Oh, this just gets better. The HOA are proposing their "mysteriously blocks trans women wholesale" list into default Mastodon installs.
This would have the effect of completely isolating trans-run and trans populated servers from the rest of the fediverse.
I thought trans people had finally found a social media where we couldn't be subjected to a rug-pull. Turns out we absolutely can, and if they get their way, we will. Remove our ability to federate with anyone who isn't us and you basically wall us off inside a closed "bubble fediverse" which we can't see out of, and nobody else can see into.
I'm missing too much context, but I did see thegoodspace.neocities.org/ which (I think) is a review of some of the things blocked by thebadspace? I may be Doing It Rong, but I searched for a bunch of those instances at tweaking.thebad.space/search and e.g. tech.lgbt blahaj.social don't appear to be blocked (any more?)...
Tl;dr: lots of small trans run instances and single user instances of mostly queer trans feminine people.
It’s important to maintain an open mind but not so open that your brains fall out. the “Bad Space” (might as well call it the “Torment Plexus”) is a tool for blocking trans women.
Some of the blocks called out by this poster do seem to be appropriate. It's not enough that they "seem nice". Like, I recall specific problems. Note also that problematic DMs won't show up by looking at their public timeline and that a lot of instances don't bother to enforce their CoCs.
A huge percentage of fedi is trans, so seeing a high percentage of trans sites is not in and of itself a red flag. Alas, there are fashy trans people.
That said, many of the small instances are not blocked by babka, which is a server with proactive moderation, so, at least in some cases, the person doing the critiquing appears to be right.
@Charles ☭ H I think we're way past the benefit of the doubt here. I mean, it's standard transphobe playbook 101: portray the removal of trans women as a necessary step to "protect" some other minority. We've seen it happen with feminism, we've seen it happen with the LGB community, and now this.
If it keeps quacking like a duck, you eventually have to stop thinking it's probably a sheep.
witches.live, for example, has been into some well-dodgy stuff, the details of which I can't recall, but it was major drama at the time.
I don't know what's going on with tech.lgbt, but they're blocked by the server I'm on now, which is also a trans server.
I tend to argue against blocking mastodon.social, but it actually is very poorly moderated. In my own experience, antisemitic reply guys face no action. Apparently, racism is also tolerated. Just because they're big doesn't mean they're entitled to federation.
imo, federating with actual Nazi instances, like shitposter.club is a valid reason to block.
In general, I'm suspicious of shared block lists and it appears the algorithm used here is not one I consider appropriate. That said, I don't think that the lead devs or the proponents of the project set out to fuck up trans people. I think transphobia can be an emergent property of respectability politics and the algorithm/oversight needs to be reworked to mitigate this. And I'd like to see a manual review of the entire existiung list, especially of the ve
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witches.live, for example, has been into some well-dodgy stuff, the details of which I can't recall, but it was major drama at the time.
I don't know what's going on with tech.lgbt, but they're blocked by the server I'm on now, which is also a trans server.
I tend to argue against blocking mastodon.social, but it actually is very poorly moderated. In my own experience, antisemitic reply guys face no action. Apparently, racism is also tolerated. Just because they're big doesn't mean they're entitled to federation.
imo, federating with actual Nazi instances, like shitposter.club is a valid reason to block.
In general, I'm suspicious of shared block lists and it appears the algorithm used here is not one I consider appropriate. That said, I don't think that the lead devs or the proponents of the project set out to fuck up trans people. I think transphobia can be an emergent property of respectability politics and the algorithm/oversight needs to be reworked to mitigate this. And I'd like to see a manual review of the entire existiung list, especially of the very small instances.
There's a lot of accusations flying around about transphobia and racism that I don't think are helpful. But I also don't think the person who you've linked is arguing fully in good faith.
@Charles ☭ H Honestly, I have seen members of marginalised communities before being suckered into being useful idiots for organised transphobes, and they end up just as dangerous to us as the true believers.
So honestly, when the end result is equally hostile and dangerous, I find their motivations irrelevant.
People spent months arguing over whether Rowling was motivated by a misdirected urge to protect women, or whether she was just an uncomplicated hater of trans people, before she removed any doubt, to what end?
You and I are both old enough and jaded enough to have seen this exact same bullshit play out time and time again. We both know that trying to convert them, one misguided soul at a time, is entirely a waste of effort.
In this instance I have begun the process of firewalling myself off from the whole thing. If, some months or years hence, someone wants to delve into it and work out exactly who was motivated by what, then I hope they find some joy and utility in that.
I totally get where you're coming from. But I think there are some important differences here.
This is basically pre-alpha software. The lead developer has recognised that a problem exists. IMO, he has not yet found the right solution, but he is taking criticism and not making excuses.
The hypervisibility of the fuckups is on purpose, in that the devs want everything to be transparent so that they can find and fix things before it gets widely deployed. They are also actively soliciting feedback. nivenly.org/docs/papers/fsep/
Rowling never owned a "mistake" as she got radicalised.
You and I both have experience of two shared twitter blocklists. One you helped run and the other was the Wil Wheaton one, which I was on. Both of them were responding to real problems - which also exist on ActivityPub. One of these was run transparently and the other was really not. I feel this difference was at the root of why one was good and the other was horrible. This new project, wh
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I totally get where you're coming from. But I think there are some important differences here.
This is basically pre-alpha software. The lead developer has recognised that a problem exists. IMO, he has not yet found the right solution, but he is taking criticism and not making excuses.
The hypervisibility of the fuckups is on purpose, in that the devs want everything to be transparent so that they can find and fix things before it gets widely deployed. They are also actively soliciting feedback. nivenly.org/docs/papers/fsep/
Rowling never owned a "mistake" as she got radicalised.
You and I both have experience of two shared twitter blocklists. One you helped run and the other was the Wil Wheaton one, which I was on. Both of them were responding to real problems - which also exist on ActivityPub. One of these was run transparently and the other was really not. I feel this difference was at the root of why one was good and the other was horrible. This new project, which is still early days, is going for transparency.
I've seen the people behind it on fedi for years and they don't just seem nice, but have a good track record.
(I've also seen a *lot* of fashy trans people on here and I wish it weren't so, but a good block list is actually going to have a ton of trans people on it. IDK wtf is going on with some young trans women, but they're very into being Nazi-adjacent edgelords.)
@Charles ☭ H Ive defederated him now, but I have to say that the posts from him that I saw before that were very much not in the vein of “taking criticism and not making excuses”. Indeed, he came across as profoundly defensive, and much keener to attribute malign intentions to anyone highlighting issues than actually engage with what they were saying, save one post where he boosted his ally cred by saying he thought the word “girlcock” was fun.
@Alexandra Lanes I’m a high responder to exercise. It used to be a real problem in my 30s. After a couple of days of moderately strenuous activity I would literally be unable to walk.
Been vaguely aware of the latest Fedi drama. Been trying to ignore it, but it seems to have ended up at “trans people need to stop being so sensitive to people randomly assuming they’re disgusting perverts who the rest of society needs shielding from, it was a MISTAKE you guys”.
@cyborg I know that I, as a trans woman, am most active on the fediverse because other social media sites routinely use algorithmic moderation to flag out existence as “against community standards”, or some such.
I am so very tired of hearing that it’s a “bug”, every single time this happens.
@cy The "bug" in this case is a major conceptual flaw in the design, which basically was to create a stupid-simple CENTRALIZED blocklist aggregation tool that had no facility for documentation, review, appeal, auditing, moderation, etc. Basically "minimum viable product" [MVP] applied to a case where applying MVP methodology was guaranteed to cause harm.
@Charles ☭ H @cyborg I agree entirely. Meanwhile the censors are doing the whole “this navel gazing just distracts us from the real struggle” crap which has been the excuse for transphobia, homophobia and misogyny in liberation politics since the year dot.
So far it's just confusing, but I haven't read any of the books and it's probably been too long since I watched season one as I can't remember who anyone is or what they're trying to do!
Basically, every few hundred years the earth is hit by a solar flare powerful enough to pretty much destroy all modern tech, and probably give anyone flying in a plane at the time cancer.
These are much bigger than the Carrington Event, which was the last really big solar flare recorded.
One day, without warning, the sun will just wipe out tech slate clean.
And there is apparently nothing we can do about it.
@andrewducker as I understand it, there are kinda sorta some things we can do, if we’re able to anticipate it, which is why there are a bunch of researchers working on #heliophysics (aka #SolarWeather) to better understand these phenomena. I think the best defense we have is to shut down electrical grids if we anticipate impacts. Also, I think only the side facing the sun gets hit, so it’s not everywhere that’s impacted at once, for better or worse.
A thing I was recently wondering. For most of the world's population, what is the largest island they can get to, other than the one they are currently on, using only fixed links (ie bridges, tunnels etc. No boats or aircraft).
And I think the answer is very straightforwardly, "Great Britain".
But if you start on Great Britain, then what is it? (I am not counting the land mass of Asia/Africa/Europe as an "island")
Watched a video about that fateful Air France Concorde flight. It took 121 seconds from the point they lit the afterburners to start rolling to the point everyone died. For most of that it was probably profoundly obvious to the flight crew that they were going to die: the plane had two engines out, their wing was on fire, they were on the verge of a stall, their landing gear was fucked, they could not gain speed or height, and the aircraft was becoming uncontrollable.
They HAD to know they were going to die, and yet right to the point their short flight ended impacting a hotel at 200 knots, inverted, with the plane yelling, “pull up, pull up, pull up”, they acted utterly professionally.
@alastair One of my favourite facts about the Shuttle is the Return to Launch Site abort mode. Literally “spin ‘er around and blast back to base”.
The Shuttle would spin around, with the external tank still attached, and execute a burn until it has nullified its down range velocity and can start to head back to Kennedy Space Center. It would then jettison the ET and try to land.
@alastair There was once a plan to test this abort scenario for real, but the astronaut office vetoed it. They thought it was so dangerous it wasn’t worth testing even once.
This is how the Shuttle stack ended up being tested, “in production”, on STS-1.
The astronauts would rather fly an untested stack than try the ridiculously risky abort mode.
@alastair (I know they did the launch tests with the Enterprise orbiter, so it wasn’t completely untested, but it was still one of the most risky flights ever flown)
@alastair Yeah, it’s not as difficult as it sounds to spin it around when you’re above the dense atmosphere, but part of me would love to see 1970s technology, with a human being at the controls, slam it into reverse.
I have no idea if it's justified or not but I feel instinctively more confident in the system they had for ejecting the Saturn V command module, then it would parachute back down. I don't think that was ever deployed in an emergency though. In fact the Saturn V is among a minority of rockets that never exploded during launch or testing.
@alastair Apollo 12 was also struck by lightning, which wiped out the guidance and the telemetry. A single flight controller was able to figure out what had happened, and instructed the crew to flip a single switch that saved the mission.
If they hadn’t have fixed it, they would’ve had to abort.
I've tended to rank Apollo 13 as NASA's most impressive crewed mission, even more so than the ones that landed on the Moon, because so much of it was improvised.
Pilot dies after plane crashes during gender reveal party in Mexico
Alan Francisco Rangel of the Sinaloa Red Cross told CNN that paramedics treated the pilot at the crash site in San Pedro, Navolato and then took him to a local hospital, where he died.
Gotta love how several people (including the one shooting the movie) see the plane breaking apart but don’t even react to it, let alone give a shit, because they’re too busy with IT’S A GIRL!!!
I discover (via @Sarah Brown's recent virality) that Republic of Ireland road signs use Transport Heavy even for white lettering. Apart from putting English-language place names in all caps, I'd been wondering what seemed different about them to my English eyes. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_sig…
I am in the showers at the marina (yes, TERFs, the women’s showers. Go fuck yourselves). They have the radio on. They are talking to a “psychotherapist” who explains how, because of the iron in your blood, you can get rid of “negative energy” by touching a radiator to “ground yourself” for 20 minutes a day.
Did the Enlightenment actually happen, or did I imagine it?
Was that the person who wrote an article in a HiFi magazine that I read some years ago?
The writer advised connecting your speaker cables to a battery from time to time to move tired electrons along the wire and out, allowing the battery to refresh them with new ones.
It scares me that I’m above average intelligence and how easily I can say that. Because I’m not very smart per se, I’ve met actually smart people and boy am I a drooling idiot in comparison.
The things you can convince people of really scares me, because it’s almost always extremely stupid stuff. Some might seem harmless (in this case the idiot looses 20 mins a day), but a lot of it is very dangerous:(
Completely besides the point of the post, I had to look up about and learnt about TERF... Interesting how we are identifying groups of people into smaller groups with acronyms.
Dear Vodafone. That you managed to make registration for your site not work with the built in password manager for iPhones, one of the most popular mobile phones, is deeply unfortunate. It’s also an impressive achievement, because iCloud Keychain works nearly everywhere. You actually have to go out of your way to bugger it up.
But you, a mobile phone company, have managed to make your mobile site not work with this most common of mobile phones. I am impressed with the amount of effort it must have taken to be this incompetent.
Why do you think "techbros" are a homogenous amorphous mass with a single will? Do you even have a working definition of what a "techbro" is? This sounds like classical prejudice to me - invent a group, then ascribe all opinions by one member to the group as a whole.
With enough people solving captchas constantly we'll be able to use them to help cars solve ethical problems on the fly like should I swerve to avoid the small child and hit the old lady
You can tell your covid requirements are pseudoscience tickybox woo when they emphasise “hand gel”, which is completely fucking useless against covid, over “face masks”, which are not.
And also when your activity is outdoors in the countryside.
Seems there's a reasonable consensus that contact transmission is a pretty small risk, and certainly a *much* lower risk than airborne transmission, but divided opinions on whether it's completely negligible or merely small
@Sarah Brown I assumed all that stuff was a holdover from before we understood Covid. I don’t plan to pack hand gel anyway. Except the sort that comes with oestrogen in.
I fully agree re covid but I do like hand gel provision for protection against _other_ varieties of crud which are spread on surfaces - colds, flu, norovirus, and so on.
@Adam With the caveat that a lot of the orthodoxy around those viruses also originates from the same utterly wrong assumptions that made the WHO state that covid couldn’t possibly be airborne until they evidence that it was became overwhelming.
I’m not saying personal hygiene with regard to hand cleanliness isn’t important: it is. It’s much more an issue for gastrointestinal stuff though, and is unhelpful to focus on with diseases (including the ones you mention), that the vast majority of people catch through inhalation.
Things are pretty good for me. Lots of people care about me and it seems to me that when I spend time with them I like myself a little more. I even had a moment of actually appreciating how I look. Some of my fears about the future have started to seem more manageable and navigable, and I've had a pretty good day today, organising for a day's walking in the Peak District next weekend and lounging around before watching what was a pretty exciting Italian Grand Prix.
And so why do I find myself suddenly feeling slightly low and on the verge of tears? There's nothing to sadden me, I'm sitting in the summerhouse with the laptop and the new bureau I rescued from Ravensworth Gardens. It's a lovely afternoon. And yet there are tears welling up and something catching at the back of my throat.
I've taken antidepressants as usual, per schedule, and similarly hormones. Whyyyyyyy.
@ceb Could well be though I rather expected most of that to be over and done with by now! Bloody hell I’ve been on hormones for three years now. How did that happen?
Is it possible that it's more "moreness" than "sadness"? I think a certain kind of sadness is maybe the most reasonable state in reaction to life, even to its good things. Not the full-grown ravages depression of course. Also, it's definitely the right time of year to feel Septembery. Is it The Waste Land or Four Quartets which starts in the garden in autumn?
@kæt The Waste Land starts in the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land. It’s Burnt Norton which opens Four Quartets with a rose garden in the autumn heat.
Ah yes, the Four Quartets! (Roses in Four Quartets; hyacinths in The Waste Land).
At the start of 4Q I always think of someone a bit like Eliot himself, a bit like someone like Bertrand Russell or Whtehead, wandering through an autumn garden of a dilapidated stately home maybe after some great sadness and shattering, perhaps the great war (1), kicking up leaves, kicking up dust, running your hand along the sheets covering the furniture in the west wing remembering the great Edwardian dances, etc.
(1)via a linking image of my own: the way people can and have dry-drowned in disused fountains filled with leaves, from the CO2 of the decay, like the trenches in the war).
@kæt Really no need to apologise. Feelings often come out best as images for me, and you’ve always had a facility with the metaphorical that prompts rather than challenges, that is never a tangent but always a chord.
I suppose maybe I just mean feeling things more intensely, but also accessing things previously barred, or synthesising, reflecting, assessing, etc, those kinds of things in that general bucket.
Discussing the time @Zoë O'Connell and I were talking our boat, Scarlet, into Shoreham harbour when I saw light glint through a thin nylon thread in the air in front of me.
“Fishing line!” I yelled, more out of instinct as it posed no threat to us, surrounded, as we were, by the stainless steel rigging lines of our boat.
The line made contact with the starboard shroud. This did … very little to our 8000 kilogram metres per second of momentum. The line turned into a delicate gossamer spiral in front of us as it instantly broke.
The fisherman on the harbour wall high above us started jumping up and down, yelling.
Like, you cast your line across the entrance to a working harbour…
…in front of an approaching boat…
…which can’t see your line…
…and even if it did, cannot manoeuvre out of the way or stop in time even if it wanted to.
So, congratulations, I gu
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Discussing the time @Zoë O'Connell and I were talking our boat, Scarlet, into Shoreham harbour when I saw light glint through a thin nylon thread in the air in front of me.
“Fishing line!” I yelled, more out of instinct as it posed no threat to us, surrounded, as we were, by the stainless steel rigging lines of our boat.
The line made contact with the starboard shroud. This did … very little to our 8000 kilogram metres per second of momentum. The line turned into a delicate gossamer spiral in front of us as it instantly broke.
The fisherman on the harbour wall high above us started jumping up and down, yelling.
Like, you cast your line across the entrance to a working harbour…
…in front of an approaching boat…
…which can’t see your line…
…and even if it did, cannot manoeuvre out of the way or stop in time even if it wanted to.
So, congratulations, I guess. You “caught” a whopper: 4 tonnes! Shame you couldn’t reel it in. Go tell your friends about the one that got away.
Just had the whole “pharmacist looks on in pity while you stand there, clammy and sweating, as they prescribe UTI antibiotics” experience. Such fun and joy.
@Conor Mc Bride in theory you can drive the length and breadth of the country in a car with no brakes, no airbags, no seatbelt, and a spike in the middle of the steering wheel and arrive perfectly safely. The car can still provide the essential function of getting from A to B, just as C can provide the essential function of implementing software algorithms.
And, in my case, no driving licence (or indeed, ability)! But driving is the right analogy, because people lie to themselves routinely about how well they do it. I miss the old (I have race memory) times when you had all day to regret last night's botched program run and really think hard about tonight's. I think that might be another driving analogue: the car is remarkably good at protecting the driver from their incompetence.
not a software person, but isn't lead piping easy to put in but bad for everyone using and touching it ever after, while software in C is devilish for the original programmer but quite fine once running?
The biggest problem with C is that pretty much nothing gets checked, and even that it’s not actually possible to check it. If you code perfectly and defend yourself against all possible rogue input, you MIGHT be OK. If something goes wrong, chances are it won’t even be caught until several billion CPU cycles later when the damage it’s done has crashed around in memory like an alpha particle in DNA.
It is common, for example, to write functions which handle multiple types of data. In C, since it doesn’t really have a type system to speak of, you pass the package and then tell it what sort of data you have passed.
It doesn’t check. It can’t check. The only validation that you’ve passed a Spong and not a Wibble is you saying, “this is a Spong, scout’s honour”.
So then you execute Spong handling code and, oops, you actually passed a Wibble, and it goes and corr
The biggest problem with C is that pretty much nothing gets checked, and even that it’s not actually possible to check it. If you code perfectly and defend yourself against all possible rogue input, you MIGHT be OK. If something goes wrong, chances are it won’t even be caught until several billion CPU cycles later when the damage it’s done has crashed around in memory like an alpha particle in DNA.
It is common, for example, to write functions which handle multiple types of data. In C, since it doesn’t really have a type system to speak of, you pass the package and then tell it what sort of data you have passed.
It doesn’t check. It can’t check. The only validation that you’ve passed a Spong and not a Wibble is you saying, “this is a Spong, scout’s honour”.
So then you execute Spong handling code and, oops, you actually passed a Wibble, and it goes and corrupts something.
But the something it corrupts isn’t even necessarily just the stuff you passed it. It essentially starts randomly firing a machine gun into the crowd. And the crowd is the rest of your program’s data.
If you’re lucky, it fires a bullet somewhere the operating system cares about enough to use the memory management unit to protect and the operating system immediately kills the process. If not, something randomly gets corrupted, and you find out … later by … some means.
@Sion [main] Pip has never considered a relationship with a woman before and kissed Stella, who has had bad relationships with women “exploring their sexuality”. They’ve agreed to a date night. (Not been following it so much this week so I don’t know if either party has self described)
I hate posting $#!t like this, but people keep buying it when these same people say they 'just have concerns.'
"Ellis said that we should 'have the moral conversation' about whether trans adults 'should be permissible in the United States...'"
On Salem Media, Jenna Ellis and Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey push states to ban health care for trans people | Media Matters for America mediamatters.org/salem-media-g…
Translation State by Ann Leckie is batshit insanity Sci Fi at its finest. Seriously, it's a profoundly good book. If you liked the Ancillary Justice trilogy, you will adore this!
Matthew Vernon
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •The Good Space
thegoodspace.neocities.orgSarah Brown
in reply to Matthew Vernon • •@Matthew Vernon They “fixed” it. Previously a single malicious report would get your trans instance banned,
Now it needs two.
I expect it won’t take long.
Alexandra Lanes
in reply to Sarah Brown • •