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Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

Worrying that a cis person might take cross-sex hormones long term by mistake is like worrying that your child will go out and roll in the nettles if you let them in the garden. Sure. Hypothetically they might roll in the nettles. What they’re not very likely to do is go out there and roll in the nettles a second time. Meanwhile trans people are yelling to be let out of the nettle patch while being told that moving around the garden is dangerous and to stay put for our own safety.

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in reply to zip Sarah Brown reshared this.

zip
zip
• •

People seem to think that hormones fundamentally don’t really feel like anything, that they just change your body and nothing else. Nothing is further from the truth.

Getting on HRT when you’re trans feels like you’ve been wearing shoes two sizes too small for your entire life and you’ve just got a pair that fits. Getting on HRT when you’re not has the opposite effect: instead you’re taking a drug that will cause crushing depression. It’s even on the side effects list!

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in reply to zip

zip
zip
• •
But say I’m wrong. Perhaps there’s folks out there who feel equally comfortable either way. People should still get to choose what happens to their body! Even if they might change their minds! _Especially_ with puberty blockers, which simply delay things.
in reply to zip

zip
zip
• •

I kind of forgot while saying this that in their mythology we’re embarked upon a sinister project to propel cis kids through transition.

Obviously fucking not, dickheads. We recoil at the idea of someone being pushed to transition as hard as we recoil at the idea of them being pushed not to. It’s always self-led. How dare you accuse us of the same monstrosity that you are so determinedly perpetrating yourselves.

in reply to zip

Charlie Stross
Charlie Stross
• •
Remember, with the right, it's always projection. Correct? (It's what they'd do, so they project it on the trans community.)
in reply to zip

𝕸𝔞𝔩𝔦𝔫
𝕸𝔞𝔩𝔦𝔫
• •

Wouldn't it be easier to just refer to HRT as 'meds'? Like if you take epilepsy meds, you will have a bad time.

It seems easier to explain 'trans men do not produce the right hormones for men, so they need these meds'.

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

Dear UK residents. I’m sorry to be tedious, but I’m going to do the trans Cassandra thing again.

The government is now moving towards regarding trans people as effective children until the age of 25.

This will be established as precedent and then used to screw over any and all young adults who can’t escape from abusive parents, especially young women.

If you want to do anything about this, you need to fight for trans people. Yes, you. Now.

We all know that isn’t going to happen to any significant extent though.

As you were.

Unknown parent

kæt
kæt
• •

@crocket2001
I think it's easy to underestimate how far most people have moved on this already. (Not that *most* makes it safe). There seem to be two groups pushing this:

1. boring folk who moan about the metric system, car parks, youth of today, ULEZ, "they're all as bad as each other", immigrants, etc.

2. Westminster-y policy type people, both left and right, professional dinner-party attenders, columnists, writers, wonks, essayists, student union types.

The (dangerous) difference now is that these groups -- our society's loudest, most boring, dull, dim, and reactionary, who only differ in social class -- are united on one subject.

The public don''t need to "come round".

People think Guardianista idealists lay out liberation's groundwork -- surveyors going ahead. But they're just apologists hanging on the coat-tails of emperors, minting excuses for comfortable lives at court. The powerful, their "clients", are moving right, so they're representing them, coining theories and writing reports.

@Crocket
in reply to Jinshei

Jinshei
Jinshei
• •
labour candidate came back with all the things I want, including saying how well trans people do when they get treatment. He is a good lad.

Sailing lots today, getting lots of practice at taking the helm and tacking the boat. "Helm to lee!" is cried and then there is much winching and pulling in of lines as the boat turns into the wind. When we first did this it was a bit disastrous and chaotic, but after doing it several times the panic distills into a concentrated focus that punctuates the periods where we just sit on the boat and let it go.

I did not expect to be hoisted up a mast, or to enjoy it!
Looking down from the top of a 14m mast at two boats moored in green water. On the left hand boat several people are waving up at the photographer.
in reply to Alexandra Lanes

Ozzy
Ozzy
• •
If it wasn't for the photo, I would have assumed that was a euphemism. 😀

After about the first night or so it’s amazing how you get used to sleeping on a boat. The rocking motion and creaking sounds of the lines just become the comforting background rather than the thing that keeps waking you up.

Reminds me of a holiday where the B&B was right above the platforms of Lancaster station. The noise of trains quickly became the background. So much so that when there was engineering works in the last night it was eerily quiet and hard to sleep.

in reply to Alexandra Lanes

Mike
Mike
• •
We live within earshot of a very busy section of motorway. If it's closed it seems very strange how quiet it is.
Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

I just made a command-line typo: 'locat' in place of 'locate'.

Ubuntu's command-not-found package offered me 'lolcat' as a higher-ranked preference than what I actually intended.

The Internet has won.

This entry was edited (7 months ago)

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in reply to Simon Tatham

KungFuDiscoMonkey
KungFuDiscoMonkey
• •

I don’t have an ubuntu machine at the moment, but I’m guessing it’s this ?

github.com/busyloop/lolcat

Probably not useful ever, but it’s good to see people having fun from time to time XD


GitHub - busyloop/lolcat: Rainbows and unicorns!

Rainbows and unicorns! Contribute to busyloop/lolcat development by creating an account on GitHub.
GitHub
in reply to KungFuDiscoMonkey

Simon Tatham
Simon Tatham
• •
@kfdm yes, I think you're right. command-not-found offers me two instances of 'lolcat', one from a .deb and one from a snap, but as far as I can see, both of them are the thing you link to.
@KungFuDiscoMonkey

Ryanair just does “plane’s here, pile on”. BA does faff with boarding groups, and plays music while you board. In accordance with the prophecy this is no faster. youtu.be/oAHbLRjF0vo
in reply to Cyberspice

Alexandra Lanes
Alexandra Lanes
•
@Cyberspice I don’t know whether I’m just narrow or always choose extra legroom but I’ve not had problems.
@Cyberspice
in reply to Alexandra Lanes

Cyberspice
Cyberspice
• •
I use Jet2. Never had a problem with them so wont be trying Ryan Air again. Oh and their 'home' airport is Leeds Bradford which is a 10 minute taxi ride, so there's that.
This entry was edited (7 months ago)

It is too early to be navigating airport land. Fortunately the only suspicious item in my baggage was conditioner and I have located a full English breakfast.
Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

Got a tattoo of the windows mouse cursor so that I can sit like this on Teams calls in the hope that someone frantically tries to move it.
A specky guy with a mouse cursor tattoo on his arm
A closeup of the mouse cursor tattoo
in reply to Michael M

Frank Engelhard
Frank Engelhard
• •
That's a big price to pay for the rest of your life, for a prank no one wil understand in ten years time. Or is it a sticker you got after nicely doing your homework? #Automutilation
#automutilation
Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

@NanoRaptor I think that means we’re canon now.
Screenshot of my reply to Dana’s shoop of the Bene Gesserit pain box with a leaky battery. The post has been liked by “Brian Herbert”, but almost certainly not THAT Brian Herbert.
@Nanoraptor

A few years ago I was on Scarlet (the yacht of @Sarah Brown and @Zoë O'Connell ) and noticed mid morning that I didn't have the bloating sensation I was used to having some time after breakfast. The reason for this, of course, is that Scarlet runs on lactose-free milk. Evidently I was slightly lactose intolerant, started buying lactose-free milk at home, and everything was better.

It shouldn't have been only today that I extrapolated this experience to cover a large takeaway banana milkshake.

@Sarah Brown @Zoë O'Connell

It's rather lovely to get a postcard from @Neil Brown - thank you!
@Neil Brown
Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

Kerbal Space Program is basically a dollhouse for people with A-Level further maths.
A space station in Kerbal Space Program showing several space planes docked around the moon of Laythe

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in reply to Sarah Brown

Sarah Brown
Sarah Brown
• •

Observant viewers will note the presence of hydrofoils. Each one of those is an INTERPLANETARY SEAPLANE!

Also, not a single expendable launch in this game.

It does occur to me that “better drowned than duffers. If not duffers won’t drown” was an excellent summary of the Cambridge pedagogical approach in the early 1990s.
Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

the six sexual roles: top, bottom, up, down, charm, strange

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Overhearing people on the train. “They have to get people back into the office at $big-research-institute” with the accompanying impression that not doing this is responsible for some kind of scientific stagnation.
Unknown parent

Alexandra Lanes
Alexandra Lanes
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@Sesquipedality I think it’s possible they are the brand of academic who used to science. Ironically he’s something to do with public health.
@Sesquipedality
Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

I guess the takeaway from the xz backdoor situation is:

If you’re an open-source project maintainer, and somebody starts getting on your case for not doing enough free work for them, you reply “big Jia Tan energy there” and then block them forever.

in reply to Andrew Plotkin

David Adam
David Adam
• •
me, as I'm writing my first comment on bugzilla.redhat in 15 years regarding an EPEL request: wow this looks dodgy as
Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

A new post on misleading Covid charts & why Covid really is low right now, and why we should be glad of it.

christinapagel.substack.com/p/hospitals-...

Chart showing changes over the last year in reported covid cases and reported covid hospital admissions
Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

Given the news of the xz backdoor, may I recommend this seminal paper from Ken Thompson's 1984 Turing Award lecture showing how a compiler with no backdoors in the source code can nevertheless propagate a backdoor.

Reflections on trusting trust | the morning paper
blog.acolyer.org/2016/09/09/re…

#SecureSoftwareSupplyChain #SoftwareSupplyChain #XZBackdoor

Reflections on trusting trust | the morning paper

blog.acolyer.org
#xzbackdoor #SecureSoftwareSupplyChain #softwaresupplychain
This entry was edited (7 months ago)

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Final leg of journey home from eastercon is (of course) a rail replacement bus. I suppose this does at least signify that stuff is being improved and mended but still. And sigh they can’t decide which bus is going where.
Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

A girl can dream...
Juliet holding the one and only Glasgow Worldcon tartan Hugo rocket with armadillo supporters crowned with traffic cones

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Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

on this Trans Day of Visibilty, remember that you are valid, you matter, and you’re trans if you say you are

if you’re not cis, this day is for you

and remember that on this, the most holiest of trans days, TDoV and The Matrix’s 25th anniversary…

she is risen 😉

Trinity from the matrix

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Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

Is anyone on Mastodon knowledgeable about Tironian notes? I've got tentative readings of two headings in a 9th c. Text from the Loire Valley, which mix Tironian notes and Latin charaters. But there are 13,000 T. Notes in Schmitz, many of which look very similar. Thanks!!

@histodons @litteracarolina @medievodons @chaprot #bookhistodons @mssprovenance

#bookhistodons @histodons group @mssprovenance @Anna Dorofeeva @Pierre Chambert-Protat @Medievodons group

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in reply to Matteo Zenatti

Mark Saltveit
Mark Saltveit
• •

@matz
Sure! Be forewarned, the MS is very hard to read (which is why it remained for us to decipher.)

Line 1: the start seems to be "Versus in baptisterio" but after that -- "Petri" something maybe. Extremely hard to read. The last character that looks like some Carolingian miniscule A's -- "abstergentis"? "delati"?

Line 14: we read "De petra manante"

We = me + Mike Fontaine (Cornell) + Rachel Fickes (Middlebury library.)

line 14 of BL Harley MS 2735 fol. 1r
Line 1 of BL Harley MS 2735, fol. 1r
@Matteo Zenatti
This entry was edited (7 months ago)
Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

Congratulations to trans folk celebrating their refractive indices today

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

Happy clock bullshit day to all those who celebrate. May you quickly remember how the fuck to do the oven.
in reply to Sarah Brown

Jonathan👣🚲
Jonathan👣🚲
• •
I did three devices in 30 seconds or so. That isn’t the worst part of clock bullshit.
in reply to Jonathan👣🚲

Sarah Brown
Sarah Brown
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@Jonathan👣🚲 I feel like the designers aren't trying hard enough to get into the spirit of capitalist enshittification if it was that quick and easy.
@Jonathan👣🚲
in reply to Sarah Brown

Jonathan👣🚲
Jonathan👣🚲
• •
One of these devices is 24 years old and still mostly operational, so I guess not. It helps that two of them have a rotary dial used to set the clock. The third (which happens to be the oven) has that stupid short capacitive tap to adjust by a minute, medium hold to start racing through many 10-minute increments per second kind of scheme. On the other hand, the cooktop that’s part of the same physical device goes through its 17 regular power levels at only 2 per second.
in reply to Jonathan👣🚲

Jonathan👣🚲
Jonathan👣🚲
• •
How are these interfaces rarely any good? Extreme nonlinearity. Extreme debouncing so you can’t just tap through, and a solid tap is coming up on the acceleration threshold. I feel like strangling the people making these, or making them use their own creations if that isn’t too cruel.
in reply to Jonathan👣🚲

Sarah Brown
Sarah Brown
• •
@Jonathan👣🚲 Actually the worst for me is my induction hob. It uses capacitative touch, which doesn't work if it gets wet, which it frequently does.
@Jonathan👣🚲
in reply to Sarah Brown

Jonathan👣🚲
Jonathan👣🚲
• •
Same here. It doesn’t take much moisture to make it unresponsive. At least a quick wipe tends to suffice. Why is everything dying to be a smartphone in the rain?
in reply to Sarah Brown

Sjaak K. 🇳🇱🇪🇺
Sjaak K. 🇳🇱🇪🇺
• •
Our seven year old technician fixed the oven challenge within seconds. Not a clue how.

On Ross Anderson… tech.lgbt/@Diziet/112180620655…

Ian Jackson

2024-03-29 19:27:07


Oh no. He was my officemate and colleague while I did my PhD. He was a thoroughly excellent nuisance to a lot of evil people.

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

One worrying thing about the whole xz debacle is that maintainers are probably going to be even less inclined to trust people they don't know coming in to offer help (99.9% of whom are, one hopes, _not_ state-sponsored attackers ...), and thus it will be even harder to relieve the pressure on overworked maintainers.

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in reply to Colin Watson Colin Watson reshared this.

e. hashman 🇵🇸
e. hashman 🇵🇸
• •
it will amplify network effects, I think. We will be more likely to trust people we already know and less likely to trust newcomers with zero background. And I'm sure you can see how that's a problem...
in reply to e. hashman 🇵🇸

Colin Watson
Colin Watson
• •
@ehashman Yeah exactly. And we saw the racists coming out pretty quickly for this one, so I'd bet it will be particularly harder for newcomers with Chinese names for a while
@e. hashman 🇵🇸
in reply to Colin Watson

mirabilos
mirabilos
• •
I have mild doubts the person was actually Chinese, but they surely presented as such
in reply to Colin Watson

the tower fairy
the tower fairy
• •
And refactors/improvements in critical areas will now be viewed with even more scorn than until now... demanding maintainers become the sole point of failure for codebases layout
Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

the radical leftist urge to stay in bed and to sleep some more

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Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

xkcd 2347 but the tiny thing holding the whole dependency pile is labeled "backdoor"

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in reply to chjara

Ian Jackson
Ian Jackson
• •
It's much worse than that picture. Imagine tens of thousands of those tiny pencil-like things stacked up, one on the other, in a fractal tree, with the gigantic edifice on top.
Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

I rag on github a whole lot, but this is one feature it has that I really like.

Since JiaT75 backdoored xz-utils, I have blocked him and now get to see a warning in every project he touched.

I hope wasmtime et all are doing some careful review..

wasmtime repository with a banner "a user you've blocked has previously contributed to this repository"
This entry was edited (7 months ago)

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in reply to see shy jo

Toasterson
Toasterson
• •
Independent from projects doing their due diligence we need a list so we can Crowdsource the audit.
in reply to Toasterson

Andrew Bartlett
Andrew Bartlett
• •

@Toasterson Been thinking about both the need for DFSG redaction in Debian (due RFC texts, but which we need as the build uses the tables) and Samba's tarball generation (pre builds the docs).

Perhaps it is time to find a way to have pristine from git release tarballs.

At the very least an effort for reproducing and analyzing of tarballs vs git sources just as we do reproducible builds would seem advised.

Next time it will be checked in of course, sadly.

@Toasterson
Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

Very sorry to hear that Professor @rossjanderson passed away last night. Aside from his (numerous) contributions to Information Security, he was a mentor to and advocate for many researchers in the field. He will be sadly missed but leaves behind a strong legacy.
@Ross Anderson

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in reply to Steven Murdoch

Ian Jackson
Ian Jackson
• •
Oh no. He was my officemate and colleague while I did my PhD. He was a thoroughly excellent nuisance to a lot of evil people.
Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

Christians: This Friday we celebrate!

Non Christians: Cool! What’s the occasion?

Christians: Our god died. Tortured to death quite horribly, in fact.

Non Christians: You celebrate that?

Christians: There are sound theological reasons.

Non Christians: Bit weird, but ok.

Christians: We call it “Good Friday”

Non Christians: …

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in reply to Sarah Brown

Diego Roversi
Diego Roversi
• •

In fact the word good stood for "holy", not the modern meaning:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Fri…

And of course christians don't celebrate good friday, but commemorate it. It's like say that jews people celebrate Holocaust_memorial_days.

in reply to Diego Roversi

Sarah Brown
Sarah Brown
• •
@Diego Roversi Yeah yeah, we get that there are sound reasons behind the Lovecraftian weirdness.
@Diego Roversi

I’ve just read “we bite each oþer” on here and I now can’t stop wondering if it should be “oðer”. Old English had “ōþer” but I think the modern English pronunciation is voiced ð

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in reply to Alexandra Lanes

Simon Brooke
Simon Brooke
• •

Completely agree!

The use of eth in Anglian and Brythonic names seems to imply a soft 'th' sound, whereas the use of thorn seems to imply a harder one; and my understanding is that the same is true in modern Icelandic (Seyðisfjörður, Egilsstaðir vs Þórsmörk, for example).

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

RUDE!
Screenshot of a Reddit post that says: 'Rubbing salt in the wound with this decoration set'
This entry was edited (7 months ago)

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Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

I see GamerGate is in the news because it’s coming up to the tenth anniversary. Ten years ago, I was in the middle of a nervous breakdown caused by transphobic harassment from TERfs organised on social media. They were using the same tactics that, months later, would be the hallmark of GamerGate.

And yet the surviving narrative is that this sort of organised, “culture war” harassment originated with GG.

It didn’t. They did it to trans women, and probably others, first, and we raised the alarm, and nobody thought it mattered enough to do anything.

And then they came for the rest of you.

They keep doing this. We keep raising the alarm. We keep being ignored.

Maybe one day people will learn.

in reply to Sarah Brown

Jesse Cohn
Jesse Cohn
• •
Thanks -- I'll have to look further into them (a cursory googling isn't very helpful). I seem to have missed a really important chapter in the cultural-political history of our times.
Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

TIL >It is also not unheard of for geese to mate with swans, with the offspring of a swan and a goose known as a swoose.
bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-4305…
via
elk.zone/mastodon.social/@kott…

New Zealand goose: How one blind bisexual bird became an icon

Henry the goose spent many years in a love triangle with two swans, helping raise their children.
By Yvette Tan (BBC News)

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Job hunting, oh my

I'm looking for work again, after the most recent temporary thing came to an end. (Arguably I did it all too quickly!).

Apart from the challenge of persuading myself that I'm actually good enough to do _any_ described job, I find I haven't a clue what job titles mean these days. Cambridge University hides everything under a "Computer Officer" blanket, and I know I'm a system administrator (who does networks and other stuff too), but the job market is full of "Thing Analyst" and "Site Reliability Engineer" and "DevOps" and I haven't a clear idea what boxes if any I fit into.

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

So is Stormy Daniels the only contractor that Trump has ever paid?

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Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

I made an HTML/DOM viewer you can paste into your console to view or debug any website in 3D. Choose from random/gradient/clear colors or whether layers have sides.

You can save it as a bookmarklet so it's 1 click away. It's just a tiny IIFE JS function.
gist.github.com/OrionReed/4c37…

3D DOM viewer, copy-paste this into your console to visualise the DOM topographically.

3D DOM viewer, copy-paste this into your console to visualise the DOM topographically. - DOM3D.js
Gist

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Star Trek Prodigy is silly.

"You want us to jump? I do not think that option is logically sound"
"In outer space, there is no sound"
"Your rebuttal is correct, but nonsense"

⇧