Esme Povirk @madewokherd@computerfairi.es
Joined Aug 2018
plurality
I'm going to try to be the system's host. That doesn't mean I'll be fronting all the time or even most of the time necessarily, but I'll be responsible for moment-to-moment bodily operations when no one else is engaged with it, which should hopefully reduce instances of it being left largely unattended.
It does require someone in the system to remember that when I'm needed, so I'm not sure how effective it'll be, especially at first.
-iore
Esme Povirk
boosted
Esme Povirk
boosted
I believe this: Because life is self-organizing and regenerating, even the very tiny shifts we make away from harm and towards sustenance of life open up possibilities that compound upon themselves.
stream announcement
stream canceled due to tech issues
stream announcement
https://twitch.tv/madewokherd Still doing the chaotic game-switchy thingy.
trauma from growing up neurodivergent
This might be an adaptive characteristic based on teachers frequently asking me to do things that I found practically impossible. If I weren't able to disregard them, it would've destroyed me.
It might also be where I learned to accept my experiences as real, even if no one else seems to get it or believe them.
In certain ways, adults trained me from an early age not to trust them.
I'm realizing that in most of my life I'm not very responsive to external motivation, but in software development I absolutely am. Or maybe it's just that the flavor of external motivation I respond to is "this has a concrete benefit for someone" and not "someone is asking me to do this".
A project I've been working on for 2 years is now out in the wild (Proton bleeding-edge branch, enabled by default for 4 games: the non-special-edition Skyrim release, Mugster, Clustertruck, and Red Faction). It add gamepad support to launchers that don't have it built in. https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/commit/627d220fa3d7a489ddf258a96b2bf557604d5db9
This is real and not an April Fools joke.
Esme Povirk
boosted
The security community is going through the five stages of grief right now with the xz thing and I think a lot of people are coping with “there are technical measures that could have prevented this”. To move on, it is important to understand that this is not true in the slightest
Esme Povirk
boosted
The eldest among us remember the First Web, before search engines were Good Actually. They used secret magics to make sense of the chaos that was the First Web.
Site directories.
Web rings.
Home pages linking to trusted sites.
Homework and jello shooter recipes study notes.
Now that the Search Engines have fallen it is time to bring those ancient tools back, for ourselves and the youngest among us who never knew the First Web.
brain noise, hypnosis, sfw
So the process of quieting our brain was:
- Observe (through meditation, hypnosis, or whatever works) how you think.
- Try to identify the whole chain of events. For us, that was a nonverbal thought followed by internal speech. Which led to more thoughts, causing a feedback loop.
- Once you can see the chain of events, find a way to intentionally interrupt it. We did that by directing our attention to somewhere there weren't thoughts.
- Practice until it's easy.
brain noise, hypnosis, sfw
We had the important realization recently that there was a condition that needed to be met before we could learn that. In order to decide not to voice a thought, we had to be aware of thoughts before we heard them. But it wasn't enough to just observe them as many people do in meditation, once we could observe them we had to actively suppress our automatic response to them.
brain noise, hypnosis, sfw
Backstory: We used to have constant verbal chatter going on in our brain. It didn't stop even when we slept, it just became incoherent. Then, we started exploring hypnosis, and at some point it clicked, and we found a way to, with difficulty, not voice our thoughts. It was such a relief, and we practiced it until it became the default, and our mind became much quieter and calmer. We've wished since then to teach it, but we never understood well enough how it happened.
Esme Povirk
boosted
@carol This is literally a good lesson for EVERYONE in *anything,* not even just software.
Giving into pressure/guilt is DANGEROUS
In personal relationships, it's one of the worst things you can do: it tells an abuser or manipulator you're a target.
In anything financial, it's often a baited hook for a scam
In politics it's a great way to get pulled into anything from outright far-right fascist bullshit like qanon to "left" groups that are actually state-sponsored ops or personality cults
Esme Povirk
boosted
the lesson *I'm* choosing to take from xz, as an oss maintainer, is that anyone trying to pressure or guilt me into doing something should immediately be told no, for security reasons
Does anyone else have, like, a nearly-transparent layer of static overlaid on their vision, only noticeable if you focus on it or turn off perceptual filters?
Esme Povirk
boosted
Reminder: Nintendo services for the Wii U and 3DS go down in less than two weeks: https://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/63227/~/announcement-of-discontinuation-of-online-services-for-nintendo-3ds-and-wii-u
Now is an excellent time to play anything online you'd forgotten about, back up your system, and install homebrew before the servers go offline.
stream announcement
https://twitch.tv/madewokherd am doing a little chaos
Boost if you cook like a video game where you just smash some ingredients together and see what happens.
I just read a message that started "one of my friends had a weird glitch" and for a moment thought that this was referring to the friend's behavior rather than a computer system the friend was interacting with. -Menderbot
Joined Aug 2018
