Cidney @cidney@social.city-of-glass.net

I have literally seen folks explain someone's game to them.

I have literally seen folks explain foveated rendering to a VR researcher.

How to avoid "mansplaining":

1) Before explaining a thing, ask a person if they're familiar with a thing, and, if not, if they'd like you to talk about it

2) Proceed appropriately.

It's expensive to be poor. It's ironic but true. You get charges and fees for everything. Higher interest rates. Overdraft fees. Late fees. Having only enough to buy what you need right now instead of buying in bulk. Losing your job because you can't afford to get your car fixed. Losing your car because you don't have a job. Even your mental faculties are drained, as you are forced to continually eat low-nutrition foods, "sleep" in miserable conditions, and be exposed to toxins and lack of medical treatment. The lack of liquidity wipes you out. Life really does kick you while you're down.

You can't tell someone trapped in that vicious cycle to "just" get a job or "just" make responsible decisions. Sometimes, no amount of good decision-making can stop the vortex sucking them down. So the next time you are tempted to place moral judgment on someone who lives in poverty, think twice.

Signed, someone who has been both a Have and a Have-Not.

Why the hell has "dystopia" come to mean "salarymen have to attend boring meetings"? And not, say, "genocide"?

I want to blame cyberpunk and its centering the problems of salarymen (and not even their female counterparts, even though that culture is infamously sexist), but it's broader than that and the constant "being inundated with ads is dystopian" messaging is all over various parts of the Internet.

Same goes for people whose criticism of the PRC centers social credit and not the Uighurs.

At the Transportation and Land Use program, we're looking for a 3D environment artist to make a playable game level of a New York Penn Station rebuilt to no longer suck for passengers. This is a short-term project, to be finished in June. #FediJobs #3D
https://pedestrianobservations.files.wordpress.com/2023/03/job-posting-3d-artist-1.pdf

"Consider setting up your first web server. You install the program, start it, and point your web browser at the server’s IP address. You get the server’s default page and a warm thrill of victory. You have a web server! If you put content on it, you can tell your colleagues “Hey, browse to 203.0.113.99 and you’ll find my new web site!” It’s a thing. Add an entry in the Domain Name Service and you can offer folks a link like http://mwl.io. More testing and you add TLS, granting you the precious S at in https. Step by step, you build a web site that works up to modern standards.¹

¹Hopefully you stop before you join the dark side and install WordPress."

Yep. Star Wars is the right motif for this book. #RYOMS

A reminder on this #WomensHistoryMonth:

Cis women are women.

Trans women are women.

Some non-binary people are women, some are not women.

Trans men are not women.

It occurs to me that ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion and all of these other media generator AIs are really the epitome of "content", as the word is used in marketing and commercial platforms.

"Content" is media that is unencumbered by context, attribution, relationships. It is fungible and transferable, can be bought and sold and stored and spooled out as needed. All that's important is that it's always fresh and different, or at least different *enough*.

No one needs users to generate or scrape up "content" now. AI can just spew it out indefinitely.

I read Dilbert back in the 90s and early naughties because it was one of the few entities in the mainstream press saying "the office environment is insane, big business is ridiculous, it's not just you." My laughter was mostly "oh, yeah, I have been there, I am not alone." It was a relief. I bought the collections for when I needed validation.

I even bought one of his text books. (The title escapes me now, sorry.) I read the first few pages with interest, which slowly morphed to horrific fascination. There were some useful ideas in it, but he would assemble them to say "Therefore, be a huge asshole to everyone." Not that he outright declared that. I wound up reading it in much the same way I read "Atlas Shrugged."

(I don't recommend this, btw, but I'm a writer. I study writing. Especially writing I disagree with, because writing an effective argument against something demands I make the best possible case FOR that that something.)

Like Rand, Adams' work makes no provision for the future, the community, or children. "Where are the children?" is a useful lens for evaluating work purporting to be moral guidance. Not that you personally must have children, but your broader community needs them and the little buggers need food and schooling and safety.

I stopped reading the comic religiously, occasionally dipping in when specific ones crossed my feed.

But as an office drone, that feeling of acknowledgement was POWERFUL. Nobody else in the mainstream press was saying "gee, this place is fucked up."

That support is far easier to find today.

If anybody is wondering if it is morally acceptable to play Scott Adams adventure games following the recent bout of newspapers dropping Dilbert cartoons.

Yes. Yes it is perfectly ok.

The Scott Adams that's famous for writing Adventure and many other classic computer games is not the racist intolerant arsehole that wrote Dilbert. They're two very different people.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Adams_(game_designer)

Running “experiments” on other people without their consent is unethical. If I do that during my psychology studies I’ll be in serious trouble, possibly career-ending.

But tech people just call it a “quick hack”, “user research” or “a/b testing” and think it’s fine.

Love that the Transit Costs Project report is getting some press!

Now let's fix this mess.

https://slate.com/business/2023/02/subway-costs-us-europe-public-transit-funds.html

Please come to our event launching the Transit Costs Project conclusion this Friday; if you're interested, RSVP here so that building security knows about you. https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1c2QaljIjnFFzW9Vm1arzUU8PKLSGaD9_4PVkDAogFTQ/edit

It is time, my trans sibs. Send it around the Fediverse. (FULL VIEW NESSESARY)

#transgender #trans #meme #Blahaj #nonbinary #agender #transfem #blahaj #lgbt #lgbtq #boost #alttext #fediverse #memes #transmasc #gender #shark #plush

I wrote down some remarks on why the whole "Metaverse" narrative basically only makes sense if one ignores that the Internet happened. Oh yeah and it's also largely middle-aged men nostalgia.

https://tante.cc/2023/02/22/an-alternative-that-would-never-be/

OK, I'm disheartened about the state of tech in 2023. I figure that's the main reason I don't feel excited to be working in IT in general anymore.

Feels like everywhere I turn I hear about some dystopian shit that either reinforces systemic oppression or invents a new way to mess things up for us.

BUT! I feel like this is also largely because not many people/orgs report on positive developments in tech.

So here's my request to you if you've read this far - what positive developments in tech/IT/science have you recently heard about? What new cool thing did you make to solve a real problem (as opposed to a problem invented by VC)? It can be big or small - I just need some tech wins in my timeline :)

(boosts appreciated)

#technology #tech #IT #development #programming