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@aredridel@kolektiva.social
2026-07-11 17:06:34
Content warning: on sexism in technology work

For those that don't know, I help run a large women in technology chat group on Slack. It's been going for 11 years now! (ask me for an invite if you want one and that's appropriate!)
It has deeply shaped how I think about technology, especially the social side. There is so much embodied knowledge in that community, it's amazing. And it's also such a window into how much the mainstream of technology writing is dominated by men. We talk about it differently! We're much more likely to be critical, and to be critical of the _structures_ in tech. Sometimes that comes off as kneejerk "Ugh BRIAN!" to some of the bullshit men to do women in the workplace, but also embedded underneath is an understanding of rarely-mapped power structures in the field. So much advice out there is written assuming that there is no dissent, no silent frustration, no quiet abandoning the job when the pressures are unresolved. And so much of the tech world, press and on social media alike, has no insight that this attrition even happens.
Women, collectively, though, understand it. We notice the patterns of promotions. We understand the way that if we're in our 40s, we're rather likely to have a manager who is a decade younger than we are, with no particular experience. We notice when men are lauded for spending time with their family instead of work on occasion, but women are expected to be present at all times and rarely seen positively for doing the exact same things.
And yet, any given instance is always shrouded in deniability. The pattern generally holds, but is this one my fault? Do I not measure up? Or is it sexism?
That's what these structures rob from us: we never have the clarity in feedback that it is accurate, that is us that must change. When we stick to our guns, are we being obstinate, or are we correct? That information is denied to us by sexism. It only becomes clear in aggregate, and even then it is very hard to find action to take on it except to acknowledge it and move on.
I don't think people talk about that ambiguity enough: we're always looking for the clear sexism, the man speaking over the women, the trading sexual favors for advancement, the clear pattern of pet-to-threat that so many women experience as they age or gain skill in the field. But the bulk of sexism that we experience is in the structural poisoning of feedback.

@cdarwin@c.im
2026-05-16 20:12:29

We are getting a clearer picture now of what happened in China,
and where our addled, weakened, desperate leader is headed.
In an interview with Fox’s Bret Baier yesterday Trump threw Taiwan under the bus, and gave it the “stop being so uppity” Ukraine treatment:
hopiumch…

Trump Is A Fool, A Coward, And A Traitor
Trump continues to bow to and appease global strongmen, doing enormous harm to America and freedom and democracy everywhere

@fanf@mendeddrum.org
2026-05-01 20:42:01

from my link log —
What SRE is not.
blog.relyabilit.ie/what-sre-is
saved 2021-11-29 dotat.at/:/T0UG8.html

What SRE is not
We used to have a difficulty in our community - thankfully less prevalent now - with rootless questions of identity. Of course, it's not wrong to ask who we are, what we're here for, and what should we be doing: every profession benefits from regular reflection. But too much of

@hex@kolektiva.social
2026-05-25 10:09:12

So one of the authors is Nicholas Carlini, who works for Anthropic. This is basically an ad for the three letter agencies to use Claude. It massively over-promises compared to what the actual paper says.
But, it is important. First, this is really about silencing people. The threat of identification is designed to make people afraid to talk online. There's a massive asymmetry between the fascists and the people. The fascists are weird racists and pedophiles who are obsessed with control. No one likes them. No one likes their ideas, because their ideas are creepy and bad.
When they talk about their ideas, that people should be murdered or kidnaped based on their skin color, that there should be a national dress code, that people's sex lives should be monitored, that children should be treated like objects that are owned by the parent (specifically, one parent), that people with different skin color or uteri should be considered as livestock, people fucking hate it because it's awful. When we talk about our ideas, that everyone should be able to eat and take care of themselves, that people who can't take care of themselves should be taken care of, that we should live in a society that values life, that we should live in harmony with nature, people like those ideas. When fascists out us for talking about those ideas, people support us. When we out people who are working as fascist goons those people have to face social consequences.
Everyone hates these people. The US government is currently less popular than it has ever been. The only way they can keep power is by making everyone think that they aren't extraordinarily unpopular. The only way to do that, the way authoritarian have always done it, is to make everyone afraid to talk.
But, yes, what this paper is saying is actually kind of bad. It looks like people who don't take any precautions at all in separating identities can be identified about 30% of the time (based on the results). It's unclear how this will actually work in the real world. Larger corpses will probably have more data, making connecting things easier.
This isn't as good as a human trying to dox someone. It's not going to work as well. It may only work in a small number of cases. There will be false positives (just like there are with people doing the work). It's probably not cheaper than hiring people. But it does mean that you can just dump money into a machine that has no ethical framework and get data out. That's the point. It's hard to find humans who will do evil shit like help dictatorships target human rights activists, but if a machine can do it for twice the price then it's a better deal for the dictatorship.
For most people, you just shouldn't care. This isn't for you. As long as you keep doing what you're doing, and you can keep everyone else doing what they're doing, then there aren't enough resources to actually target you. Even if they know who you are, there are just too many people who hate them and too few goons.
For people who might actually be targeted, there are a lot of things. First, keep in mind what you're putting into anonymous accounts. Any feature that's connected to your real life is a feature that can be extracted to identify you. This has always been true, it just may be easier to find now. Your identities should be totally siloed. It's also harder to identify you if you're writing anonymously as a collective. Collectives are better anyway because they can help check your thinking. When you write as a collective, you can help clean up each other's personal details and language. A collective develops its own voice, which is distinct from individual contributors. If you do this, and you also present your work as being from one "person," then it becomes even harder for anyone (systems or individuals) to really figure it out.
I'm not going to do a full deep dive on this because I just don't have time, but your existing threat model should *already cover these threats* if you need to make sure your writing remains anonymous.
This paper doesn't present any novel methodologies. It just extracts a bunch of features, which a human would extract as notes, and tries to correlate those between identities, which is how human researchers work. Linguistic forensics were mentioned (not by name) in the paper, but the actual methodology doesn't actually seem to use them.
So a thing with less ethics can do a worse job for more money (when adjusted for the real, not investor deflated, price of tokens). It's worth knowing. It's not the end of the world, but it is a good reminder to check your threat model and make sure it's up to date.

@fanf@mendeddrum.org
2026-05-30 20:42:02

from my link log —
What SRE is not.
blog.relyabilit.ie/what-sre-is
saved 2021-11-29 dotat.at/:/T0UG8.html

What SRE is not
We used to have a difficulty in our community - thankfully less prevalent now - with rootless questions of identity. Of course, it's not wrong to ask who we are, what we're here for, and what should we be doing: every profession benefits from regular reflection. But too much of

@aredridel@kolektiva.social
2026-05-08 01:29:01

Put your name on your work and find like-minded people to share credit with. It is now on you to build not your brand, but the demonstration that you know what's going on.
It is going to be very hard to get a job by printing a list of skills at the top of your resume and hoping to get noticed. It already was and now it's worse than ever.
Be a person on the internet and by that I mean do not hide your person-hood. Your curiosity, your learning, your willingness to consider angles. Professional polish is something the clankers do better than us, because they are trained on all of us doing it.
If not putting your name on your learning, put a stable pseudonym out there. Be known by the work you do and even the mistakes you make and reconsider. Showing that your knowledge has _depth_ is now one of the most important things. We can all vibe up to a basic understanding. It's the people who can see where they went wrong, and course-correct that really are going to carry the day.
You no longer get to be perfect and only show what's finished and polished. And you're gonna have to show your work.

@pre@boing.world
2026-05-11 09:30:55
Content warning: ukpol - Starmer election response

Starmer is doing a thing about election results. Is he resigning? :bounceface:
He says the elections were tough, he lost brilliant representatives. He feels the hurt and takes responsibility. Not just for the results, but also for explaining how they'll do better in the years ahead.
Times are dangerous, opponents are very dangerous, if we don't get it right the country will be on a very dark path.
He takes responsibility for navigation in this dangerous world and for not walking away.
Oh right, he's not resigning then. 😦
He says he'll prove his doubters wrong. He's learned a lot! And realizes now we need a bigger response to this unordinary times.
Times demand serious progressive leadership he says, and Zack or Nigel can't provide that. [Citation needed] Only Labour can [Really, come on, citation needed]
He's pleased to be reducing NHS waiting lists and crime, and for some reason is pleased migration is coming down too.
He says he realizes that people don't think Labour cares about them. So that's something.
So his plan to fix things after this election is to talk more about why he's doing things instead of just saying what he's doing.
Right. Sure. That'll help.
He admits millions of people, like his sister, don't get respect or help and are held back because the status quo doesn't work.
He says he's fighting for them but, eh, perhaps he should be doing that thing where he says more about why and how?
He says we need a complete break to take control of energy and defense and fairness (he isn't resigning though, not THAT complete a break)
"Strength Through Fairness, Hope and Urgency" is his plan.
Three concrete examples of the plan:
Sure, about time, not like the Greens are against that.
Doesn't sound like he wants a re-join though, so not really sure what this means. The EU don't allow partial memberships or cherry picking benefits. Some kind of external heart I guess, an outside-body heart pump?
No. He's going to guarantee training or work placements to school leavers.
So in response to likely being unelected next time, he'll nationalize steel (now he's failed to find a corporate buyer anyway), is going to renegotiate with Europe (again, they have no better offers to give), and offer apprenticeships to education-leavers (who are still going to be mostly in debt by then).
Right.
Oh, and he's going to ban more marches too. Almost forgot that.
What a cock.
He did sound a bit passionate at least for a change.
#ukpol #starmer

@mgorny@social.treehouse.systems
2026-06-02 13:13:05

Well, we've finally packaged #Valkey (another #Redis fork) in #Gentoo, along with its #Python bindings.
Not that we wanted to, but #FakeRedis now started requiring it for tests so heavily that it was too much effort to patch it out. Just to be clear, it just requires the Python bindings, because its test suite happily runs against either Redis or Valkey, and literally doesn't support testing against both simultaneously. But to add the bindings, we needed the database to test them against. And since I've added the package too, I've put a lot of effort (and swearing) to test FakeRedis against both servers.
Should you be using Valkey? Well, let's put it like this. You shouldn't be using Redis, because it's enterprise quality shit. Valkey is roughly what happens when you fork enterprise quality shit and have no clue what you're doing. Though you are able to mostly get renaming right (one valkey-py test failed over the server calling itself "Valkey" rather than "Redis").
Disclaimer: I've only looked at the Python bindings. Maybe the maintainers are more knowledgeable with the server itself.