Kind reposts

instead of “cocktail hour” events at conferences can we instead have “kitten hour” where we go to a cat cafe and speak quietly about nerd stuff over soothing tea?

🦊 I wrote a new book, called YOU DESERVE A TECH UNION. It’s coming out *real* soon. (I’m freaking out a little tbh!!) If you’d like to support the book ~slash~ get the word out, here’s how you can help! https://ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/street-team/ #YDATUbook #unions #TechUnions #1u #publishing #books #bookstodon

#Zoom just changed their terms and conditions to include using anyone's video and audio for training #AI with no option for opting out. You too can help train #deepfake s! Living with a disabled spouse, I used Zoom a lot to get through the ongoing global pandemic. What alternatives are out there for remote teaching/meetings? #BoycottZoom

I don't understand why abusive AI is so attractive to people.

Attached: 4 images @TechnicallyRon@Twitter.com: "I took 1 star reviews of #Barbie from furious men on letterboxd and put them on the posters because it makes the film seem ever cooler." That last one has to be a guy who doesn't understand why he is so attracted to the Kens. #Feminist #PinkAcidTrip #Gay #AlienatingDangerousAndPerverse https://twitter.com/TechnicallyRon/status/1683058689224179712

I don't know how to convince more workers in tech that we need unions. We sorely do and I'm hoping that the strikes are showing why. That's why I can't wait for @beep@follow.ethanmarcotte.com's book about tech unions at https://abookapart.com/products/you-deserve-a-tech-union to come out. It's cheaper than an O'Reilly subscription and will put you into what will make the industry and the industries we touch so much better.

Attached: 1 image Today I discovered that not only is July #Disability Pride Month but also that we have a flag. It is so well done and extremely meaningful. It was created by Ann Magill, a disabled writer. The entire thing will not fit into the thumbnail but if you open the image, it will tell you what each color and flag feature stands for. It is also in the alt text if you are unable to open it. #disabled #accessibility #cerebralpalsy #adhd #autism #OCD #PTSD #bipolar #depression #invisibleillness (& more!)

you don't have to be open-minded towards corporations, they're not people, and they are legally obligated to eat us when the money's right

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People seem to really have bought into the capitalist version of open source where software is still a product that requires support and marketing and a roadmap and exists to serve a user community separate and apart from the project. But a whole lot of open source is really just a sharing economy. It’s devs doing something they found useful and deciding to share it rather than hoard it. Those devs don’t owe anyone extra labor just because they chose to share.

ask not what your country can do for you. ask why they aren’t doing literally any of it

trash jones (@jzux)Thu, 08 Jun 2023 19:24 +0000

Why aren’t the “godfathers” of AI talking about the massive data theft from artists & their lawsuits eg? Because that discourse is too beneath their genius brains to cover? They have to talk about grand endeavors like SAVING HUMANITY? Because their practices would be implicated?

@timnitGebru@dair-community.social on Mastodon (@timnitGebru)Sun, 04 Jun 2023 01:50 +0000

I love my cat so much. does she know. does she understand when I kiss her little head

Attached: 1 image Nothing has changed.

you don't lose your engineers because they're solving dumb technical problems, but because leadership is bad. if leadership makes some sense then people do the work they need to do.

We spend roughly 10x as much time reading code as we do writing it. A tool or technique that makes you twice as "productive" at writing code *at best* makes you 5% more productive over all. Making your code easier to understand will have 10x the impact. But that doesn't sell tools or put developers out of work, so you won't be reading about it in Forbes.

Humans doing the hard jobs on minimum wage while the robots write poetry and paint is not the future I wanted

Karl Sharro (@KarlreMarks)Mon, 15 May 2023 08:34 +0000

Tech speakers, it's 2023. Stop using moms as your example of a non-technical audience. It's wrong, its not funny, and whatever you were saying, now most of your audience is not thinking about it. Just use the exec team as an example instead and get on with your life.

I'm going to be really blunt here: if you don't care about trans people, if you even remotely think there's the slightest hint of merit to the blatant genocidal actions that are going on in the US right now, you can fuck right off from my projects, spaces, and communities. I don't give a fuck about "tech shouldn't be political" garbage takes. Tech is made by people and right-wing legislators in the US are trying to *kill* my colleagues right now. There is no tech without people.

Attached: 1 image #transrights #gender

Based in the UK? Do you have 15 minutes to help shape the Future of Open Source Software? Take our survey openuk.uk/state-of-open-… outputs feed into our reporting and economic anlysis #opensource #openuk

OpenUK (@openuk_uk)Fri, 19 May 2023 16:57 +0000

Boost this toot if you quietly say hello to dogs when you see them even if they can't hear you or have a strong fantasy of committing arson against billionaires

Getting accepted at a conference is great because you get to go to the conference, and getting rejected is great because you don't have to travel and you don't have to prepare a talk.

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Self or private diagnosis for neurospiciness is valid. Especially these days as it's damn near impossible to get help for mental health issues from the NHS right now.

People in security and computing have been saying for years - there's no cloud. There's just someone else's computer. Right now, there's no AI. There's just someone else's work. Stop calling generative text and image programs AI. It's inaccurate and insulting. They are just the evolution of corporate creative theft that's been going on as long as media corporations have existed.

When I was a kid, my dad had stacks of Fortran paper punch cards. Programming with punch cards on shared mainframes was a slow, deliberate process which required a lot of time, effort and coordinat...

forest dwelling communist on stolen land (@spaceca60314452)Sun, 14 May 2023 16:52 +0000

I absolutely do not have it in my soul to read another pithy blurb by some random exec on linkedin about how AI is transforming our lives when it's currently just regurgitating content stolen from elsewhere and for the last decade, "AI" has been a glossy shell disguising underpaid human labor.

🏆 CONGRATULATIONS! You have scrolled so far you found the Dopamine! ✨️🧠✨️ SHARE TO GIVE OTHERS DOPAMINE FOR EXTRA DOPAMINE. (📎1)

On remote/real-world working: both are good. If you never interact casually with your collaborators at work it is harder to find a unity of purpose. If you spend all day having serendipitous conversations you never write any code. When possible, why not some of each?

fellow tech workers, looking at the screenwriters guild striking, do you not feel that we too need a union? how many pointless layoffs have there been so these huge companies run by trust fund goons could do stock buybacks? we need a union.

A great practical website to help you vote tactically in the upcoming local elections.

I am really not a fan of all the managers & leaders posting "Oh, it was so hard today because I had to lay people off." It's 100x harder for the people who got laid off. Yeah you made some decisions and had some conversations. But you aren't the one who suddenly lost their job, who may not be able to make their mortgage or provide for themselves and their family, who is wondering if their career and experience is valid. Stop with the "woe is me" as a leader. It's a bad look.

stop firing people I like and instead abolish your c-suite.

pilnok 🔜 eat prey love (@Pilnok)Thu, 19 Jan 2023 21:37 GMT

For those who trust me: Goto your Amazon account, sign out of all your devices, everything, everywhere all your Echos (yes I know it's a pain), reset your password, delete 2FA and any tokens and reset them. Now. That doesn't include Fido / Yubikeys but does include Auth tokens. Do it now. As much a pain as it is to reset Echo and all smart devices, trust me, please do it. I can't tell you more yet, but I am being ethical and you need to actually realise I have a clue. It's been a scary day

So how does Mastodon pay its engineers? Mostly...it doesn't. Eugen and Claire are the only paid devs on Mastodon. Everyone else is making updates *for free*, as a hobby, on the side, after their day job. People are building CalcKey for free. People are building just about every fediverse product for free, as part of the open source community. It was particularly amusing when Elon said he wanted to open source the algorithm-- Jack Dorsey saying he wanted to create an open source protocol-- Nearly all of the Fediverse is open source. The algorithms are already open source. The protocol is a W3C standard (ActivityPub) just like HTML. The future these dopes have been trying to build already exists. There's just no money or power in it for them, so they have no interest and pretend it doesn't exist.

As mentioned in the above toot yesterday, the UK government are going to be scaring the pants off half the country at 3pm today with an emergency alert test. If you have a hidden phone you don't want someone finding out about, turn off emergency alerts in that phone's settings or turn the phone off. Otherwise it's very likely to make a loud noise once the test commences. Edit: Going through the replies suggests it's best to turn the SETTING off and NOT just the phone.

AI isn’t “intelligence”. It’s stolen data and artists’ stolen labour cherry-picked to conform to techbro programmer preferences. The speed of operation is a technological achievement, sure, but in the end it’s just Plagiarism 2.0.

Attached: 1 image Okay now I really need to block Google and Microsoft from anything I touch. It's been clear that this AI stuff is moving like a virus, but it's not like any disclosures are even given for this. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2023/ai-chatbot-learning/#lookup-table

We really missed an opportunity to call logging, monitoring, alerting, and observability LMAO 😹

Stop adding “AI” to every new product ever challenge [Impossible]

Looks like #VirginMedia is down across the UK. Even their error reporting page has crashed! https://www.virginmedia.com/help/service-status

Happy World Autism Awareness Day! To celebrate, I'm sharing my book (again): sparkleclass.files.wordpress.com/2021/05/autist… #Autism #WorldAutismDay

Rachel Morgan-Trimmer (@rachelmtrimmer)Sun, 02 Apr 2023 09:15 +0000

Y'all told me Andreesen was smart, Thiel was smart, Rabois was smart, Musk was smart, they have all outed themselves as lucky and dumb. You need to stop assuming being rich and being smart are the same.

April fools prank idea: unionize

I didn't see your email

K E L S E Y (@glumDumpst3r)Tue, 21 Mar 2023 19:04 GMT