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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • All people need is a focus for resistance, a group or a leader to join. Most people are disgusted by this, and despite the election result I still believe most people would rather see trans people happy than suffering. And as the visibility of trans people increases, more and more cis people have been discovering that they know and care about trans people in their own lives. That’s why the hateful fringe feels it’s so urgent to shut trans rights down. They know they have to push people back into fear and silence before transphobia becomes uncommon. And they know they have to silence people talking about these matters to make organized resistance possible. But the quiet is largely people not knowing how to connect and resist, not a lack of desire to resist. It’s time for organized resistance and the first movement that gets going will find many supporters.

    We also need some organization around getting LGBTQ+ refugees out of the USA and into other countries. The restrictions on passports are very ominous.






  • “It’s heartbreaking,” she said. “There are people in my position making pragmatic decisions about their careers. There are people we will absolutely lose to industry, whose brilliance will go toward a company instead of public good.”

    The wealthy will profit from knowledge while the public suffer in ignorance. This is the plan, though it’s stupid and short-sighted.

    I hope other countries can provide a base for US scientists to continue their work for the public good. But it’s a shame the Republican plan to destroy the USA is working so quickly.




  • I dunno. I’ve been programming on and off since the 1980s and professionally since the early 2000s. It still always takes me forever to build anything worthwhile and even longer to maintain it. Most software these days is complicated enough that it requires many people to build and maintain. I’m not sure that “everyone should be equipped to program what they need” was realistic even back in the 1980s, let alone with today’s complexity.

    Most users don’t want to be sucked down a bottomless time hole just getting their computer to do a thing it won’t do, and understandably prefer to have someone else suffer this for them, then use what was built.

    So I don’t know about the goal of everyone being able to program. I still think it’s a worthwhile goal that people should have full control over their machines so that they can install and uninstall what they want, configure devices to work the best way for them, and turn off the features that don’t serve the user at all. And I think open source software is great for bringing technically inclined people together to collaborate on what’s actually useful to people.