i wouldn’t find out till after her death that my grandmother had a PhD in computer science. she became a housewife and pretended her whole life to be tech illiterate because she was ashamed of being a technical woman, apparently because of the hatred she got during her studies.

they have, but they assume:

• ‘for-profit’ means ‘good’ because ‘they have a lot of money’.
• ‘proprietary’ means ‘good’ because ‘the code/infrastructure is obfuscated’.
• ‘widely used’ means ‘good’ because ‘more people with the skills to manage it’ and ‘it’s widely supported’.
• ‘open source’ means ‘bad’ because ‘anyone can analyse the code for exploits without reporting them’.
• ‘self-sufficiency’ means ‘bad’ because ‘that’s anticompetitive’.

they hear the phrases ‘supply chain attacks’ and ‘24/7 premium support’ and they’re sold. the more responsibility they can foist onto third-parties for when something goes wrong, the less liability they have.

in a lot of ‘developed’ countries: government at all levels are structurally forbidden from managing their own infrastructure. to ‘maintain the free market’ and avoid ‘anticompetition’ lawsuits, they procure development contracts via bids. Microsoft has the money and dominance to not only lobby governments to adopt their software, but can also outbid most other companies, and pays a lot of money to ensure there’s an army of Microsoft Certified™ office workers and technicians everywhere.

every time the government tries to do something by itself, or to exclude one company or another from the bidding process, the industry lobbies crawl out to screech about ‘competition’ and ‘free market principles’.

when i was in school we were taught to use the CIA World Factbook as a single primary source for our social science papers.

when the fantasy racism goes too far and you start elfjacketing your roommates

all the people in my life are libbrained. they agree with almost everything i believe in but then instantly forget every conversation we ever have and go on believing and acting the same way they always have. their entire concept of geopolitics is flag emoji bashing into each other and making SWOOOSH and CRASH sounds. they treat it like a team sport. casualties are just numbers on a scoreboard. it’s all just a game to them.

there are a few of them who are aware of how politically uneducated they are, and they’ll come to me with questions, which they insultingly open with some variation of ‘so i get the impression you’re not the biggest fan of capitalism’ (DO YOU NOT REMEMBER A SINGLE FUCKING CONVERSATION WE’VE EVER HAD???). and i’ll answer directly and briefly, with links to more information. they never look anything up on their own. and then they come back a month later about how ‘someone who used to be my friend who went to Harvard said you’re wrong. thoughts?’ and i tell them to kick rocks and go back to rotting in their bingbingwahoo and superhero slop.

my local orgs are trapped in a sectarian stalemate; too busy fighting with each other. the paths toward effective action are all criminalised, so organising has been limited. i’m mostly stuck doing small things here and there with radlibs. all ‘above board’ of course.

the job i’ve trained for / done my whole life has been outsourced. i’m blacklisted in my industry and need to re/upskill thanks to “AI”, with no support. (not that there’s any jobs available anyway; there isn’t.) i might get deported. my trump card is playing into my disability, which sacrifices my agency and belonging for being permanently isolated but almost never having to worry about being homeless again. i’ve been on the streets twice; i don’t think i can do it again at my age.

i’m just so fucking done with it all. idk i’m writing this mostly to scream into the void.

the little roads connecting german homonationalism → NATO → Palestine is certainly uuuhhh… something.

last year there was a NATO flag flanked by EU and pride flags with little hearts connecting them (LGBT ♥ NATO ♥ EU), as if being queer has anything to do with NATO, or as if the terrorist entity gives a shit about queer people.

this was fever-inducing to read. in a frighteningly familiar way, but i couldn’t remember what for.

then i realised: another n+1 article from a year ago about a techbro conference: An Age of Hyperabundance.

postcovid would also align with that timeline. i know several people chronically impaired by it.

i was very lucky that my introduction to software engineering came from a mentor who cared intensely about their work. but i dropped out of the IT industry after i never met someone like that again.

i never even went to secondary, but across several jobs i was having to teach my colleagues (compsci degrees) basic computer literacy skills. the moment they had to leave their IDE, they were lost. they had not even a basic understanding of version control systems. zero curiosity. they frequently broke their git repos and couldn’t fix it. they didn’t give a single fuck about the theory of what they were doing for 72 hours a week; what they were voluntarily choosing to do for 72 hours a week on 30 hour contracts. they hardly even cared about the practise.

LLMs completely ruined these people. they started using it for everything: responding to Slack messages, writing emails, writing code, doing code review… and when it was found out at my last company that i was the only one stubbornly refusing to use LLMs for anything, i was put on a fucking PIP and told it was company policy to use ‘labour saving technology.’ despite the fact that my code had the fewest defects, ignoring how frequently i was misled into doing something i wasn’t even supposed to do because the fucking task requirements were ALSO WRITTEN WITH AN LLM [THAT MADE SHIT UP]. but it was my fault for ‘not checking first’ (???).

i will never touch a computer for money ever fucking again.

aside: reading this while listening to clipping. was an experience

i mean there’s basic input validation yeah, but the number of unique valid signatures isn’t known for all countries till after the collection period.

i didn’t have a strong opinion on the matter. just sharing my thoughts re: promoter463’s suggestion.

do we take the ideological route of dismissing him for reformist that he is

no, probably not. i think he’s already doing good work; he’s becoming walking agitprop. he ruptured the liberal obsession with (manufactured) polling data. he’s now even an official enemy of the state, so he’s got that going for him.

i don’t know what it means exactly to ‘endorse’ him (letalone in the context of this comm). share memes and articles about him? raise awareness? sure, why not? let’s watch what he does.

signatures aren’t immediately validated; the identification you provide is just ticking boxes. verification happens after the signing period, when the signatures are sent to their respective states to confirm and tally.

i have two minimums: the socialist minimum (the broad front; groups i’d act together with), and the libertarian socialist minimum (groups i’d organise with).

the socialist minimum is:

1. social ownership
2. internationalism
3. critical theory

if you aren’t for the negation of capitalism, private property, nationalism, imperialism and false consciousness: you’re not a socialist; you’re not a comrade.

the libertarian socialist minimum is:

1. horizontalism
2. self-determination
3. prefiguration

if you aren’t for direct action and free association, or your means don’t match your ends: you’re not an anarchist; you’re not a friend.

i identify with social anarchism because it describes my approach to life, but i’ll broadly advocate for anything matching my libertarian minimum, and more broadly lend (critical) support for anything matching my socialist minimum.

within this frame, i feel that Zohran is a socialist (public utilities, social housing, city-owned grocers, BDS; a focus on improving the material conditions), but the focus on state-mediation (ex. rent control) over dual-power (tenant unions) makes me feel — aside from tugging the Overton window — that he’s more focused on relieving people than empowering them.

Also the sight of a so-called “socialist” or “radical” government managing capitalism, imposing cuts, breaking strikes and generally attacking its supporters will damage the credibility of any form of socialism and discredit all socialist and radical ideas in the eyes of the population. If the experience of the Labour Government in Britain during the 1970s and New Labour after 1997 are anything to go by, it may result in the rise of the far-right who will capitalise on this disillusionment.

• see also: the Italian general election of 1921, and the weak liberalism it brought, which led to the Fascist March in 1922, which led to Mussolini.
• see also: most governments in Europe right now.

The research team does not believe the satellite suddenly came back to life for a moment. They suggest it is far more likely that an electrostatic charge built up on the craft and reached a certain point and then discharged. Such discharges have been seen before, the team notes. Another possibility is that the craft was struck by a micrometeoroid, releasing a very small cloud of plasma.

my mother giving me an allowance and then calling take-backsies every month because she needed it to cover the bills.

won’t even embezzle or SA interns or make me listen to their life story once a year

wow, i didn’t know we had the exact same boss.

seconding Parenti, as an anarchist

is this all there is? /rh

in Europe all i ever seem to meet are:

• ‘communists’: chauvinistic pensioners, or uni trots selling newspapers
• ‘syndicalists’: workaholic labour aristocrats and manscapers
• ‘anarchists’: teenage punkers

i’m either too old or too young to hang with any of these groups, and every year i get badjacketed because i wear a mask or have a ‘funny’ accent. i spent most of today having my fashion sense and diction mocked by 80 year old crackkkers. [nb my keyboard is broken and typed the three k’s itself. i’ve unlocked Maoist English autocorrect on my pc.]

all the local orgs are either clandestine anarcho-nihilists, or radlibs adopting revolutionary language but whose praxis begins and ends at petitions and performative protests.

Oh thanks for crossposting, I am still a Lemmy noob and didn’t manage to find right instances.

i hope it was okay to crosspost it here for you.

(i see a downvote already, but i don’t understand how this would be unfit for the comm…)

Oh, and hope you would enjoy Focus on the Road if you want to give it a try!

of course! i played a few turns. i like to remix and mashup systems i find interesting, so mostly i’ve been tinkering with the core rather than playing the game. i’m thinking of converting the tables to generic scifi and sword/sorcery themes, and using it to create connections for Cepheus characters.