@betsythemuffin@wandering.shop avatar

betsythemuffin

@betsythemuffin@wandering.shop

autodidactic to a fault. nolite te bastardes carborundum. technically not a Hugo award winner. she/they.

Chemical biology re-entry undergrad; into plastic valorization, soil remediation, and other cleantech. Former software engineer, for my sins. Unabashedly techno-utopian, #solarpunk, #hopepunk. Working to make partially-automated luxury anarchism more evenly distributed.

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betsythemuffin, to random
@betsythemuffin@wandering.shop avatar

Did you know that it used to be legal to fire women for not wearing pantyhose?

The "clothing according to biological sex" people want to bring back the laws that allowed that.

danilo, to random
@danilo@hachyderm.io avatar

We need to change our social norms. The extent to which extravagant, self-indulgent despair has become normalized is simply bad behavior, and it should be treated as such

Dumping a bucket of hopelessness at strangers’ feet in this way should receive the same social rejection as walking up to someone enjoying lunch and farting in their face.

Who raised you like that?

betsythemuffin,
@betsythemuffin@wandering.shop avatar

@danilo @jessamyn the difference between "this is shit [and will always be shit]" and "this is shit, let's grab a shovel"

betsythemuffin, to random
@betsythemuffin@wandering.shop avatar

My local community college planetarium has an old-school analog projector. They've had it since the 70s and it still runs.

Can you imagine a 50-year old digital projector still working?

The more I decenter the SaaS industry's notions of maintenance and repair in my head, the more appalled I am at the standard it's lowered the world to.

betsythemuffin, to random
@betsythemuffin@wandering.shop avatar

Coming from a fanfiction background, two things trouble me about the standard anti-AI copyright discourse.

  1. Blurred rhetorical lines between copyright (a legal construct) and creators' moral rights to their works;
    1a. in a way that implies creators have an infinite moral right to control derived works.

  2. An implied belief that putting more law on it will always empower rather than endanger independent creators.

betsythemuffin,
@betsythemuffin@wandering.shop avatar

Contrariwise, the story of my teens and early twenties was the story of seeing the independent queer art that (very literally at points) kept me alive suppressed time and time again because of overactive copyright enforcement, or fears thereof; because of some creators' overactive sense of their moral rights.

Questions of copyright law are always really questions of power, and power will never favor independent art no matter how the law is arranged.

betsythemuffin,
@betsythemuffin@wandering.shop avatar

However, DMCA exemptions are only good for three years at a time, so MAINTAINING the legality of DVD ripping is itself a process.

The most recent exemption submission was in 2023. It directly addressed digital preservation needs regarding art that has been removed from streaming services; it also addressed the digital preservation of politically suppressed but newsworthy video such as Seb Gorka's antisemitic interviews.

This is an ongoing fight. I hate seeing it undermined by the well-meaning.

betsythemuffin,
@betsythemuffin@wandering.shop avatar

A bit of history: under the DMCA, it is by default illegal to rip DVDs to take clips from them, EVEN IF the clip will be used for a legal/fair-use purpose such as to illustrate a point in the classroom.

We became able to legally rip DVDs for fair-use purposes in large part because of the Organization for Transformative Works' advocacy on behalf of fan videos as art. (If this surprises you, perhaps you have some internalized sexism to work on.)

betsythemuffin,
@betsythemuffin@wandering.shop avatar

Anyway. To close out this thread, here's three fan videos that were critical to the OTW securing its initial DVD-ripping DMCA exemption: Sisabet & Luminosity's "Women's Work," Luminosity's "Vogue," and lim's "Us."

https://archive.org/details/WomensWork106MB
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_NrUD1iqME
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yxHKgQyGx0

Celebrate all art, including derivative works.

Don't advocate for copyright regimes that would take it away.

betsythemuffin, to random
@betsythemuffin@wandering.shop avatar

I'm upset about losing affirmative action, but letting the educational-equity frame center on Harvard admissions is losing the plot.

What's tuition like at your local community college? Does it have a range of class times and structures (in-person, hybrid, online) to accommodate different learning needs & adult commitments? How does it balance both technical/trades education and liberal arts education? What kind of on-ramp does it have for less academically prepared folks?

betsythemuffin, to random
@betsythemuffin@wandering.shop avatar

Listening to people in my life talking about how they are Reactifying old Rails MPAs or rewriting React SPAs to a Hotwire-driven MPA style or.....

It really does leave me wondering how I bore it.

In chemistry the answer to "why is this inelegant" is "quantum" and I can take being mystified by something that also boggled Einstein.

In software the answer is "because someone at a FAANG wanted a staff promo" and that's much harder to take, emotionally.

betsythemuffin, to random
@betsythemuffin@wandering.shop avatar

Software engineering friends:

-- How many times have you cautioned against premature optimization?

-- How concerned are you with datacenter-related energy consumption and e-waste generation?

-- What do you intend to do about the relationship between these things?

betsythemuffin, to random
@betsythemuffin@wandering.shop avatar

Looking for Rails or frontend coaching, architecture consulting, or good ol' hands-on-keyboard delivery?

I have some availability beginning mid-May and stretching through mid-August. 15+ years experience. References consistently describe me as "one of the best folks I've ever worked with when it comes to helping folks reach a shared [technical] understanding."

Email at betsy.haibel@gmail.com.

betsythemuffin, to random
@betsythemuffin@wandering.shop avatar

Hey folks, are there any language learning apps out there that actually address grammar as a first-class concept? I know that immersion-style is fashionable now and conjugating verbs is unfashionable, but to me full-immersion-low-grammar alternates between slow and disorienting.

betsythemuffin, to random
@betsythemuffin@wandering.shop avatar

Hey Masto-verse!

I am thinking about getting my genes sequenced, but I'm aggressively disinterested in the privacy practices of e.g. 23 and Me.

Looking for perspectives on how people who have done privacy-conscious personal genetics have evaluated providers for privacy and security concerns; secondarily interested in tools they have used to interpret this data.

(Looking ONLY for sequencing perspectives, NOT general genetic testing advice. Or for randos' commentary on adjacent topics.)

betsythemuffin, to random
@betsythemuffin@wandering.shop avatar

Have such complex feelings about the smartphone mental health debate.

On the one hand, smartphones are obviously making most people's mental health worse. But on the other hand, the elite moral panic about smartphones making kids "depressed" is clearly a code for them making kids "trans," when you look at the people involved, and I'm not interested in advancing transphobes' arguments for them.

betsythemuffin, to random
@betsythemuffin@wandering.shop avatar

still desperate for a credible comparison between the carbon cost of AI and the carbon cost of streaming video

betsythemuffin, to random
@betsythemuffin@wandering.shop avatar

From @lcamtuf, https://infosec.exchange/@lcamtuf/112182346314363746

"The real issue with a lot of small, foundational OSS libraries is just that there isn’t enough to do. They were written decades ago by a single person — and beyond bugfixes, they are not really supposed to change much."

-- When is software allowed to be done? How can software become "done"?

What if the cracks appearing aren't merely corporate greed, but rather the profound expense of the current software maintenance model being unsustainable?

betsythemuffin, to random
@betsythemuffin@wandering.shop avatar

Just discovered that a firm called Kimble Group has been shopping me around as a software developer based on my LinkedIn profile, without my awareness or consent. SO GROSS.

betsythemuffin, to random
@betsythemuffin@wandering.shop avatar

Really freaked out by the casual antisemitism I have seen in so much anti-Israel organizing.

(criticizing Israel is not inherently anti-Semitic, and YET so many people choose to be anti-Semitic while doing so!)

I am happy to talk through the dynamic I'm seeing with anyone privately but I am not comfortable with having public conversations about this.

I've found the following reading list helpful as well: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fwmYHzxJuURMg_iTO-K5XetyDdTEX4-syvyI84J8Jvg/edit

danilo, to random
@danilo@hachyderm.io avatar

My first exposure to the mechanics of neoliberalism came in high school, when I sold consoles, phones, PDAs, cameras, and appliances for a certain blue and yellow retailer.

Managers would patrol the store with a little clipboard with hourly figures on how each department was succeeding, or not, at attaching high margin supplements to customer orders:

Cables, extended warranties, credit cards.

The store was brand new, with no baselines established. So a conspiracy emerged.

betsythemuffin,
@betsythemuffin@wandering.shop avatar

@glyph @danilo this is the part where I Kool-Aid man in and recommend Red Plenty (Spufford) and the first half* of Seeing Like a State (Scott).

  • The first part of the book is sufficient to advance Scott's thesis, and it starts to get repetitive after. There is also a chapter (?) (more than a chapter?) that is Scott taking Wendell Berry literally rather than poetically, which grates once you have read enough of @sarahtaber 's work. So, stop reading once bored, basically.
betsythemuffin, to random
@betsythemuffin@wandering.shop avatar

Many of the readings for my Asian Art class this semester are online resources. I want to print them to PDF and put them on my tablet so that I can read them offline, away from my laptop the Distraction Machine.

This is unpossible in many cases because of bad SPA practice, and unpossible in several others because the print stylesheet has header banners actively obscuring text.

But sure, traditional front-end is "outdated" and "useless" and also too easy to bother learning......

danilo, to random
@danilo@hachyderm.io avatar

alongside the TikTok ban it's wild to see the government deciding that certain shit is definitely evil, but domestic companies should still get to do it

https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/20/24106991/house-data-broker-foreign-adversaries-bill-passes

betsythemuffin,
@betsythemuffin@wandering.shop avatar

@danilo Creating enforcement mechanisms forces the government to grapple with the scale of the problem overall; and we have admitted that there is at least one circumstance where this is unacceptable.

Both make expanding the zone of legal unacceptability MUCH easier in the future.

betsythemuffin, to random
@betsythemuffin@wandering.shop avatar

One thing I struggle with, with regard to leftist/pop-leftist approaches to environmentalism, is:

Our modern medical supply chain is dependent on fossil fuels to a boggling extent. Single-use sterile items; packaging for same; pharmaceutical precursors; etc. Obviously, defossilization of these supply chains is mandated --

but it's a hard problem. There are no quick or absolute fixes. So when I hear "just shut it down," I hear "my disabled brother is an acceptable casualty."

betsythemuffin,
@betsythemuffin@wandering.shop avatar

More generally, it drives me nuts that sloganeering and anti-institutional sentiment become excuses for disengagement from supply chain and lifecycle analysis. Hard problems are handwaved as shit "corporations" should fix, that the revolution will magically fix --

-- but thermodynamics cares little for moral suasion, folks. Transcending modern, environment-destroying approaches' limits requires a shitton of research, development, and operationalization work. & I see folks stepping down not up.

betsythemuffin, to random
@betsythemuffin@wandering.shop avatar

Periodic reminder:

Are you feeling dispirited by the software industry? Does every job you look at feel like another bullshit way of transferring working-class money into VC pockets?

YOU CAN LEAVE!

It will mean less money, but you can leave.

Whether it's as small a step as a janky university webmaster job, or as large a one as retraining, you can leave. I have been so much happier for leaving.

Always happy to talk through logistics of this with the curious.

betsythemuffin,
@betsythemuffin@wandering.shop avatar

@williampietri Another thing I have observed in Big-Software-Leavers (not only myself) is an increased ability to be in right relation with non-SWEs. The weird clannish hierarchies of the tech industry all too often seep into one's sense of relationships outside of it. It's overcomable, but it's easier when one doesn't need to overcome it.

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