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THE BIGGEST NEWS! Rob and I are offering up a hand-signed hardback, first edition/first printing copy of Monstrous Regiment straight from the Pratchett archives. Those who know the story will know why it’s a pertinent one for this cause.
32auctions.com/organizations/1…
Monstrous Regiment (Signed 1st edition)
Auction item 'Monstrous Regiment (Signed 1st edition)' hosted online at 32auctions.32auctions
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I won't be able to partake in this but thank you for this!
Not only do you carry on Terry's legacy, but you are so much of an amazing person in your own right and I love your work.
Please help push back against the transphobic UK Supreme Court judgment. Philippa East has created an excellent letter that you can co-sign using this link. forms.gle/FZXBWzWFx4fHhPAL8 #TransRightsAreHumanRights
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You know the worst thing about today's ruling? It doesn't take into account the primal, overwhelming power of - and I'm going to use the old term - gender dysphoria.
Most cis folk haven't experienced it, though many cis queer peeps know what I mean from a different context. The compulsion to live free or die. I wouldn't be alive now if I hadn't transitioned.
The lucky ones transition before they get there but the rest of us hit a point in our lives where it's transition or die and that's not hyperbole. I always wanted to see a world where transition happened for all before that point, because I barely made it through. That hope is pretty much gone.
Call us mentally-ill if you like. I don't care. I live, or I don't. For the sake of preventing some vile people feeling a bit uncomfortable, you've put our lives in real danger, judges of the Supreme Court.
You're disgusting bigots and any remaining respect I once had for the law has gone. We're outlaws again.
Please boost this unless you don't give a shit.
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The Transphobic Guardian practically jumping for joy today, as is 'White Feminism'
How well things are going for that rich bigot in her castle, a new TV Series, Trans people being punished for simply existing.....and Westminster just shrugs and follows Gilead's lead
I feel ill, as a Queer man I fill ill and alone in this country, it's not hatred mostly I see, it's indifference....so when the Fash come for us, nobody will make a stand.
I don't feel British at all.
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Sorry man
You're just a victim of the human condition, apathy 🤷
Or
🎵💃🕺📯Derrr da derrr
🥳👯♀️📯
Da der da der dadud derrr🎵
YOU CAN GO DOWN DANCING!
FUCK EM
Young man
there's no need to feel down
I said, young man
pick yourself off the ground
I said, young man
'cause you're in a new town
There's no need
to be un happy
THEY MARCH YOU TO THE TRENCH, ASK IF YOU WANT A SMOKE/BLINDFOLD, TAKE THE SMOKE, KEEP DANCING. EVEN IF THEY TELL YOU TO STOP, WHAT ARE THEY GUNNA DO, SHOOT YOU¿
Ah, I see that GNOME has started throwing X out the airlock. According to the Fedora 42 release notes, GDM no longer supports X-based sessions, leaving Cinnamon, XFCE, and various other desktops out to lunch, and if you switch to another login manager, GNOME itself may not work properly.
Good job, everyone, right when Windows 11 could give desktop Linux a great opportunity to pick up users.
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Good practice for RSS Feeds, about which there seems to have been some fedi chat mendeddrum.org/@fanf/114324807…
linkspam!RSS/Atom feed best practise.
kevincox.ca/2022/05/06/rss-fee…
saved 2025-03-27 dotat.at/:/JTER8.html
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One of the more unhelpful trauma responses that’s resurfaced this year is the fear of copying. When I was a kid I was mocked for picking up interests from friends, so I used to try hard not to do that or to be cautious or contrary in how I developed interests.
I learned not to do this at some point, especially with transition initially (which I think I knew had to be about me and nobody else whatever my brain said) but it’s come back this year. I have to fight against an urge to reject for myself anything people I know find positive.
I always feel there should be a mirror image of the heart emoticon "❤". We talked about this - after all, Unicode should offer some possibilities - and so far we have:
E> - robot heart
∈> - lewd Jack-in-a-box
∑> - sideways cat.
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#BabyGoatCountdown
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This is what I try to communicate to team leaders, that even looking past all the obvious reasons for equality and inclusion, choosing NOT to take full advantage of the skills available in your team is simply bad for business.
The (mostly) men in this world are wasting such an immense amount of talent.
One of the hard bits of social media is feeling that the approval of people on the internet is important, and that their disapproval is to be avoided at all costs, even if it means avoiding discussion for fear of having a Wrong Take.
I'm working on myself to change this.
Rust is indeed woke. It's woke technology that embodies a woke understanding of what it means to be a programming language.
Blog post, by me.
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I agree with this post, and think it's an insightful perspective.
However, I think Rust faces a challenge with complexity. I completely failed to get any of the rest of the team to work on a Rust project I'd developed on leaving my last programming job cos they got stuck learning Rust (before they saw my code!)
Folk found things like co-/contra-variant lifetimes befuddling. I couldn't even convince people they need to know the difference between heap and stack. Not least, management stripped this exact question out of hiring interviews.
Things like async are a mistake, I think. (A mistake I used in my project until I understood why), mainly because of the way they pile on things like pinning. I coped okayish, but the project failed because I was the only compsci degree-er.
I worry that Rust is turning into C++
I don't really think Rust can hope to be inclusive while it require so befuddling concepts. I hold out hopes for maybe Zig (I've not learnt it).
I have no problem with the community.
I do agree that Rust faces a challenge with complexity.
But, I think the problem in the language is much less severe than often imagined. One can write eg Easy Mode Rust - which is still a highly performant and reliable language.
I certainly wouldn't bother novices with lifetime variance; that's advanced stuff which you hardly ever have to worry about (and as ever, either if builds it's fine, or you're an expert doing unsafe). I think "heap vs stack" is another thing novices can ignore.
It doesn't help that there's still a fair amount of perf hacker thinking even in resources for total newbies.
A very real challenge is the way that Rust programs almost never compile first time, which can be deeply offputting to people who've been socialised to be afraid of error messages. I wish we could somehow persuade folks that compiler errors are completely normal and fine, so they feel free to go ahead and experiment.
People apparently don't realise that I moderate comments on my blog. They think that if they send a 1000-word screed complaining about "wokeism" that anyone (even me) will read it.
FTR, my practice is to moderate comments vigorously so as to try to maintain the space as both enlightening and pleasant.
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NEW
“We will deport you if we have evidence against you, and deport you if we do not”
On an extraordinary witness statement from the US government - and how it has adopted the logic of the Ducking Stool
By me, at Prospect
prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/l…
We’ll deport you if we have evidence against you, and if we do not
On an extraordinary witness statement by the US governmentwww.prospectmagazine.co.uk
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I'm reminded of the WWII internment of the Japanese-Americans:
"He felt that the lack of sabotage efforts only meant that it was being readied for a large-scale effort. "The fact that nothing has happened so far is more or less . . . ominous, in that I feel that in view of the fact that we have had no sporadic attempts at sabotage that there is a control being exercised and when we have it it will be on a mass basis."" en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_L…
Given the onerous requirements of the UK online safety act this is a very good way forward. mstdn.party/@pandorablake/1142…
I've spoken at length about my journey to a good solution over on Patreon: patreon.com/posts/open-source-…
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Yeah. The original UNIX philosophy was "small single-purpose tools that do one thing brilliantly and can be connected like Lego bricks"; systemd pours a pint of cyanoacrylate glue into the toy box.
mastodon.social/@LinuxAndYarn/…
@jimcarroll I'm not getting into Vim vs Emacs, Gnome vs KDE, Debian vs Rhel vs Arch or any of their siblings and children fighting amongst themselves.But systemd is the most cursed, bastardized, overcomplicated and overcompensating crock that has ever been forced upon Linux users. (AI is still a choice, after all.)
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Some of you have been eagerly awaiting part 2 of my test date with Jack. HERE IT IS!
The conclusion: love yourself before you start #dating. You'll know you're ready to #date when you can accept rejection with a shrug and 'your loss!'.
(pls share if you like it!)
girlonthenet.com/blog/love-you…
Love yourself: Test date with a blog reader part 2
Part two of the test date I had with a blog reader, and a message I don't think men get to hear often enough: love yourself before you start dating.Girl on the net (Girl on the Net)
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That's a lovely piece.
(JHR's internalised transphobia) "But!"
(JHR) "No. I'm sure you think you mean well, but no. The core message is still correct."
It occurs to me that Ken Thompson's classic lecture "Reflections on Trusting Trust" has a LOT to say about code generation using LLMs.
The Thompson self-propagating UNIX hack that he described was a lot like a prompt injection attack (the right parsed input could trigger an unexpected output via opaque-to-programmer intermediate steps).
cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers…
mastodon.social/@gmh/114132067…
Something that strikes me is that news disinformation is a relatively minor threat here; there's enough news around for fact-checking AI-boosted propaganda.I think a bigger threat is AI-boosted unsafe programming. Too many people rely on Copilot or GPT to write their code for them, perform no sanity-checking, and put it into workplace production. If you pollute a LLM with backdoored code, how many people will roll it out?
The phrase 'Word macros for the 21st Century' springs to mind.
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Mark Dominus
in reply to Vee • • •@byorgey Long long ago I did a survey of all the '-ie-' and '-ei-' words in the dictionary and found that the number of cases where the rule held was only about twice as large as the number of exceptions.
It's just a terrible, terrible heuristic.
Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷
in reply to Vee • • •“i before e, except after c, and provided it rhymes with ‘key’ “
Vee
in reply to Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷 • • •