CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@0xabad1dea Poor baby!

@glyph This kind of "consent" structure is unfortunately nothing new - I felt a bit like this recently signing on an apartment rental, and we all know the reputation record labels made for themselves pretty much from the start of them existing at all.

Where tech really steps in to make things worse is that:

1. Almost all tech that people directly interact with, acts like this.*
2. A lot more of our lives involve tech now.

It's not that different from the push to financialize everything. There are rich people who want every aspect of human existence to happen in spaces that contribute to their own wealth and power.

* Tech that is, not coincidentally, almost all proprietary on the outer edge.

@jonn_blanchard I know a couple artists (literally, they're a couple). I asked them about availability, we'll see what - if anything - comes of it.

@cappuccino Welcome! I've heard Belgium is a very pleasant place. Hopefully with those high standards, you'll find us pleasant here too. Also, BSD, niiiice.

@artemis I don't consider myself an accelerationist, but after watching Trump burst the bubble of the American Empire in some plausibly permanent ways... I gotta admit, maybe they had a point. There are certainly long-term silver linings to the ongoing cortisol bath of being a queer person under this administration. It's probably the most I've felt that, if we can survive this part, things will get better someday, and not in the old "at the rest of Earth's expense" way.

@astro_jcm This is why thick apartment walls are important. Sometimes you just want to pound your schnitzel in peace.

@yayaver being able to do all that every day "for awhile" does not mean you've found some sustainable groove, btw. That's the other hazard. "I can do it, I'm doing it right now!" Ma'am you are warming your hands on your own house burning down and telling me "that should keep us warm all winter!" In like, November. It don't work like that.

@susankayequinn

@nixCraft So glad to be off of Trello for long enough that they deleted my account.

@chu Very true, and the "otherwise the nicest people" part hits home particularly hard.

Growing up, my Grandma always had Rush Limbaugh playing on the radio, FOX News on the TV, all that. She was also a woman who supported her (grand)kids even when they made decisions she didn't agree with. When my nudist libertarian aunt and uncle needed a place to stay for awhile, she hosted them at her house as long as they needed. When I was out as an atheist, and had a heated conversation about that with a particular aunt and broke down in tears after she left, it was my pillar-of-the-church Grandma that held me while I sobbed in her arms. I'll never forget that.

The thing that struck me, as I moved far enough left to see it, was this: you could always tell which opinions were hers, and which things she'd been told to believe by right-wing media, because the two were worlds apart. That's really what taught me the evil that conservative media does TO our elders, not just THROUGH them.

@zkat Open source is (maybe subtly) about maintainership, and LLMs are incredibly hostile to maintainers.

And licensing! I definitely have moved towards the Radical Copyleft over the last two years, after spending most of my career leaning towards permissive licenses, because I finally see the value of having some legal teeth to bite back against bad actors. Even GPL isn't some cure-all though, and it's exhausting.

It's going to be a dark couple years of existing open source exploitation trends/burnout getting worse, which will be recounted by ghouls: "I don't understand why $maintainer doesn't just drink the Radithor I'm hawking! I've never felt more vitality in my bones."

@downey this is especially stupid because prior versions of the code, with the same vulnerabilities, will continue to publicly exist. Welcome to the worst of all worlds!

@inthehands Currently out of work, and I've been struggling with this. On the one hand, I have a strong conviction that what I do matters, and will continue to matter, and is (among other things) a form of art. On the other hand, it's incredibly jarring for the economy to do such a rapid 180 on whether I have anything useful to offer, and it leaves me feeling like a leech on my partner's salary, wondering how long it's going to be before I can bring money to the household again. I think it's going to be a capital P Process to figure out how to carve out a niche in this broke new world.

Thanks for this thread, btw. It helps.

@jalefkowit You can tell people that one of fascism's signature operating principles is taking the ever-shrinking safe zone of a battle royale video game and applying it to society itself, but there really is no substitute for actually seeing it happen in real time.