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Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


I see GamerGate is in the news because itโ€™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, โ€œculture warโ€ harassment originated with GG.

It didnโ€™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

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-4305โ€ฆ
via
elk.zone/mastodon.social/@kottโ€ฆ

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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/4c37โ€ฆ

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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"


Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


Etymology is so cool.

The term "microblog" comes from micro + blog, ie small blog.

Then, "blog" is a shortened form of "Web log". And a "log" comes from "log book", which is a book used to record events on a journey.

So get this, the "log" in log book is because you would use the book to record the progress and speed of a ship by using a reel attached to a chip log... So called because it's made of wood... ie a log.

So a microblog is a small record of your journey.

I think that's very poetic that this very post is a direct descendent of mariners from 400 years ago.


Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


I had to sign up to a private dentist (no NHS in the area). One thing I always notice the few times I've had to go private for things is that you don't get lectured.

With the NHS it's like waiting for the NordVPN bit in a YouTube video, except you can't skip it.

You need to lose weight, stop drinking, eat better, exercise, wash behind your ears, phone your mother, come more often, not come as often, get more sleep, work less, just be happier, find some "me" time, stay informed but worry less, get out more, close the door (were you born in a barn?).

I wonder if there's been any papers on contrasting primary care providers who moan at their patients and those who don't. I can't help wondering if it's counterproductive.

It's made me much happier to book checkups knowing that we both start on the basis that I'm trying.

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in reply to kรฆt

I've never had that from any dentist.
I've been with the same NHS dental practice for maybe 10 years.
The biggest difference is that there seems to be a revolving door of dentists where if you are unlucky (like my wife) you never see the same dentist twice.
in reply to Mike ๐Ÿ‡ฌ๐Ÿ‡ง ๐Ÿ‡ช๐Ÿ‡บ

@MikeFromLFE My personal experience within the same practice is that when you are an NHS patient they just do the bare minimum to patch you up, now Iโ€™m a private patient I have a plan for restorative/preventative work to improve my teeth for my future life. Obviously that costs, but itโ€™s silly not to help people to keep their own teeth into older age

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


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in reply to Ruby S.

@Ruby Sinreich @MyView Outside Israel, perhaps? I get the impression (from what other journalists report, so...) that Israeli TV isn't really showing very much of the devastation in Gaza.
in reply to Alexandra Lanes

@ajlanes
That's common among media that supports and encourages their government's bad policies and very bad behaviour ...

We've had the same thing over the past quarter century from a media reduced to three owners ... one being Murdoch and the other two being well known CONservative recipients of Mate$ Rate$ ...

No such thing as a Free Press in many countries now.


Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


it's not "clocky transfem voice", okay, it's the distinctive regional accent of ๐Ÿณ๏ธโ€โšง๏ธ, that country all the hot girls are from

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in reply to xanna

"they find that basically nonbinary people do whatever the heck they like"

damn right lol



I'm going to #eastercon this coming weekend. If you're going too and you'd like to, let me know so I can say hi!


This judgment in the Family Court, written in the form of a letter to a 14-year-old, is an excellent example of the law trying to be accessible. bailii.org/ew/cases/EWFC/HCJ/2โ€ฆ

Ben Evans reshared this.

Unknown parent

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source
Alexandra Lanes

@Sesquipedality It's an interesting exercise in attempting to express the reasoning in accessible language. To me it seems a little patronising but it's been a long time since I was 14 so I'm a poor judge of that... and was never very typically 14 anyway.

Problematic how?



You know goats have those excellent rectangular pupils in their eyes? Well apparently they give the goat an excellent field of vision to detect predators. They also swivel in their sockets to ensure that the pupil remains parallel to the ground.

#goats




I want to know why Sky is doing the presentation for the Melbourne Grand Prix from a studio. #f1
#f1

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


Eridanus looks like it was created to deny proportional representation to voters in neighboring constellations

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Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


Saw someone hyperventilating over LLMs โ€œpassing the mirror testโ€, so โ€ฆ

TL;DR This short program โ€œrecognises itselfโ€: show it a file containing its own source code and it will print โ€œThis is me!โ€

Underwhelmed? You should be! But I did have to type a lot of backslashes.

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

in reply to Greg Egan

why didnโ€™t you use raw strings to save yourself from all those back-slashes?
in reply to Greg Egan

In the 90s we had Eliza. Why couldn't we just have been happy enough with "Super Eliza" and watching ourselves drawn eating a twelve foot donut with Freddie Mercury?

Why did we have to jam this garbage machine into absolutely everything?


Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


We got an email from the Serbian Registry of Internet Domain Names (RNIDS), the organisation that is responsible for the `.rs` top-level domain.

Looks like they are a big fan of Rust. ๐Ÿ˜Š


Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


Looks like Threads is inhospitable to journalists posting real time information about major international news stories.
in reply to Steve Herman

Gosh! Zuck platform behaves like the other Zuck platforms! Color me shocked!
in reply to Steve Herman

that's a bummer. one by one, people will stagger over to the fediverse (not counting threads as worthy of the fediverse yet)




I have a knee jerk reaction to anyone saying theyโ€™ve lost something. Especially metaphorically.
โ€œMrs Jones lost her husbandโ€ โ€œHas she looked down the back of the sofa?โ€


Can a swan be a birb? I canโ€™t do polls on Friendica so you will have to reply either birb or the appropriate noun of your choice



An article from earlier this year argues that it is entirely constitutionally appropriate for the Lords to block the Rwanda safety Bill and suggests some approaches the courts might take to it if it were passed. #ukpol
ukconstitutionallaw.org/2024/0โ€ฆ

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


It is perfectly proper for House of Lords to insist House of Commons think again with certain types of legislation.

This delaying power is expressly part of the Parliament Acts.

It is not an outright veto.

If Commons in their next session pass same Bill a year from now then it becomes law.

theguardian.com/politics/2024/โ€ฆ

in reply to d a t green

Is it then the case that the Lords CANNOT stop a bill in the end? Even if it's something obviously completely wrong like "All non-caucasian people to be euthanized"?
in reply to Alexandra Lanes

@ajlanes I see. I suppose the intent was that if the Lords kept sending something back over and over, the Commons would take the hint.

(I have to admit, in my Reductio Ad Absurdum, I struggled to come up with a hypothetical policy more obviously immoral than "send refugess to a country known for its genocides and human-rights abuses".)

in reply to Mike Taylor ๐Ÿฆ•

@mike

No, there is no absolute veto is the Bill is passed by the Commons again a year later in identical terms.

You would then be looking to the monarch to not give it royal assent.

in reply to d a t green

I see โ€” which is probaby why the government were so keen on rejecting ALL the amendments: so they can send it back in identical form. What a shower.
in reply to d a t green

โ€œpeople are risking their lives in the hands of people who donโ€™t care if they die as long as they payโ€
A fair description by the Home Secretary of the COVID PPE profiteers who benefitted so much from this government during the pandemic

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


Yo I've got a PhD in genetics from Cambridge and on the off-chance you need it I give you permission to say that Dawkins is a hack
in reply to Koos Pol ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ฆ

@KoosPol @FSMaxB The problem with popular science is that you get to just make your own claims without them being reviewed by other experts, so things like "The gene is the unit of selection" end up as part of popular understanding despite it not being accurate
in reply to Matthew Garrett

@FSMaxB Fair enough. But that's on another level then saying he's a hack. I'd argue that popular science is way more a means of getting people to understand things than necessarily being correct in every detail. It's ok to present omissions, generalizations and caricatures if it helps me understand difficult topics.

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


Jakop Dalunde commissioned it. I wrote it. And it came out this evening - what needs fixing has why with public transport ticketing, cross border, in the EU jakopdalunde.se/wp-content/uplโ€ฆ

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in reply to Jon Worth

Read it all now and have just one nitpick. The NAPโ€™s donโ€™t really solve the timetable data issue fully because being open data, they come with no guarantees. If a booking portal is planning journeys to sell tickets, there needs to also be a guarantee from the operators that the data is in fact correct, including some commercial relationship as recourse if there are errors.
in reply to Stefan Lindbohm

@stefanlindbohm thanks, but does this matter? Ok, when you hit โ€œbookโ€ you might then end up with (fractionally?) different times, but are there cases where this would be significant enough to matter?
in reply to Jon Worth

I will have to get back to you on how frequent issues might be for inaccuracies as we get more data, but the big issue lies in building a portal that is dependent on data without a commercial relationship. If the data would disappear from one day to another and we would potentially have to go through courts to get access back, that is a huge risk to the business model.
This entry was edited (1 year ago)
in reply to Jon Worth

A lot of countries/operators are already fine with their long distance/regional traffic missing from Google/Apple maps. Or in a few cases they are present in Google/Apple without the data otherwise being publicly available (assumingly there are commercial agreements), which would make open data that another party uses a separate question that is lower impact for countries/operators to break.

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


I would like to see greetings cards saying

"GET WELL SOON"

and inside

"The well is firmly cemented to the ground. You cannot take it.
What now?"

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Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


Ireland managed โ€œmarriage without regard to genderโ€ before basic bodily autonomy for women. Thatโ€™s so Ireland. The Northโ€™s worse.

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


in reply to Alexandra Lanes

... and thereby having a significant impact on my life. That is so weird.


Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


The dreaded barnyard puddle has returned, and the goats would like you to know they are really annoyed about it. I'm a little surprised they didn't make use of the plank, but goats have very strong opinions about getting their feet wet.

(Every year this puddle appears and I want to dig a trench, but the ground is still too frozen, and then the puddle soaks in by the time the ground is workable and I forget to do it)

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in reply to Prof. Sam Lawler

@Prof. Sam Lawler Seems like perfectly sensible behaviour for anyone spending time outside in your neck of the woods. Water is cold!
Unknown parent

mastodon - Link to source
Prof. Sam Lawler
@weirdmustard They're desert animals. Water makes them sad (though snow doesn't seem to bother them too much)

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


I've worked out when the Firefox developers plan to retire.

(Of course there seems to be an off-by-one error, it's javascript. Kwality is its watchword. I'd expected it to be on an IEEE754 boundary, but it looks like a magic constant).

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.



Me: "I don't think I know $person"
Friend: "I think they know you because you did a politics near them once"

That should be my epitaph. "Did a politics once"


Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


If you want to buy Grace Petrie's new album Build Something Better, you should do it now so it has a chance to make the Top 40 chart.

If you bought it but haven't downloaded it, it doesn't count towards the charts, so go and download it.

gracepetrie.bandcamp.com/albumโ€ฆ

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Happy get a sensible date order day to those who celebrate.

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in reply to Alexandra Lanes

Iโ€™m eagerly awaiting 22 July for the actual decent-approximation-to-pi-day.


Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


Discourse, ๐Ÿ”ฅflaming hot take๐Ÿ”ฅ

Sensitive content

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in reply to Another Angry Woman

Discourse, ๐Ÿ”ฅflaming hot take๐Ÿ”ฅ

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in reply to Another Angry Woman

Discourse, ๐Ÿ”ฅflaming hot take๐Ÿ”ฅ

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