You may not agree with what your favorite company is doing, but please be kind to the ones who answer the phones. they did not make the upper level decisions. Don't take it out on them. They probably don't much like it either.
People use ableist insults because they think the worst you could possibly be is genetically defective in some way.
No, the worst you can possibly be is deliberately cruel and terrible, choosing to do things that dehumanize others. Having the faculties to not say something shitty but doing so anyway is worse than so many of the things these people think are good insults.
Wo wir jetzt wohnen, kamen tatsächlich viele Gruppen verkleideter Kinder zur Tür. Das war so aufregend und toll, dass ich zwischendurch vor Freude Tränen in den Äuglein hatte. :D
Ich hab verkleidet im Flur gehorcht und über die Videoklingel geguckt, während Henrik mit Schweinemaske Süßes verteilt hat. Für echte Interaktion war mir das alles zu wild, weil halt #Autismus aber auf die Weise indirekt dabei zu sein, war richtig toll!
Ich mag unbedingt nächstes Jahr ganz viel dekorieren.
Sigh, openvpn has terrible error reporting. It exits when it can't open a file, but it doesn't tell me why it couldn't open it. Doesn't even look at errno to report it.
Why the heck is there a call to bash and install dependencies / npm install embedded in the FAA's TFR pages? (Updated: amused to learn, informally, there's already a ticket filed against this one at the FAA).
Been thinking a lot lately about the deep tension between abstraction and context.
What do I mean by "abstraction" and "context"?
Abstraction to me, fundamentally, is separation. Distance. It's that which can be lifted up out of its context and sent far away. A software library. A bylaw. A statistic. Containerization. Commodification. Securitization.
Whereas "context" is embedded & embodied. Relational. It is tied to a moment in time, a particular place, a person, a feeling. It's closeness.
Neither abstraction nor context is inherently bad. We need both. We need the ability to look at our lives & worlds and see patterns to lift out. There are so many wonderful things abstraction has given us. But we also need a respect for and appreciation of context. Both because our abstractions are always incomplete and often wrong, and because much of the joy in life is in context. The here and now. The specific things that bring you joy, your specific needs, the specific people you love.
What concerns me is how society privileges and emphasizes the abstract over the contextual.
Some examples of this:
STEM vs the Humanities: Employers and society in general tend to favor and admire people with STEM backgrounds over humanities backgrounds. Even within STEM, the "hard sciences" are seen as more valuable than the "soft sciences", where hardness and softness are largely judged by how much abstraction they require (with, for example, physics and math being seen as very 'hard').
Securities Fraud: As Matt Levine likes to say, "Everything Is Securities Fraud". Why?
"When a company harms some class of people in some bad but essentially non-monetary way, it is hard to quantify the damages as money; when a company harms its shareholders, you can just see how much the stock went down."
The more measurable - that is, the most abstractable - the harm, the more likely you are to get justice for it.
Even within the financial industry, a highly abstract domain, securities stand out as especially abstract and thus valuable:
Patrick Mackenzie writes:
"I think our level of awareness is less than where it should be at the moment. Partially this is for Seeing Like A State style reasons. Securities are so legible . They have conveniently surveillable mark-to-market prices and trade continuously. [...] Loans, on the other hand, remain quite illegible."
Speaking of Seeing Like a State, that book is full of examples of overvaluing abstraction and legibility - and it also shows that this preference is nothing new.
For example, Scott documents the rise of fiscal forestry:
"The early modern European state, even before the development of scientific forestry, viewed its forests primarily through the fiscal lens of revenue needs. [...] Missing, of course, were all those trees, bushes, and plants holding little or no potential for state revenue."
In Germany, this "fiscal lens" was imposed on the forest itself. "To this end, the underbrush was cleared, the number of species was reduced (often to monoculture), and plantings were done simultaneously and in straight rows on large tracts. The German forest became the archetype for imposing on disorderly nature the neatly arranged constructs of science."
The neat and orderly nature of the German forests mean unskilled (and thus cheaper) labor crews could carry out maintenance and logging.
Yields were more uniform and easy to turn into standardized products. The forests were easier to study scientifically: "Now that the more complex old-growth forest had been replaced by a forest in which many variables were held constant, it was a far simpler matter to examine the effects of such variables."
These abstracted German forests were better for many human purposes, but worse in one crucial way—they could not survive. Germans had to invent a new term: waldsterben, or "forest death".
Given the long growth cycles of trees, it took nearly a century for the fact that the forests were dying to become clear. Or perhaps I should say, "clear to the people in charge". Who knows what the plants and the animals and the people who relied on the forest knew?
This is a recurrent problem with abstraction. Because it is inherently more visible than the contextual, and because it is more likely to be wielded by those in power, it can be hard to alter.
Ideally, the abstract is valued in equal measure to the contextual. Just as abstractions can help make the contexts of our individual lives better, so can feedback from individuals and contexts about issues with the abstractions make the abstraction better.
But we do not value abstraction and context equally. And so the forests die.
As someone in tech, I am particularly concerned with how tech perpetuates this dynamic.
The tech industry constantly tries to commoditize human needs, replacing real relationships in all their complexity and interdependency with context-less, ephemeral "relationships" mediated by apps. Instead of asking a neighbor or a new friend for help fixing a broken screen door, we hire someone on TaskRabbit. Instead of asking someone we know to cook us something when we're sick, we order a meal online.
One of the best ways to build a close relationship with someone is to ask them for help. But—if we can afford it—we no longer have to bear the exquisite vulnerability of asking for help. Instead we can pay someone to perform a service for us. It's a transaction. No vulnerability needed.
Another vital element of relationships is rupture and repair. This is when you tell a person they've hurt you or failed to meet your needs in some way, and they work with you to re-establish trust and a sense of connection. We perform a grotesque simulacrum of rupture and repair when we report an issue on an app like Uber Eats. A faceless customer support agent, completely unrelated to the person who failed us, gives us a refund.
The Amish are remarkable for their care in determining what technologies they'll adopt. This applies to engineering innovations like cars and televisions, but also to new social technologies. For example, starting in 1955, the Amish refused to pay Social Security taxes.
"The Amish objected to participating, in part on the basis that they believed they were religiously obligated to take care of each other and should not be transferring that obligation to the state." - David Friedman
The Amish have a point. While I am a strong supporter of Social Security, I can't deny the problems that shifting the burden of care from individual relationships to the abstract state has created. There is a much greater distance between those giving care and those receiving it—a distance that can lead to shame, resentment, and fears of exploitation. The often-mocked refrain "Get government out of my medicare!" speaks to degree of dissociation possible with such an abstract system.
"Is in the very nature of a question like “What do I owe my parents?” that there is not and can never be a final, numerically answer. It is a question that we re-visit and re-negotiate every minute we are with them; obligation and love form an endless Möbius strip"
If anything, the limitation of this big book is actually that it’s not big enough, that it gestures towards — without fully including – so very much that is within the ken of its ambition. Bu…
"By contrast, Graeber argues that purely monetary debts – such as the $14k I owe in student debts to a variety of banks – legitimize violence and exploitation precisely because they take an otherwise irreducibly complex human relation and reductively simplify it into a number. When you quantify a debt with financial precision [..] you take what was a human relationship of mutual imbrication and co-implication into a financial one based on a kind of moral dominance."
"Let us, then, look with new eyes at the fact that when a dictator takes out a loan from a Western bank—pledging as his surety the future revenues produced by the people who he uses men with guns to rule—we can be utterly sure that long after he is dead and gone, that debt will live on. [...] children unborn when their nation went into debt will somehow still be on hold as the debt’s guarantors. This will appear normal. This will not seem a monstrous perversity."
If money is an abstraction that tends to replace human relationships, capitalism is a way of structuring a society that rewards and accelerates that replacement—and modern, highly financialized capitalism the most extreme version of that.
See again Matt Levine's contention that everything is securities fraud—at the rate we're going, maybe someday soon, it will be.
That's an interesting take. I'll admit my default is towards abstraction and while I can see that it has its issues, I can see the issues in context more glaringly. Context has high variance. If you're well-embedded in a good community with plenty of people willing to help you, outcomes will probably be better than depending on an average bureaucracy. But a lot of people aren't. Vulnerable people who are unlikable or friendless or lonely, without systems to take care of them, simply don't get the help they need.
This was most starkly brought to my mind by a post I read recently, remarking that some disabled people aren't allowed to be unlikable, because if they are, it may mean death to them (less dramatically, not eating that day, not being helped to the toilet, etc).
I think my society tends to prefer contextual, individual solutions. Until recently, nursing homes were seen as family failure, for example. Having seen what this can do to people (abandonment, care burden) it's very hard for me not to come on the side of abstraction.
But it's totally fair to remind us that it also has its costs.
Apologies if this is too wordy or takes things in a different direction from which you were thinking.
That said, some people (including myself!) have a tendency to see the failure modes of context and think "we can fix this with abstraction!" And sometimes this is true, but sometimes it's not, and what you actually need is to improve things at the context level.
To use your nursing home example: yes, institutional and societal support is so important in reducing unequal care burdens but also professional nurses cannot actually replace the experience of being cared for by loved ones.
You write: "If you're well-embedded in a good community with plenty of people willing to help you, outcomes will probably be better than depending on an average bureaucracy. But a lot of people aren't."
100% true. But "good community" and "well-embedded" and "people willing to help you" are all dynamic, changeable things. And if we only focus on abstract solutions instead of asking what's failing at the relational level, we miss the opportunity to change them.
Right, that's certainly true. If that can be improved, it's very much worth working on it. I just think it's very hard to improve; people have been doing context since forever. And it's even harder to improve it at scale precisely because it's so variable.
But there are things that can help. People having fewer working hours comes to mind. Being less afraid of strangers. That sort of thing. And yes, that's all worth doing.
Halloween est une fête folklorique et païenne originaire des îles Anglo-Celtes, célébrée le soir du 31 octobre 🎃. La tradition moderne veut que les enfants se déguisent avec des costumes effrayants et aillent sonner aux portes en demandant des friandises. fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallowee…
Héritage de la fête religieuse celtique de Samain, cette fête est introduite en Amérique du Nord au XIXème siècle après l'arrivée massive d'émigrants fuyant la Grande famine en Irlande 🇮🇪. Elle est aujourd'hui célébrée dans de nombreux pays.
Hey @delta! Reading this delta.chat/en/2025-05-22-brows… got me thinking. I live in Firefox but miss Chrome’s one-click “Install PWA as app”. What about a Tauri-based helper + a Firefox extension that wraps a PWA into a desktop app in one step? Hosting stays light: the PWA is cached; relays/self-hosted instances can serve the client. Keeps control with admins. Interested? 👍🏻
As part of the project to port Delta Chat Desktop from Electron to Tauri1, we’ll showcase a setup where our Desktop app runs in Firefox and does not depend on Electron or Chromium anymore. This vid...
there is also a tauri version, we will publish the blogpost about that somewhere in the future. github.com/deltachat/deltachat… Also this browser version is not standalone, it still requires one server instance per user that runs deltachat/chatmail core. Ideally it would be just a PWA, but for that #chatmail core needs to be compiled to, and work in wasm: support.delta.chat/t/what-woul…
A law that requires "age assurance" sounds reasonable and moderate. But if that law defines age assurance as requiring government ID verification, it's not moderate at all—it's mass surveillance. Here’s a guide to what all those terms mean: eff.org/deeplinks/2025/10/age-…
If you've been following the wave of age-gating laws sweeping across the country and the globe, you've probably noticed that lawmakers, tech companies, and advocates all seem to be using different terms for what sounds like the same thing.
Excited about going to my first @w3c #TPAC in Kobe Japan. I will be co-hosting a breakout group on Web Sustainability Guidelines #WSG — November 12th, 08:30 JST w3.org/events/meetings/f7fcc7e…
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international community where Member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop Web standards.
Happy Halloween! Need a scary game? How about a hindsight horror tale of a looming Y2K apocalypse ruled over by digital eldritch gods?
The Shadow Over Cyberspace is a full-length visual novel for free. No ads, no MTX, we just gave it away because why not. fictionfactorygames.com/cybers…
So a blind person from around town that only calls me for tech support is having jaws issues. In any word document she opens, jaws reads the word space marker instead of regular space and some kind of formatting info appears on her braille display. Line/paragraph info is turned off in quick settings. I have no clue what is going on.
It's show or hide non-printable characters. Those includes space markers, paragraph markers, new line markers. For example, we can clearly see on the Braille display that there are two or three spaces in a row, but for sighted people it's tougher, especially due to font and paragraph formatting difference.
I am looking forward to going to the @w3c 's #TPAC in Kobe Japan. I will be hosting a breakout group on #ARRM — Accessibility Roles and Responsibilities Mapping — November 12th, 16:15 JST w3.org/events/meetings/76eeff8…
We also just reposted his invitation to a Puerto Rico group, because we think the way this group is instigated is exactly right: ask for people to drop into a DM, or like with the borken.social Fediverse instance: show an invite link only for authenticated users 🎯
Non-public invites maintain some privacy and sense of joiners and brings e2ee messaging to instance communities.
Fun with Robots. Had a tech support chat with Dell to triage a failed Alienware PC. I kept posting the transcript in ChatGPT so the robots could tell me what tech support was going to ask next so I could perform the task before they asked.
"A federal judge in Rhode Island on Friday blocked President Donald Trump's administration from suspending all food aid for millions of Americans amid the ongoing government shutdown and directed it to use contingency funds to pay for the benefits."
Arduino Rap? "MIDI-triggered robots strike and vibrate glass bottles, coffee mugs, plastic wrap and a pizza box to make futuristic music out of the present's refuse and rubbish." clipping., the only hip hop group to win a Hugo. Tiny Desk concert.
Zítra nám držte palce. Čeká nás první velká streamovací akce. Ve spolupráci s @openalt budeme streamovat přednášky ze všech 7 místností konference #OpenAlt. Pokud budete mít čas a nějaká přednáška v programu vás zaujme, zkuste se mrknout. Při sledování videa jej zároveň sdílíte s ostatními diváky jako u torrentu (pokud nejste na mobilním zařízení) a každý peer se tak počítá!
Here's a short video about my cloudless, portable, small, low-resource "smart thermostat". It doesn't need an internet connection and uses MQTT. Here, it's directly driving a relay. It's running on a Raspberry Pi Zero W, powered by NetBSD, in read-only mode. I used it for years and it's time to go back to it, cloudless and local.
I wish I could find the HN comment by the Honeywell engineer that talks about like 6 different safety features none of the open source DIY thermostats have but I cannot seem to find it anymore. Stuff like
- it needs to lock out instead of continuing to try to start the gas heat so you don't flood the house with gas if the ignition is faulty
- it needs to automatically turn on the heat no matter what if if gets too cold
- it needs a mechanical safety feature to shut itself off if the heat gets stuck on
@feld My Netatmo doesn't do all that, and neither do the other thermostats connected to the other boilers I have access to.
Fundamentally, those are things the boiler handles (if it's less than 20 years old), not the thermostat. My boiler, even though it's 10 years old, has all these internal features; it also controls the water temperature, etc.
The thermostat is just for deciding if the house is cold or not - I expect all the other controls to be handled by the burner itself.
In other words, I'm not replacing the internal thermostat (the one that regulates the flow temperature, etc.), just the room thermostat. Besides, my sensor is located very far from the boiler, which is in a separate, ventilated room.
modern thermostats have neat features like compressor short cycle prevention for ac. 40 years ago you could literally make a call for service from the unit every minute and nothing would stop you until either the high side failed or the compressor motor failed.
I removed the Nest at this place I'm renting and put in a ZWave Honeywell, thought it was defective at first because it wasn't turning on the AC but it was just a safety thing and made me wait like 15 minutes before it would turn on the compressor the first time
on an unrelated note kids these days dont remember when a wet floor or frayed Xmas light could literally send you to Jesus same day delivery or flash fry the cat and burn the damn house down.
GFCI AFCI combo outlets save lives and their inventor deserves a Nobel prize.
![> The early modern European state, even before the development of scientific forestry, viewed its forests primarily through the fiscal lens of revenue needs. [...] one might say that the crown’s interest in forests was resolved through its fiscal lens into a single number: the revenue yield of the timber that might be extracted annually. [...] Missing, of course, were all those trees, bushes, and plants holding little or no potential for state revenue. Missing as well were all those parts of trees, even revenue-bearing trees, which might have been useful to the population but whose value could not be converted into fiscal receipts.](https://fedi.ml/photo/preview/640/719723 "> The early modern European state, even before the development of scientific forestry, viewed its forests primarily through the fiscal lens of revenue needs. [...] one might say that the crown’s interest in forests was resolved through its fiscal lens into a single number: the revenue yield of the timber that might be extracted annually. [...] Missing, of course, were all those trees, bushes, and plants holding little or no potential for state revenue. Missing as well were all those parts of trees, even revenue-bearing trees, which might have been useful to the population but whose value could not be converted into fiscal receipts.")
![> [It] is in the very nature of a question like “What do I owe my parents?” that there is not and can never be a final, numerically answer. It is a question that we re-visit and re-negotiate every minute we are with them; obligation and love form an endless Möbius strip, through which our complex interdependence on each other makes the idea of paying off that debt – and of thereby severing the relationship – a sort of bitter joke. Precisely because it is a non-monetary “debt,” its function is to be an unpayable and unbreakable bond, one whose dividends never end and one that could and will never default.](https://fedi.ml/photo/preview/640/719717 "> [It] is in the very nature of a question like “What do I owe my parents?” that there is not and can never be a final, numerically answer. It is a question that we re-visit and re-negotiate every minute we are with them; obligation and love form an endless Möbius strip, through which our complex interdependence on each other makes the idea of paying off that debt – and of thereby severing the relationship – a sort of bitter joke. Precisely because it is a non-monetary “debt,” its function is to be an unpayable and unbreakable bond, one whose dividends never end and one that could and will never default.")
![This is just a thought experiment, of course, but the point of it is to bring out and make explicit that contrast. While the perversity of paying off your debts to your parents hardly needs comment – or of them garnishing your wages to pay for the hospital costs of birthing you – it is just as unspeakably normal for our debts to banks to seem, always and forever, the first thing we need to honor and respect. [...]
Let us, then, look with new eyes at the fact that when a dictator takes out a loan from a Western bank – pledging as his surety the future revenues produced by the people who he uses men with guns to rule -- we can be utterly sure that long after he is dead and gone, that debt will live on. Banks will not only claim the right to be paid back, but the moral force of the world’s political and ruling classes will assent to the proposition that children unborn when their nation went into debt will somehow still be on hold as the debt’s guarantors. This will appear normal. This will not seem a monstrous perversity.](https://fedi.ml/photo/preview/640/719713 "This is just a thought experiment, of course, but the point of it is to bring out and make explicit that contrast. While the perversity of paying off your debts to your parents hardly needs comment – or of them garnishing your wages to pay for the hospital costs of birthing you – it is just as unspeakably normal for our debts to banks to seem, always and forever, the first thing we need to honor and respect. [...]
Let us, then, look with new eyes at the fact that when a dictator takes out a loan from a Western bank – pledging as his surety the future revenues produced by the people who he uses men with guns to rule -- we can be utterly sure that long after he is dead and gone, that debt will live on. Banks will not only claim the right to be paid back, but the moral force of the world’s political and ruling classes will assent to the proposition that children unborn when their nation went into debt will somehow still be on hold as the debt’s guarantors. This will appear normal. This will not seem a monstrous perversity.")
Dirkjan Ochtman
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