Esme Povirk @madewokherd@computerfairi.es
Joined Aug 2018
Esme Povirk
boosted
we don't know what to call this property, that input doesn't change its meaning merely through the passage of time
but it's a nice property that we wish there were more conscious attention to
Esme Povirk
boosted
Christmas PSA about not being a dick
With today being Christmas, here is your annual reminder to be nice to newbies in your spaces.
There is going to be a very sudden influx of people who are just getting into the spaces you occupy because they got a gift that acts as their gateway into that activity. Maybe you're into photography and someone just bought them their first ever camera body, or you're into music and someone bought them their first guitar, or you're an audiophile and someone bought them their first really nice headphones, or you're big into TTRPGs and someone just bought them their first ever core rulebook.
Whatever the specific activity and gift, these people are going to have no idea what they're doing, they're going to ask a lot of obvious questions, they're going to make a lot of rookie mistakes, and there's going to be a lot of them.
I cannot stress this enough: BE NICE TO THEM.
Few things will ruin someone's enjoyment of something faster than trying to join its community and getting such a rude first impression that their conclusion is "People who like this are kind of assholes. I don't think I want to do this if it's going to involve getting yelled at." Craigslist and eBay and FB Marketplace will be filled with mint condition gifts being resold to attest to this in the coming months.
You were there at the very first step once. Be the person for them that you wish you had back then. (Or if you were lucky enough, the person you did have who fostered your love of it!) Make this something they'll love just as much as you do, not something they'll want to sell and get away from as soon as possible.
Be the reason this Christmas starts a lifelong passion for them, not the reason they decide to abandon something that they would've loved because people made them feel bad for needing a helping hand.
vision, glasses
It still makes the image in each eye a different size, but there's not much I can do about that.
vision, glasses
I had a cataract (and surgery) in only one eye, so they're very different. This particular tradeoff makes the closest that I can see something clearly about the same in each eye.
vision, glasses
I ordered glasses with a prescription that I adjusted manually (for better near vision), and I just got them and they are exactly what I was hoping they'd be.
I think the default is to optimize for seeing something infinitely far away, and I have reached the point where that is no longer good for near vision and I need to make an intentional tradeoff.
Actually, now that i think about it, this category is very broad outside of software too.
To me it feels reasonable to say: the things needed for a functioning society (or participation in such) should be free, transparent, and non-discriminatory. Which I guess is almost, but not quite, socialism? I don't care about ownership of those things, just how they're run.
It just occurred to me that a lot of software, including client-side software, is infrastructure. Like, my email client and text editor are infrastructure. And therefore I hold them to different standards than I would a game someone made. I expect them to be free, not for profit, transparent (open source, open protocols, finances, etc.), and non-discriminatory.
I am willing to pay for such things, but if using it requires payment, I will look for any alternative.
I recently started using this Android application for medication reminders: https://github.com/Futsch1/medTimer
It'll make notifications on your phone based on your meds schedule, and you can mark off when you've taken them. Options to repeat or snooze notifications. It keeps track of what you've taken when, or skipped, and you can log that in more detail in the app (including non-scheduled doses).
It seems to work well, and I think I'll keep it.
Esme Povirk
boosted
About “deadnames”
Some myths about deadnames and deadnaming
- “it’s just a trans thing”: cis people can have deadnames too, for many many reasons. It’s not just a special concern of trans people. One common reason is that a name can be connected to an abusive family member, and they may be powerless to change it formally and publicly. Another is the adoption of a name for oneself as a rite of passage.
- “all former/assigned-at-birth names of trans people are deadnames”: not all trans people have deadnames. Practices about names vary widely across cultures, languages and groups. For example I don’t consider my “wallet name” dead, and it isn’t a gendered name and doesn’t make gender dysphoria worse. Meanwhile I choose to not use it day to day because many people have trouble pronouncing it (or recognizing it as a name!)
I think the rejection of deadnaming shouldn’t be understood as a dogmatic issue but as a practice of care, about caring of the real other.
Like, no one can make a web browser because the web is so complex, and we mostly use that complexity for:
- Running complex client-side applications in a cross-platform virtual machine. Which is really cool, but I kinda hate that the UI and the service are so often tied together.
- Bombarding me with distractions when I just want to read an article or watch a video or whatever.
And.. maybe a simple client would be better than a complex VM and layout engine a lot of the time?
So much of my experience of browsing the web is fighting sites over how I want them displayed, that I'm beginning to think that I don't want a web browser that renders web pages, and instead I want a web browser that scrapes content from web pages and displays it according to my preferences.
Today I learned that you can replace share/media/blank.mkv with whatever you want and Proton will (in theory) play it instead of the SMPTE pattern for videos it doesn't have transcoded. I feel like there's some meme potential here.
Esme Povirk
boosted
So, “Order of the Sinking Star” by Thekla was just announced, which takes several small free games (two of which are mine) and gives them a major graphical upgrade and mashes up their rulesets. I haven’t been very involved but it’s a great concept and looks cool.
villain problems
blisters from doing the evil hand rub too frequently
Esme Povirk
boosted
AI stuff (-)
I am beginning to suspect that the labor exploitation in how LLMs are trained (tuned?) has a detrimental impact on the quality of responses. Basically, LLMs sound like someone who is being exploited, which comforts and discomforts entirely the wrong people.
AI stuff
I have set up a local LLM with a web UI on my laptop. It was pretty easy (for that I credit Arch/AUR). It barely runs but my laptop doesn't have a fan or discrete GPU so it's kind of amazing that it works at all.
(For the few things I use this for, I don't want to be there when OpenAI starts rent-seeking, and I'd rather not continue to inflate their numbers now.)
Esme Povirk
boosted
“If difficulty itself becomes a badge of honour, you've created a trap: anything that makes the system more approachable starts to feel like it's cheapening what you achieved. You become invested in preserving the barriers you overcame.”
https://www.beatworm.co.uk/blog/computers/perls-decline-was-cultural-not-technical
If we take the "it'll be too hard to tell who you're talking about" argument against they/them personal pronouns to its logical conclusion, we arrive at "everyone should have their own unique pronoun set". Which, has a certain appeal. Or maybe I just want my own unique pronoun set.
Joined Aug 2018
