This is nothing new (managers love to micro-manage and feel in control) but it's gotten a lot worse in the last year or two with the rise of "Why can't an AI do that?"

But I'm realizing that the answer is to not even try answer the question. They don't need to know WHY they need me. It's enough for them to see that they're constantly coming to me with "Faith, can you look at this?" because all the AI-assisted juniors failed.

I don't need to justify what tools I am or am not using. They want me to but mostly so they can feel good about their own choices. When they use XYZ and I, a very senior engineer, don't, it fills them with doubt and that makes them uncomfortable. But that's on them, not me. And justifying it won't make them think any higher of me because they're not asking so they can understand or learn; they're asking so they can feel validated.

So I don't. I just do my job better than anyone else can and leave them wondering how.

While I’m in a ranting mood about it…

There is something so incredibly white about AI bros. Like, dude finds an app that can bullshit just as well as him, can spit out shitty code and pictures or whatever better than him and his conclusion is “I’ve found God.”

The thought “I’m worse at this than a phone app, maybe I should study/practice and get better” never occurs to him. Why should it? He’s a white dude who’s on top of the world. So if this app is able to do everything he can do, it must be the most amazing thing ever created and it can do everything.

Like, dude finds himself face to face with his own limitations and decides to worship a chatbot rather than just admit he’s mediocre.

Okay, back to much-needed fedi-exile.

Dear cis people, more trans people will be born. They’ll be your children and grandchildren. They’ll learn our history. And they’ll learn what you did or didn’t do, when we needed you.

Apparently trauma processing isn’t a single pass, one-and-done. I’m back in this one, working through it again: https://chaosfem.tw/@Willow/114439252252598274

The Terms Of My Loan From My Traumas, Taken To Buy My Relationships

#ThingsYouCantUnsay

Some nights, when it’s late, my traumas tell me I’ll never be able to afford my relationships. That because I have no worth, there’s nothing of value for my partners to acquire by being kind to me and meeting my needs.

So I take out a loan. A loan from my traumas. They tell me that if I give away everything about myself, if I take everything that is affirming about me and twist it to be for others and not for myself, if I offer to give touch I so desperately need to receive, if I hold my partners the way I need to be held, if I make the space I so dearly need to occupy, if I wear my favorite clothes as a display instead of an affirmation, if I move my body as an invitation instead of a celebration, if I go fast when I need to build slow, then, maybe, my traumas tell me, maybe my fairy godmother will whisper in my partners’ ears and I’ll get the barest hint of what I need.

But! they say, I must never let my partners know about this loan, this contract I made with my traumas in the dark. My traumas tell me that if I speak of it, everyone will know I’m worth nothing, that any value I appeared to have was merely on loan, and had been expended in one massive, ruinous transaction to try to buy the care I needed but could never afford.

And so, I experience myself as having no position from which to negotiate with my partners. If I were to try, I would be revealed as having nothing, having spent everything already just to get this far.

My traumas are big on “relationships are transactional, and you have nothing to bargain with.”

The circumstantial evidence that my traumas may be lying to me is very difficult to see over the edge of the tub as the shower water pools around me, mixing with my tears.

Does anyone have good, non-AI written, not-super-violent hyperpop song recommendations? Bonus points for “coder girl slice of life” or “mecha girl” themes.

(I enjoy some Charli Morgan like “Lip Gloss and Lasers” but a lot of it veers a bit too into blowing up people for my taste.)

Wait wait I have a question!

Thus ends my very brief visit back to fedi, I’m returning to exile!

Turned forty five on Saturday and treated myself to something slitty. 🏳️‍⚧️

#trans #transwoman #transfashion #ThirstAid #thirsttrap

Okay, so I've been using #grapheneos for about 2 weeks now after switching from a rapidly-falling-apart iphone. Here are my impressions:

1) The device and system is initially **extremely** minimal: There's an sms app, there's an app store, there's a browser, but that's it. You have to bring everything else

2) It's so much easier to stay open-source. I've been primarily using Thunderbird for mail, Finamp for music, Organic Maps for maps, Antennapod for podcasts, KOReader for books, and Signal for messages. The only not-totally-free pieces I'm regularly using is Google Messages*.

3) It's still not all open. Currently the only way to use RCS messaging on Graphene is with the Google Messages app and allowing that app to access Google Play Services. In the US, the major phone carriers have more-or-less delegated their RCS backends to Google so if you're sending RCS Google has your metadata (alternatively if you're sending iMessage, apple has your metadata). Luckily while you have to run Google's app and service to send and receive RCS, you can sandbox those apps and restrict their permissions to basically just sending and receiving messages.

4) Most platform apps are still corporate. In the US there's not really a useful way to get an early-morning taxi to the airport outside of the rideshare apps, so you're stuck with Lyft etc. But as with Google Messages, you can pare away the permissions to the bare minimum for function and safety.

5) The device feels fully mine in a way that I haven't felt since my last linux laptop. I get to choose what goes on it and I have the final word about what data is harvested and where it goes. It feels like a little island outside of our current technofeudal hellscape where I can enjoy my music, get around, and chat with folks without my actions being monetized by Apple or Google.

Overall, a highly positive experience!

Now I'm just thinking about how many issues both professional and personal could be erased if we all got a little better at having uncomfortable conversations.

But I think a lot of this comes back to how we as a society have made it really difficult to fail gracefully, or be wrong and change our minds.

Okay, quick timeline scan, and back to my fedi-exile. I love you all!

♥

"i can take care of her" is the lesbian version of "i can fix him"

My impression of cis people…

[clears throat, taps mic]

“What are you talking about?! You can’t just assume Tranzo the Gender Clown is transgender. Sure Tranzo’s costume was white, blue, and pink, and Tranzo’s catchphrase was, ‘I am transgender,’ but you have to consider it in the context of clown culture. You can’t just read your own values into it!”

Like...people think this is a joke, but i literally moaned when I took my first sip of tea this morning.

I mean ive heard people claim sex is great, but have you tried tea?

I think I need to detox from doom for a bit. If you have my contact info elsewhere, I still feel chatty, but I’m going to be away from fedi for at least an hour and maybe a week.

Some vacuous cretin came into my mentions to concern troll, so let me clear something up:

Antifascist activists have kept our side of the bargain, while the shitlib electoralists have not. Antifascists successfully stymied every attempt to build a fighting US fascist street movement for more than a decade now. With full control over the federal government the US fascist movement still struggles to maintain any kind of confrontational street presence. ICE, which is straightforwardly the US blackshirts/SA, struggles to hold its own against protests and decentralized action. Patriot Front remains limited to furtively performing occasional publicity stunts. ICE officers fear their faces being uncovered because antifascists will and have identified them.

But electoralists have failed to secure that front at all. You have lost a series of winnable elections pursuing indulgent strategies focused on performative right-wing liberal vice signaling and sacrificing large portions of your coalition you find distasteful. Your unwillingness to discipline the Democratic party has produced nothing but craven losers and corporate hacks that lack a crumb of pragmatism. They're unwilling or unable to pursue popular, common-sense center-left compromises, like universal healthcare and progressive taxation. They waste their political capital on frivolous projects about competing with the Republicans to be the most insanely racist about the border and immigration, and have destroyed their own prospects again and again by acting as concierges to the rich moocher class.

You electoralists have failed, embarrassingly and at great length, and you have the gall to speak down to the sober pragmatists that have been actually successfully holding your flank this entire time. You resent that the activists you hate are the only people that have shown they can get results because it flies in the face of your ideological hangups, and shows you as the feckless cowards you are.