Technically, genderfluid is more a descriptor of the rate of change of gender than of gender when you think about it :p
So really, the answer to that is an ever changing subset of people ^.^
It's a convenient file transfer/sync tool. Copying data has to happen somehow, I'm not surprised someone thought to use syncthing for that purpose >.<, since it can do that. But its not really different than any other tool here.
That's pretty awesome ngl :p
Power being priced negative is awesome. We need more of it imo, make energy so abundant that it makes processes that were previously too energy-intensive viable, and enables a massive increase in both residential and grid storage capacity.
My opinion is that Na-ion batteries are the way for bulk grid storage and apartment/home storage nya.
They use hyper abundant materials and are now reaching the point of decent endurance, and if you arent bothered by them being heavy (as is the case for grid and residential storage), they're fairly comparable to Li-Ion without the usage of relatively rare Lithium.
The "original sin" is having the potential to understand ethics beyond blind obedience to the Abrahamic diety and to make decisions for yourself (to my understanding of the concept).
"Having original thoughts beyond obedience" is the original sin.
Make of that what you will :p
Fuck this bioessentialist piece of trash.
I don't believe in any god, but even if I did I would not think such an entity had any right to dictate or make judgements on who I am and how I am, or my identity or purpose.
I'm so goddamn sick of this bullshit. I get to decide who I am and set my own path, fuck these people who think they get to tell me (and everyone else) what my life and body and purpose and identity are >:(
Really, I can't even begin to describe how much I hate this sort of patronising bullshit, how many of us have to suffer or die because of the relentless repressive normativity imposed by these groups and their infantilising ideologies of self repression and obedience and compliance, especially with the "dignity" and "diversity" doublespeak they've been trying to use in the past few months even while they systematically try to erase those very same things from anyone who doesn't fit into their suffocatingly binary and restricted conceptualisation of identity nya.
Our biology, identity and lives should be ours to control. We are capable of deciding our goals and purposes. I frankly hope more people realise they don't need some patronising religious institution to tell them how they should exist or what their purpose should be (if any, some folks are more nihilistic), and seize their morphological autonomy and decision making from groups that would deny it to them under the guise of such bullshit as supposed "dignity" ^.^
Seriously, fuck this. The Catholic Church (and this """cool""" pope), as well as pretty much all the other organised religious institutions who propagate the same infantilising and self-subjugating rhetoric, can go fuck themselves with a cactus in every available hole.
Its all bioreactionary stuff, really. Its always been about control and conformity to their idea of a """natural""" role.
Using technology to aid in reproduction is seen as bad because it's doing something """nature"""/"""god""" did not dictate you do as per their highly authoritarian worldview.
Basically anything that would let you have agency over your body is hated by these people, because their real ideology is one of control, social and physical conformity, and obedience (to "god", to what's "natural", to repressive social norms, to churches, to parents - these folks view children as property, to whatever hierarchy exists, to some strongman leader, etc. :/)
The same logic applies to something as comparatively minor as hairdye or piercings - they always freak out about that stuff, ever notice? - to something as major as being trans or the state of someone's uterus. Its all about control over people's bodies and minds and identities to what they may deem "natural" (or often "godly") (which usually involves hierarchies of prejudice as well as opposing any technological means to have control over yourself, and also opposing people's access to information and critical thinking skills - e.g. promoting internet censorship often of queer groups <.<, or opposing science & critical thinking education).
Anything that gives people the option to decide for themselves what they want - technologically, socially, informationally - rather than obeying some higher authority ("nature", "god", the state, corporations, parents, social norms) is opposed. Anything that demonstrates people have used those methods - such as any kind of transition stuff, miscarrages (because it "could" be due to abortificants nya), or the things mentioned earlier - is to be punished. Socially, monetarily, physically, legally, anything.
What's actually entitled is thinking that people should just shut up and accept shit choices to preserve your property value (and commodified housing in general <.<) instead of building more goddamned dense housing and infrastructure.
"Suck it up" is one of the worst phrases invented. I've only ever seen it used to justify hierarchy, subjugation, abuses of power, and not changing things for the better. Its existence primarily serves the interests of those with power.
Think about it this way. Many LGBTQ+ identites have been considered to make people "mentally unwell" (even to this day, the way stuff like being trans or asexual is talked about is.... >.<). Or what about, say an autistic person who may do exceptionally well in one part of the test but fail some other parts (or even be unable to complete them).
This isn't even starting on the issues of socioeconomic and cultural biases (which have been discussed elsewhere in depth).
The problem is "mental competency" is a pretty damn flexible concept and one that is frequently weaponised en-masse against various groups of people to strip away agency >.<, as it is often based on ideas which have primarily been from very specific perspectives, which can be malicious (see disenfranchisment of black people), or dehumanisation (see the fact that the Double Empathy Problem associated with autistic people was only really acknowledged in the past 10 years when they actually considered how their behaviour could appear from autistic people's perspective, and only really because autistic autism researchers got some publishing and papers <.<), or simple incompetence, or any combination.
There's many more examples of this, that I haven't even started covering. The fact is that any "mental competency" requirement for a public office implies some kind of testing and barring process, which is ripe with all the flaws listed many times :p
Literal fascist rhetoric. Seriously wtf.
Breitbart? Really?
Most anti copyright people I see (including me) hate those kinds of laws lol
The war on drugs is just shit urgh. Fucking over people's lives, both directly ("you put something in your body that the government didnt approve of so suffer"), and indirectly ("other people put this stuff in their body in ways we don't approve of, so even though with doctor's suggestion we have decided you're allowed to have a little bit for medical reasons and hence know it is probably vital you have it, we're just going to make it difficult, frustrating, or impossible to get and ruin big parts of your life in case you're secretly using it in ways we dont approve of") nya
It's wrecking people's lives by presumption of guilt - or at least, not presumption of innocence - for a stupid "crime" (where at least some of the committers are also likely to be self medicating ADHD lmao).
I have ADHD (and have medication for it, though i dont use it 100% of the time every day, but do have it most times). I have methylphenidate, which is a bit different to adderal though its still a stimulant.
Honestly the side effects are not great (really don't understand why someone would have this recreationally at any higher dose), but I don't actually give a shit if soneone does consume it either recreationally or for uni work (though stimulants in non adhd people worsen problem solving skills while on it, but the fact people use it for studying and still benefit really to me illustrates a problem with the way things are taught and assessed as well as the high sociopolitical pressure for grades) >.<.
I actually get a bit irritated sometimes, cause a lot of adhd folks see these shortages and blame "illegal users" rather than bullshit war on drugs policy that violates bodily autonomy.
At least as far as I am concerned I dont think people using these things illegally is "wrong" - I don't see why it's any of my business even if I don't think it's the greatest idea or get why given the side effects (might be a bit different for adderal since it has some slightly different effects to what I have nya) - especially when some of them may be self-medicating, as per this article.
The link is to a court filing with the UN.
And its not just the actions, its the statements by Israeli figures, which aren't related to the PA/are easily externally verifiable.
They clearly demonstrate intent and action for genocide, and the most significant aspects like razing half of Gaza to the ground, bombing """safe zones""" (which are already essentially force mass migration, and what about people who cant evacuate), preventing even the most basic access to food, water, electricity, healthcare, etc. are easy to see.
If you want more named sources, perhaps consider that Israel apparently loves to prevent journalistic entry and also bomb journalists in Gaza <.<
And we all know what Israel's statements are. "Everything is a Hamas base, so lets use masses of high yield bombs in highly urbanised areas while deliberately bombing the zones we pretended were safe, and our officials cheer on mass slaughter of civilians while claiming no person in Gaza can be considered a civilian and comparing them to animals or filth to be removed"
Honestly I'd just read South Africa's court filing with the International Criminal Court (yes I know they're hypocrites due to lukewarm attitudes to Putin's actions but it doesnt change the facts in the specific case): https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/192/192-20240112-pre-01-00-en.pdf
You dont have to read all of it. Even scrolling and just stopping randomly comes up with sone of the most horrific shit the government of Israel is doing and the stuff high level administrators have advocated for and said.
If you think the "human animals" comments and policies are bad, it gets so much fucking worse :/
Also needing to do lots of things like shopping + washing + other stuff at once is stressful because prioritising is frustrating and it can be overwhelming >.<
Yes.
When I have something i'm thinking about or want to work on, other things - including stuff like feeding myself properly (as I have to cook at least somewhat for economic reasons) - are interruptions and very frustrating. I like my drive to do things I care about and have special interest in but it can lead to self neglect :p
If I didn't have such a large appetite, or got something affordable i could prepare and eat that was actually nutritious and filling in a couple minutes, it would be much less annoying ..
Its not just making food, but that's a major one.
Anti-piracy group Rights Alliance removed the prominent "Books3" database, that was used to train high profile AI models.
cross-posted from: https://kbin.social/m/tech/t/364852
> > > > > > Anti-piracy group Rights Alliance removed the prominent "Books3" database, that was used to train high profile AI models. > > > >
Her case highlights why we need to enshrine neuro rights in law.
An important article related morphological autonomy and self-determination.
I think it's also worth considering this in the context of FOSS and it's ability to empower as such. Self-hosted stuff or implants that are capable of containing their own computation rather than being required to use the internet to the cloud may help with this \.\
This post is a sort of partial dump of my efforts towards an idea/proposal for improving discoverability and onboarding for the Fediverse while avoiding new users just being dumped on a centralised instance. I've seen people suggest that one of our secondary defenses from megacorp social media (like Meta) is improving our UI, so this is part of my attempt to do that.
We can use our non-monetizability to construct algorithms specifically for the purposes of people finding the content and groups they want, rather than for the purposes of selling them shit.
I actually started working on this during the Reddit Migration, but got sidetracked with other things \.\, so I'm dumping it here for everyone else to make more progress!
I want to discuss a rough proposal/idea that eases the onboarding of new users to the fediverse, and discovery of groups, while hopefully distributing them across more instances for better load balancing and decentralization. More generally, it should enable easier discovery of groups and instances aligned with your own sentiments and interests, with a transparent algorithm focused on user control and directly connecting people with entities that align with what they want to see.
I may interleave some ActivityPub terms in here because I've been working on a much larger proposition for architectural shifts (capable of incremental change from current) that might allow multi-instance actors and sharding of large communities' storage - I want the fediverse to be capable of arbitrary horizontal scaling. Though of course that will depend heavily on my attention span and time and energy. I might also just dump my incomplete progress because honestly my attention is on other projects related to distributed semiconductor manufacturing atm \.\
What this post addresses is the current issue of onboarding new users \.\, and helping users discover communities/instances/other users. These users typically are pointed to one of about 5 or 6 major instances, which causes those instances to have to eat costs, especially since loads of users in one place means loads of communities - and the associated storage needs - in one place (as users create communities on their instances).
My proposition/idea consists of the following:
- A mechanism by which instances can declare their relevant purposes in a hierarchical, "refinement" manner
- A mechanism by which instances can declare what sort of instance they are - lemmy, mastodon, kbin, etc.
- A mechanism to specify those purposes such that different terms can be merged in a given instance - for example, multi-language terms for the same item
- A relatively simple algorithm that lets instances select hopefully other reliable instances that are relevant to someone and automatically link over to them on signup.
- A proposition for a hopefully intuitive UI with sensible defaults \.\
- (maybe in another post) an idea for simplified Fedi signin.
Self-Tagging Structure
The first part of the proposal is specifying a way for instances to tag their general topics and category at varying levels of specificity.
Tagging the "Type" of Social Media an Instance is Running
Each instance should have a descriptor of what software it is running.
This serves as a proxy for what "type" of social media it is (reddit-like, twitter-like, whatever kbin is, etc.), taking into account that users are likely to have visited an instance based on reports that the type of software it runs is what they want.
I propose some string endpoint like instance_software in the top-level instance actor.
Tagging the Focus of Instances
Generally speaking, instances fall into several categories:
- General purpose instances
- Instances which lean towards some topics but are general purpose.
- Instances that are very focused towards some topics to the exclusion of others.
There are also instances with varying levels of moderation, which may be encompassed in this. \.\
To solve this problem, instances should provide an endpoint (for now, let's call it instance_focus) in their representative actor that produces a collection of so-called subject trees with associated weights.
Subject Trees/Sentiment Trees
Each subject tree is a nested list that looks like the following: ```json { "weight": 1, "polarisability": -0.7,
"subject-tree": {
{
"subject": "programming",
"terms": {
{"en", "programming"},
{"en", "coding"},
{"en": "software-development"}
}
},
{
"subject": "language",
"terms": {
{"en", "language"}
}
},
{
"subject": "rust",
"terms": {
{"", "rust"},
{"", "rustlang"}
}
}
}
}
```
This indicates an instance/other-group that is interested in programming, specifically programming languages or a programming language, and specifically the programming language rust. It also indicates an estimated polarisability by this instance for /programming/language/rust/ of "-0.7" i.e. they estimate that people who feel a certain way towards one subtopic of /p/l/rust/ will also likely feel a similar way to other subtopics of /p/l/rust/ unless explicitly specified. There may be other fields which indicate some of the more complex and specific parameters documented in [the proto-algorithm I wrote][algorithm-snippet], such as specific polarizability with sibling subjects (e.g. if rust had antagonistic sentiments toward cpp, it may have a "sibling-polarizability": { "cpp": 0.5 } field, or something similar).
A useful compact syntax to indicate the tree (for, for example, config files), might look something like the following: /programming{en:programming,en:coding,en:software-development}/language{en:language}/rust{*:rust,*:rustlang}/
This encodes the terms that it knows for these concepts, within the context of the subject above it, along with the language that term is in (star indicating many human languages where the same term is used, e.g. with proper names).
For this system to work, there must be a roughly-agreed upon set of names to use as keys.
The "subject-tree" for "general interest" is just an empty list {} \.\
How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse) écrit par Ploum, Lionel Dricot, ingénieur, écrivain de science-fiction, développeur de logiciels libres.
I strongly encourage instance admins to defederate from Facebook/Threads/Meta.
They aren't some new, bright-eyed group with no track record. They're a borderline Machiavellian megacorporation with a long and continuing history of extremely hostile actions:
- Helping enhance genocides in countries
- Openly and willingly taking part in political manipulation (see Cambridge Analytica)
- Actively have campaigned against net neutrality and attempted to make "facebook" most of the internet for members of countries with weaker internet infra - directly contributing to their amplification of genocide (see the genocide link for info)
- Using their users as non-consenting subjects to psychological experiments.
- Absolutely ludicrous invasions of privacy - even if they aren't able to do this directly to the Fediverse, it illustrates their attitude.
- Even now, they're on-record of attempting to get instance admins to do backdoor discussions and sign NDAs.
Yes, I know one of the Mastodon folks have said they're not worried. Frankly, I think they're being laughably naive >.<. Facebook/Meta - and Instagram's CEO - might say pretty words - but words are cheap and from a known-hostile entity like Meta/Facebook they are almost certainly just a manipulation strategy.
In my view, they should be discarded as entirely irrelevant, or viewed as deliberate lies, given their continued atrocious behaviour and open manipulation of vast swathes of the population.
Facebook have large amounts of experience on how to attack and astroturf social media communities - hell I would be very unsurprised if they are already doing it, but it's difficult to say without solid evidence \.\
Why should we believe anything they say, ever? Why should we believe they aren't just trying to destroy a competitor before it gets going properly, or worse, turn it into yet another arm of their sprawling network of services, via Embrace, Extend, Extinguish - or perhaps Embrace, Extend, Consume would be a better term in this case?
When will we ever learn that openly-manipulative, openly-assimilationist corporations need to be shoved out before they can gain any foothold and subsume our network and relegate it to the annals of history?
I've seen plenty of arguments claiming that it's "anti-open-source" to defederate, or that it means we aren't "resilient", which is wrong \.\:
- Open source isn't about blindly trusting every organisation that participates in a network, especially not one which is known-hostile. Threads can start their own ActivityPub network if they really want or implement the protocol for themselves. It doesn't mean we lose the right to kick them out of most - or all - of our instances \.\.
- Defederation is part of how the fediverse is resilient. It is the immune system of the network against hostile actors (it can be used in other ways, too, of course). Facebook, I think, is a textbook example of a hostile actor, and has such an unimaginably bad record that anything they say should be treated as a form of manipulation.
Edit 1 - Some More Arguments
In this thread, I've seen some more arguments about Meta/FB federation:
- Defederation doesn't stop them from receiving our public content:
- This is true, but very incomplete. The content you post is public, but what Meta/Facebook is really after is having their users interact with content. Defederation prevents this.
- Federation will attract more users:
- Only if Threads makes it trivial to move/make accounts on other instances, and makes the fact it's a federation clear to the users, and doesn't end up hosting most communities by sheer mass or outright manipulation.
- Given that Threads as a platform is not open source - you can't host your own "Threads Server" instance - and presumably their app only works with the Threads Server that they run - this is very unlikely. Unless they also make Threads a Mastodon/Calckey/KBin/etc. client.
- Therefore, their app is probably intending to make itself their user's primary interaction method for the Fediverse, while also making sure that any attempt to migrate off is met with unfamiliar interfaces because no-one else can host a server that can interface with it.
- Ergo, they want to strongly incentivize people to stay within their walled garden version of the Fediverse by ensuring the rest remains unfamiliar - breaking the momentum of the current movement towards it. \.\
- We just need to create "better" front ends:
- This is a good long-term strategy, because of the cycle of enshittification.
- Facebook/Meta has far more resources than us to improve the "slickness" of their clients at this time. Until the fediverse grows more, and while they aren't yet under immediate pressure to make their app profitable via enshittification and advertising, we won't manage >.<
- This also assumes that Facebook/Meta won't engage in efforts to make this harder e.g. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish/Consume, or social manipulation attempts.
- Therefore we should defederate and still keep working on making improvements. This strategy of "better clients" is only viable in combination with defederation.
PART 2 (post got too long!)
As implants and biotech is developing, I think it is interesting and important to consider that the technology being integrated with people's bodies and minds is essentially a part of them (note: I have more thoughts on this like how I consider "external" technology to essentially be a part of me too, but that's a whole other thing ;p).
As such, I think it's worth elevating the importance of Free Software and Free/Open Hardware from a transhumanist activism and politics perspective. \.\
If we generally consider the ability and access to control, modify, and understand your body - think things like legally having access to all your medical records - to be something like a basic human right, then Free Software and Free Hardware become more than just a fundamental aspect of the right to information and communication, and start to become an ever more important issue of basic bodily integrity.
In the same way that things like abortion and access to trans healthcare are issues of bodily/morphological autonomy, so too does access, control, and right to understand tue schematics of any implants or mechanisms of communicating with them become a similar issue \.\.
As such - at least within the current context of states (I'm an anarchist so I don't consider this as the political endpoint) - I think it would be a really good idea to push for some policies mandating that all schematics and software for devices intended for implantation or to specifically communicate with such devices, are open access and open source, including documentation on how to modify firmware of these devices (e.g. people receiving implants must have access to a cryptographic key that can be used to arbitrarily modify the device firmware).
Furthermore, I think it'd be a very good idea to have strong protections against both coercive implantation and coercive removal of implants \.\
It's also worth considering the privacy issues. For example, trying to add legal protections to prevent any kind of location or sensory data being sent to opaque services with questionable consent.
If Neuralink can prove its device is safe in humans, it would still potentially take more than a decade for the start-up to secure commercial use approval
cross-posted from: https://kbin.social/m/tech/t/55456
> If Neuralink can prove its device is safe in humans, it would still potentially take more than a decade for the start-up to secure commercial use approval
I think this illustrates the importance of FOSS and Open Hardware for biomodification.
Thoughts?
The device decodes the brain’s signals and brings movement back to the legs
Neural interfaces facilitating communication between the brain and machines must be compatible with the soft, curvilinear, and elastic tissues of the brain and yet yield enough power to read and write information across a wide range of brain areas through high-throughput recordings or optogenetics. ...
A "first" on the horizon: the expansion of uterus transplantation to transgender women
Guide on how to fuzz test software written in the Rust programming language
This is a pretty neat read. Has information on writing fuzz tests, setting up tooling (including AFL), structured fuzzing, and ways to make your fuzz tests produce fancy output only when reproducing a failure case \.\
sapient [they/them] @infosec.pub Autistic queer trans²humanist and anarchist. Big fan of dense cities, code, automation, neurodiversity, and self-organising resilient networks.
Pronouns: they/them, xe/xem, ze/zem
Favourite Programming Language: Rust
Alt-Account Of: @sapient_cogbag@sh.itjust.works