PSA: "It's hard to find women to speak at events in Tech" - this is pure bullshit 💩
It's hard to convince women to risk attending a mostly-male event when they cannot see your ally-ship, maybe. But there are plenty of smart, highly capable women in Tech that would significantly enhance your event by speaking there.
Build your network. Listen to women. Then get a 50:50 women:men organizing team. 🧑🤝🧑 Then listen some more.
Gerade gehen hier auf Mastodon mal wieder Sachen viral herum, die zeigen sollen, dass die #noAFD im Bundestag gegen Sozialmaßnehmen gestimmt hat und damit gegen die Interessen ihrer vermeintlichen Wählerschaft stimmen würde. Genauso gehen Reportagen herum, die sich darüber wundern, dass in Ostbayern die #noAFD eine Hochburg hat, obwohl es die Region als strukturstark gilt. 1/
Some 52 years ago, when I was in 4th grade of primary school, I found a book "who put glasses on the kid's eyes" in a small book shop in open bazaar of my hometown Ahvaz in khuzestan province of Iran.
A few days later, we had to bring a book to school and read it in front of the class. Happy as I was to have found a great book, I took it to school and read it in front of the class.
I couldn't understand why my teacher was acting so scared and stopped me before I had finished the book and sent me to the principals office.
I was nervous, didn't know what I had done wrong and our principal, who was a really nice man, and went to the same university as my oldest sister took the book and asked me where I had bought it. I knew something was wrong, so I said I bought it at the book store of our local mosque, to protect the guy who was my source of cheap and lovely books and would buy back my old ones to help me afford buying new ones.
In the evening my father came home, agitated and clearly upset. Asked me what I have done and I explained the situation, including the fact that I lied about wher I had bought the book. Told him the highlight of the book about a happy child who was living in a town with happy people who were all wearing glasses.
He was seeing flowers, colorful houses. Nice people and happy children all around him, birds flying in the sky and everyone were so friendly to him.
Until one day he fell of and his glasses broke. He couldn't believe his eyes, the flowers, colorful houses and happy people were all gone. All he could see was a run down city, with piles of garbage everywhere, people wearing worn out clothes, looking hungry and sick.
He was nece happy after that, he couldn't believe that everyone were walking around with glasses and we're happy all the time. But he was sad and miserable, because he had seen his town without those glasses.
Anyway. My father took me to a building close to the main police station on the other side of the Karun river, he spent almost entire day in a room where I could people screaming at him and a few times someone his the table very hard. But couldn't hear what they were saying.
My dad came out. Pulled my hand without saying a word, we walked for an hour to get home, didn't take taxi as we used to do.
He didn't say a word during the whole day and told me to go over my books and bring all the books I had bought from that shop, he through them in a metal bucket and poured some fuel over it, set them on fire and waited until they were completely burned, mixed the ashes to turn them into dust, filled the bucket with water and through it in the toilet.
He told me to never go back to that shop and be careful to take any books to school from now on.
That' was my first interaction with the notorious Savak police of Shah of Iran. In the next days, all the 4 book stores in our town were raided. Books confiscated and doors locked. Never heard about any of them again.
Reading the comments of pro Israeli accounts on mastodon reminded me of that book and that experience that changed my life when I was only 8 years old.
This post specially triggered those memories. Unlike the kid in my book and the people living in the town, these people know very well tat what they are posting is not true, they have seen the horror of the past 76 years of occupation, they have seen the 66 times they were subject to UNSC charges, and 45 that were vetoed by the US..
But they don't care, they see themselves as victims. They don't see the millions of starving palestinians, or the millions living in refuge camps around the world as worthy of their empathy or cause of why Palestinians and some of the world is fed up with their out of control criminal behavior
They don't have glasses on their eyes, they have chosen to be selective and above the laws of the world.
I hate it when softwares are using braille dots for a progress bar. Nah, really I do.
These are braille characters in a lot of cases, folks. They're not meant to be pretty to look at, or looking fancy for your progress indicator. They're meant for blind people to read and understand informations. What do you think my brain understand when it sees braille dots 1, 3 and 5 together? The "o" letter. And that's just one example.
So we all agree to be welcoming to anyone coming from Twitter now, right? We won't be sanctimonious privileged douchecanoes telling them they're not Mastodoing correctly, right?
2022 and some of 2023 showed plenty of gatekeeping assholery in line with early 2000s Linux forums. Let's not do that anymore.
Oh fantastic. Someone assigned a CVE to an invalid bug report. Of course it's rated "critical".
Now I have to file for a rejection again, while thousands of "vulnerability report sites" copy each others bad summary of the CVE text making it worse with every copy.
The whole CVE system and the "security research industry" at large is a steaming pile of 💩
I feel like the ability to add alt text to our profile and banner pictures should be a larger priority for #Mastodon when we spend so many characters admonishing those who don't include it in their regular posts.
Including it in the profile description is an inelegant kludge that doesn't make sense semantically.
Imperial units are a pain all round, but I cannot even begin to describe how maddening “thousandths of an inch” are. OH LOOK.. AREN’T DECIMALS USEFUL? I suppose that some other weird subdivision of an inch would be worse, but really, if you can cope with thousandths of an inch, what’s so hard about a centimetre? #units#rant
The people behind Bluesky/Threads/Post/anything besides ActivityPub/Diaspora protocol federated social web, financially and otherwise, are the exact same people that gave us the calamity of modern social media and tried the exact same market monopoly move with web3/crypto (which I despise for other reasons but that’s a segue). They even sold the latter with the same decentralization and egalitarianism marketing shtick. I’ll be damned if I trust my social media presence to them again. To quote The Wire: “Fuck me once, shame on you. Fuck me twice, shame on me.” #bluesky#fediverse#ActivityPub#BillionairesShouldNotExist#rant
Watching the social media landscape news the past couple weeks has me in a dual mindset of despondancy and determination about the fediverse. The despondancy comes from the reinforced realism that usage decisions around these systems will forever be driven by FOMO and frictionless entry and our systems aren't really ready for either yet. I have mixed feelings about Mastodon changing onboarding to make it all "mastodon.social" by default (where 90% of the users will go now) but getting rid of the biggest analysis paralysis part of getting people here is vitally important. To be frank, normal people don't give a damn about decentralization or data control they care about FOMO and "it just works". Friendica, my network, has even further to go on that front than Mastodon even. The determination comes from the knowledge that we did get a glimpse of people being able to feel FOMO about the fediverse thanks to Musk's Twitter enshitification. As people, including me, continue to refine the fediverse we could be in a position where more of them feel it enough to stay on the next wave. The fact is I'm not working on these systems to "conquering the world". I'm working on these systems because I enjoy using them on a daily basis and I want to improve that experience for myself and others. I hope that as we improve more will come into the fold and we could eventually hit a critical mass to be a real fraction of the social media space. If we remain niche though I have to be fine with that too. "Be the change you want to see in the world," as the saying goes... #friendica#fediverse#mastodon#SocialMedia#rant#ElonMusk#twitter
I'm going to be slightly contrarian and say that I like Discord. It's great to be able to get real-time help on a problem. And it is fun to see, again in real-time, what other people are working on and struggling with. In truth, Discord is no harder to sign up to than Slack, Matrix, […]
My daughter, T, rang to vent the other day. Her 5-year-old, C, had come home from public school pre-Easter and proceeded to tell T all about Jesus being persecuted and crucified, dying, and then being alive again.
Now, T takes after us; thoroughly atheist; to say that she was taken aback would be an understatement. In essence, C now believed in the resurrection and thought that anybody who died could come back to life. It took a weekq to convince her of the truth (dead is dead and the bible is a storybook), but as we know, that shit sticks.
The same afternoon as the revelation, before the steam had dissipated, T rang the school to enquire, mostly politely, 𝙒𝙏𝘼𝙁?? C had not been to any religion-based classes and should not have been exposed to this rubbish/nonsense/garbage. The school apologised and said they would look into it. Apparently, other parents had complained, too...
The teacher, in all innocence (apparently) had been telling the story of Easter from the Christian point of view without realising (apparently) that children are sponges, especially at that age and in a situation where they have been told repeatedly that 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘵𝘦𝘢𝘤𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘴 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘵𝘰 𝘣𝘦 𝘵𝘳𝘶𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘵𝘦𝘭𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘵𝘳𝘶𝘵𝘩.
Now, to my mind, any teacher who doesn't understand that shouldn't be a teacher. Or it was quite deliberate, in which case they shouldn't be a teacher in a government school.
The teacher apologised and the school closed the case but T is still dealing with the fallout, with C occasionally coming out with comments about people dying and coming back to life. Like I said, this shit sticks, often for life.
We're all born atheist; the real indoctrination is religion.
Videos that auto-play but muted are wrong in every possible perspective. Even if I want to see it, then by the time I unmute I've missed the first several seconds. And if I don't want to, I'm wasting a ton of bandwidth for video I don't want.
There is no situation in which "autoplay muted" is the correct answer. Absolutely none.
If your website is doing it, you are wrong. Please stop. Now.
In der Kieler Kommunalpolitik wird gerade über den Neubau eines Fussballstadions gestritten. Dabei hat der CDU Ratsherr Sebastian Thiede dieses Argument vorgebracht:
kn-online.de hat geschrieben:
„Wenig hilfreich sind die geäußerten kostspieligen Wünsche der grün-roten Kooperation hinsichtlich Klimaneutralität und nachhaltiger Bauweise, die die monetäre kommunale Finanzlage wie so oft ignorieren und eine schnelle Bauumsetzung erschweren“, so Thiede.
Das Teil ist ein Fussballstadion und somit ganz und gar nicht Lebensnotwendig, es dient nur der Unterhaltung. Und da hat man gefälligst auf Klimaneutralität und Nachhaltigkeit zu achten! Die Stadt Kiel hat immerhin schon vor ein paar Jahren den #Klimanotstand ausgerufen (Quelle: Klimanotstand Kiel). Wenn dadurch der Neubau teurer wird, muss man halt mehr Eintritt zahlen.Und davon mal ganz abgesehen frage ich mich sowieso was die Stadt damit zu tun hat, sie muss es nur genehmigen oder halt nicht. Um die Finanzierung eines größeren Stadions sollte sich der Verein selber kümmern. Das regelmäßige Polizei-Großaufgebot um die "Fans" in Schach zu halten kostet die Stadt und das Land ja sowieso schon genug.
Male-defaultism in #archaeology is bloody annoying.
Just because someone draws a #hunting scene in a #cave, doesn't mean it was a man doing so or depicting one.
Every #archer grave from the Bell Beaker Era MUST be #male because even when they find #female additions, that just means she is related to a great man or the male lost status (of course).
Archaeologist Randy Haas just assumed he found a male big game hunter in Peru in 2013. Except he didn't.
All of this "Democrats should worry about tit for tat" is beyond hypocritical. Democrats did not do tit-for-tat against GWB after the ginned up Clinton Impeachment. Democrats didn't do it to Trump after GOP tried the same thing with Obama nor when they refused to support legislation they normally would under Obama. Trump already tried to make the US AG and DOJ his personal law firm. He directly interfered with investigations against cronies and his family. Meanwhile Democratic congressional members and the Biden's own son are under active investigation and criminal cases for stuff that was shady as fuck, in the case of Menedez, or wouldn't normally have gone this far in the case of some of Hunter's charges. Republicans were already going to use these things without the pretense they are presenting here because one of their own was finally held to account. #uspoli#rant
"Down in the valley, he said, there were ancient earthworks, but they had been rendered unrecognisable by quad-bike damage. I expect these Neolithic stargazers thought their way of life would last for ever. Then maybe someone started lying about stuff. And things deteriorated
rapidly."
How do civilisations collapse? Ask Lee Anderson | Stewart Lee #rant