admin note: this is a very early access version of our WriteFreely instance — I’m finishing out a couple of features as we roll it out to our instance regulars. thank you to @fasterandworse@awful.systems for publishing our first non-test post!

I’m always surprised that’s not a factor, given how fervent the posts are

“we’ve tried nothing, and nothing is working!” this is going to be such a common refrain

not gonna give any money to a startup whose weird fucking founder thinks their primary product is AI rather than search, thanks

Unfortunately, the only way to change what’s happening in an echo chamber may be to add your own noise.

imagine writing something like this and considering yourself to be the adult in the room. just a big ol politics understander, writing and writing and none of it means a fucking thing. you get up every morning and somehow the dread doesn’t make you collapse back into bed.

what in the absolute fuck

“you shouldn’t do anything that works to resist fascism” is going to be the neoliberal siren call for 4+ years, isn’t it

that’s absolutely the ploy — in almost every instance, civility rules are used to punish marginalized people while giving polite fascists a pass (and the ability to normalize the behavior of impolite fascists)

having a lawn is so easy first just hire a gardener to come every week, second live in a place where tap water’s inexpensive

motherfuckers

I was going to call them friendless losers who never had company over to play cornhole, have a bonfire, or lounge around on a hot summer day getting doused by a sprinkler while drinking beers because they are repugnant socially awkward cave trolls who are bitter and jealous of people who use their picturesque lawns.

But I would never do that because that is neither civil nor polite.

dang hates this one weird trick you can use to be an asshole in spite of the orange site’s civility rules

also what is that list of activities? did ChatGPT generate this? grass is required to play beep boop normal human games like cornhole now? you’re “having a bonfire” on grass and not in something normal like a firepit that’s safer on rocks or concrete? you’re just laying down on the grass, where the dog shits, slowly getting drunk and incredibly itchy from the grass as a sprinkler douses you?

picturesque lawns

oh maybe that’s it, the only people I’ve ever met with picturesque lawns are wealthy and wealthy people ain’t fucking normal

Or you could just not water it, not fertilize it, not pesticide it and simply run the mower over it whenever the assorted vegetation (which will be mostly grass) exceeds a certain height.

It won’t look “nice neighborhood” nice but it’ll still be fine.

i love when my yard is a giant mud patch rimmed by yellow with an occasional glimmer of green when the crabgrass blooms

the orange site is absolutely populated by the type of shithead who’s proud to be on their HOA’s board

that’s absolutely valid, and I’ve come to effectively the same conclusion: good encrypted email is effectively a different protocol (one which, as of now, is proton-to-proton and tuta-to-tuta only) and should be treated as one. daily unencrypted email is a legacy protocol that can effectively be handled client-side as a different account.

encrypted mail should be federated, possibly with something like activitypub (though I don’t have a good solution for attachments), but every time I float this I get a lot of very angry feedback about how I shouldn’t propose a new email standard without solving spam first, whatever solving spam means. some of the people giving feedback then float solutions that are basically warmed-over hashcash and then I stop listening.

the difference between modern webmail and what activitypub already does is very thin — a lot of it is intent, UI (email’s focused on long messages and potentially long threads), and features like attachments going from best-effort priority to crucial. there’s absolutely room in the world for better email — I just believe that internally, it’ll look closer to e2e ActivityPub with something like Soatok’s federated keyserver concept on top, rather than the shitty half baked shit we do now to make PGP work with email

you’ve fucking done it

my next movie marathon is gonna be Revolution OS, Battlefield Earth, Antitrust, and then I’m going to go into a coma

you are, without any sense of shame, evangelizing libreoffice to someone who compiled it straight from git like 12 hours ago because they use it constantly, in a community made entirely out of techies deeply involved with open source projects

and now you’re complaining that your weak shit got a tiny number of downvotes? cause we didn’t clap like seals at the mere idea of the existence of open source software? fuck right off, thanks

consider the raw, stupid energy of reporting me to myself for violating a civility rule that doesn’t exist and never will

huh, I just switched to Tuta and that’s a very good point — there isn’t even a command line mail client, much less an IMAP bridge. the official word from a couple years ago is “write it yourself but we don’t support automated email” which is several kinds of wrong

so far I’m not hating Tuta but it’s definitely much jankier than Proton. I’m kinda surprised I’ve heard good things about Tuta’a UI compared with Proton — it’s faster, but functionality so far varies from somewhat barebones to mildly broken

no regrets on the switch on my end so far though, but this might come to bite me at some point. I wonder if a dedicated transactional mail provider could alleviate some of the pain? I can DM you a recommendation for a good one if that seems like it’d be handy

congrats on just learning about the corporation named “Microsoft”

now fuck off

and of course, Twitter and Facebook style influence campaigns work just as well or even better elsewhere, in communities that haven’t hardened themselves against that type of bullshit

minor upside: it’s going to be a good time to make lists of people who suddenly feel comfortable to mask off

correct. keep receipts.

what a surprise, the thread all the leftist shitposters on mastodon boosted about how you’re a class traitor if you don’t vote for the Green Party (who I don’t buy as socialist) or “any other socialist party” (fucking who??? am I supposed to write “socialism” on my ballot in crayon???) conveniently went missing

anyway post your favorite fuckhead accelerationist here, mastodon’s a shooting gallery tonight

I don’t have too much coherent to say right now

fuck the fascists for what they’ve done and what they intend to do

fuck the neoliberals for doing their best to convince marginalized people that they shouldn’t defend themselves against a terrible fate

fuck the accelerationists for pumping shitheaded propaganda into the fediverse, for the victory lap they’re taking now, and for the general idea that their revolution is worth our deaths

shit’s about to get very hard and very weird and I can’t stress enough how important it is to be careful who you trust with your life

This second-stage trial claims to have ironed out issues from the first-stage trial where the bot “starts to get challenging, or abusive — or even seductive.” [Public Technology]

Officials showed the bot to reporters earlier today. It would occasionally answer English questions in Welsh. It wouldn’t answer “What is the corporation tax regime?” because it didn’t like the word “regime.”

could you imagine fucking up a government contract so bad the resulting technological output starts sexting or tone policing you instead of giving correct answers to tax questions? and then you just shove it in front of the press and expect praise?