AnarchistArtificer @ AnarchistArtificer @slrpnk.net

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2 yr. ago

I'm also sick of it, but I also sort of like how it's gone viral. I had a very non-techy friend mention it to me the other day. I feel like most of the people who I see talking about it are jazzed because it makes them feel seen. My friend, for example, said to me that before she learned of "enshittification", she felt like she was going mad because of how things don't seem to work like they used to, especially in tech; she said that for the longest time, she had assumed it must be something that she was doing wrong.

Being all like "I fucking love science" whilst perpetuating ignorance of what science actually is like

No it won't. Eco-fascist rhetoric like this is unproductive because it ignores the fact that the people who are most shielded from the harms of climate change are the ones most responsible for it.

Billionaires and others who are profiting most from pillaging the planet's resources are not the ones at risk here.

(N.b. I am not calling you an eco-fascist, just that this framing is commonly used by eco-fascists. Part of why I highlight this is because your use of this rhetoric may not be intentional)

It's frustrating how common IQ based things are still. For example, I'm autistic, and getting any kind of support as an autistic adult has been a nightmare. In my particular area, some of the services I've been referred to will immediately bounce my referral because they're services for people with "Learning Disabilities", and they often have an IQ limit of 70, i.e. if your IQ is greater than 70, they won't help you.

My problem here isn't that there exists specific services for people with Learning disabilities, because I recognise that someone with Down syndrome is going to have pretty different support needs to me. What does ick me out is the way that IQ is used as a boundary condition as if it hasn't been thoroughly debunked for years now.

I recently read "The Tyranny of Metrics" and whilst I don't recall of it specifically delves into IQ, it's definitely the same shape problem: people like to pin things down and quantify them, especially complex variables like intelligence. Then we are so desperate to quantify things that we succumb to Goodhart's law (whenever a metric is used as a target, it will cease to be a good metric), condemning what was already an imperfect metric to become utterly useless and divorced from the system it was originally attempting to model or measure. When IQ was created, it wasn't nearly as bad as it was. It has been made worse by years of bigots seeking validation, because it turns out that science is far from objective and is fairly easy to commandeer to do the work of bigots (and I say this as a scientist.)

I'm super dubious because Starmer has done very little to earn my trust, but I would be very keen to be surprised, or even proven wrong

This post has a title I can hear

What the fuck do we have hate crime laws for it not this guy? What the hell?

It's one reason why I like Lemmy so much — conversations around here are so small scale that I can be confident I'm talking to a human.

I saw an article recently that looked at the rates of suicide in Israeli soldiers. One guy, who featured heavily in the article, had killed himself after being an IDF bulldozer driver. The article tried to dial up sympathy for him, but additional coverage (in response to this article) highlighted that this guy had posted some pretty horrifying stuff on social media — stuff like videos and photos of him in Gaza, being pretty jovial as he drove through bodies and buildings. I wonder whether the PTSD he experienced afterwards was a sort of moral immune system, and that once he was away from the kind of military camaraderie that normalises atrocities, if he began to reflect on his part in this genocide. At least for him, we'll never know.

A Jewish, anti-Zionist friend who lived in Israel for a while said that it was disturbing to see how much the Holocaust was leveraged to make people feel scared and insecure. I imagine many members of the IDF do genuinely believe that most, if not all Palestinians hate all Jews and want them to die. That way, they can enthusiastically participate, believing that they are on the side of justice.

I once punched a Nazi at a gig, and I did enjoy it, because it feels good to be righteous and angry. Enough so that it makes me anxious about how easy it would be to lean into anger if it feels righteous.

That's an extreme case, but the point still stands. For example, right now, I'm pretty fat, because I haven't shifted the weight I gained over COVID. Even though I'm visibly way larger than I was, I'm not much heavier than I was pre-covid, because I've lost a heckton of muscle. It's insane to me that BMI will look at me pre-covid, and look at me now, and say "that's the same picture". Especially because I personally found that the best and safest way for me to lose weight was to focus on getting strong and fit first.

Quells surprise

That sounds somewhat like bread and butter pudding, but I'm not sure

Oh man, this makes me nostalgic. I used to do powerlifting, but I don't like peanut butter, and I remember cursing that fact

Sometimes I slice some red Leicester cheese on a small plate and microwave it for around 30 seconds, until it melts. Then I eat it with a teaspoon. I first had it when I was desperately hungry but that cheese was literally the only food I had in, and I liked it enough I did it again. (Red Leicester cheese is like cheddar, but it tends to have a distinctly nutty flavour to it).

I used to have chives growing on the windowsill and it always tickled me to sprinkle some chopped chives over the cheese puddle, because a chive garnish feels very fancy but this "meal" was incredibly trashy.

Who is David Kinne and what did he do?

I think being aware of the ongoing maintenance (and one's ability to do it) still feels productive in a prepping sense. It's sort of like meta-prepping? Like, I'd expect that in a disaster, your knowledge would be helpful in organising within your community. Certainly you'd fare better than me, as someone who has been fortunate enough to never have to consider emergency supplies.

I have a variety of blankets near my bed, of varying weight, warmth and texture. It's mostly because of autism related sensory preferences that vary across situations, but it's also great when hosting guests.

Congrats! I appreciate this post because I want to be where you are in the not too distant future.

Contributing to Open Source can feel overwhelming, especially if working outside of one's primary field. Personally, I'm a scientist who got interested in open source via my academic interest in open science (such as the FAIR principles for scientific data management and stewardship, which are that data should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable). This got me interested in how scientists share code, which led me to the horrifying realisation that I was a better programmer than many of my peers (and I was mediocre)

Studying open source has been useful for seeing how big projects are managed, and I have been meaning to find a way to contribute (because as you show, programming skills aren't the only way to do that). It's cool to see posts like yours because it kicks my ass into gear a little.

Unfortunately, learning about things doesn't always help. I'm still very scared of spiders, despite being big on team learning. Some fears are rational, some are irrational, and these have very different salves.

I'm not sure what definition you're referring to, but I don't see any reason why visualisation is necessary.

By analogy, I used to have a friend who was born with no sense of smell. This also greatly impacted his sense of taste. Despite this, he was an excellent chef. I once asked him about this apparent contradiction and he explained that because he knew this was something he lacked (it was discovered when he was a teenager), he had put extra work into learning how. He was very reliant on recipes at the beginning, because that was more formulaic and easier to iteratively improve. He most struggled with fresh ingredients that require some level of dynamic response from the cook (onions become stronger tasting as they get older, for example), but he said he'd gotten pretty good at gauging this through other means, like texture or colour or vegetables, and finding other ways of avoiding that problem (such as using tinned tomatoes, for consistency).

I found it fascinating that his deficits in taste/smell actually led to him being an above average cook due to him targeting it for improvement— I met him at university, where many of my peers were useless at cooking for themselves at first. To this, he commented that it wasn't just the extra effort, but the very manner in which he practiced; obviously he couldn't rely on himself to test how well he'd done, so he had to recruit friends and family to help give feedback, which meant he was exposed to a wide variety of preferences and ways of understanding flavour. He also highlighted that the sampling bias in my surprise — that all the times that he had cooked for me were things he had loads of experience cooking with and so he could work from knowledge about what works. Most people who had as much cooking skill and experience as he had would be way more able to experiment with new ingredients or cuisines, whereas my friend had to stick to what he knew worked.

I wonder whether aphantasic authors might feel similar to my friend — like they're operating from recipe books, relying on formulae and methods that they know work.