@Xavier@infosec.exchange2025-11-16 01:20:20
Wow, what a wonderful day at @… ! They put on a great conference and I was honored to have been part of it. I held a privacy workshop and gave a #fedvierse talk. I just posted the worksheets from the workshop and the presentation from the talk over on the …
@castarco@hachyderm.io2025-11-16 12:05:17
I have the distinct impression that we could use most American "sci-fi" TV series (which seem to have a kink for post-apocalyptical scenographies) as a diagnostic tool for the autism spectrum.
For a moment, let's leave aside the tons of right-wing propaganda "hidden" in plain sight, and their excessive reliance on boring & worn out tropes (religious & cultish bullshit, irrational lack of communication & excess of anti-social behaviour, all vs all, ultra-low-iq characters*, psychotic & irrationally treacherous characters*, ultra-inconsistent character development used to justify "unexpected" plot twists, rampant anti-intellectualism...).
What could be used as a diagnosis tool is the incredible amount of strong inconsistencies that we can find in them**. It throws me out of the story every single time; and I suspect that it takes a certain kind of "uncommon personality" to feel that way about it, because otherwise these series wouldn't be so popular without real widespread criticism beyond cliches like "too slow", "it loses steam towards the end of the season", etc.
Many of those plots start in a gold mine of potentially powerful ideas... yet they consistently provide us with dirt & clay instead, while side-lining the "good stuff" as if it was too complicated for the populace.
Do you feel strongly about it? Do you feel like you can't verbalize it without being criticised as "too negative", or "too picky", or an "unbearable snob"? Do you wonder why it seems like nobody around shares your discomfort with these stories?
* : I feel this is a bit like the chicken & egg problem. Has the media conditioned part of American society to behave like dumb psychopaths as if it was something "natural", or is the media reflecting what was already there? Also, could we use other societies as models for these stories... just for a change? Please?
** : Just a tiny example: a "brilliant" engineer who builds a bridge out of fence parts and who doesn't bother to perform the most basic tests before trying it in a real setting and suffer the consequences: the bridge failing and her falling into the void. Bonus points for anyone who knows what I'm talking about.
@tiotasram@kolektiva.social2025-10-16 07:22:11
Day 23: Thi Bui
Indirect CW: parental neglect, war, intergenerational trauma
Bui is the author of "The Best We Could Do", a graphic memoir which explores her relationship with her parents and unpacks some of the intergenerational trauma coming out of the Vietnam War. It has a lot of wisdom to offer about both dealing with troubled parents as a 1.5th-generation immigrant, and it delves deeply into her parents' histories in Vietnam and the complexities of the situation there both in the north and in the south. It's beautifully illustrated and very nicely plotted together given all the disparate threads it is working with.
I haven't read any of Bui's other work, but it looks like she's published a picture book for kids as well as a series of short comics during the pandemic. Besides Oseman who also writes non-illustrated fiction and the two manga artists Ice mentioned, Bui is the first graphic novel author I've included here, but I've actually got quite a few of them in my longer list, one of whom may make it into the 30 I'll include in this thread. These days I'm reading a bunch of graphic novels since they're easy to get through, and the variety of stories and perspectives in that space is wonderful these days, with a huge array of indie stuff that probably never would have gotten off the ground in traditional publishing/comics spaces.
#30AuthorsNoMen
@aral@mastodon.ar.al2025-11-14 17:33:43
In case you were wondering whether you should cancel your Paramount subscription…
“Ellison’s [spawn of the Oracle billionaire] goal is to turn Paramount into a MAGA-friendly environment, with content in the TV and movie divisions expected to be more ‘America-centric’ and geared toward ‘the middle of the country.’”
@robpike@hachyderm.io2026-01-14 20:06:26
Many years ago I was working with a friend to find a bug in a Makefile generator. We had a megabyte or so of Makefile we needed to examine. He was an emacs user. It took him minutes just to open the file. I was using sam. It took about a second for sam to load, and I found the problem before he'd even finished loading the file.
The speed of tools matters, and big files are common nowadays. Things should stay fast as their workload grows. That goes double for interactive tools.
By the way, it still takes me 30 seconds to log in to my bank. I wonder how long it will take when it's an LLM-generated landing page.
https://phanpy.social/#/hachyderm.io/s/115891592999188880
@tante@tldr.nettime.org2026-01-15 22:36:01
"Software is no longer seen as an asset, as something to care for, to maybe even take pride in. It’s a throw-away product. Like a napkin. Just get one quick, wipe your mouth and throw it away. Like a novelty t-shirt."
(Original title: Software as Fast Fashion)
https://tante.cc/2026/01/15/software-a…
@hikingdude@mastodon.social2025-12-15 19:48:53
For #mountainmonday AND #monochromeMonday , here's the start (well and end) of my hike the weekend before last.
Usually I'm not a fan of photographing roads, but this one made a nice line over the saddle and into the fog so I just gave it a try.
And heck was it c…
@cdarwin@c.im2026-01-15 07:06:52
ICE invading Minny is like when Hitler invaded Russia in winter.
That metro has a high concentration of motivated liberals with the means to organize and act.
https://bsky.app/profile/resnikoff.bsky.social/post/3mcfyff5ugs2x
@toxi@mastodon.thi.ng2025-12-14 09:16:17
A silent scenery in four acts...
(Selenium-toned[1] 4x6 salt print (still in final wash) plus previous work-in-progress stages... see alt text for details)
The picture/motif itself is one of my personal favorites and was taken 4 years ago in the Alpstein massif, when clouds were spontaneously forming around us, creating a wonderful light/scene/drama and a dear memory... now also as print which likely will/can outlast myself
[1] The tones will become more neutral once dry...…
@tiotasram@kolektiva.social2025-12-15 14:45:57
Re: discourse about #FediSoWhite
I'm a white man. Was on Twitter throughout #BLM and gained an awful lot of free education from Black folks on there. That was the start of me consciously following diverse folks which is a strategy that's improved my life immensely.
Back on Twitter before the Muskening, there was a lot of diversity. Black Twitter was a thing, and not just first-world (anyone else remember "O jewa ke eng?"). When I went looking for people to follow to diversify my feed, I found them in abundance.
That's why it's so clearly false to me when people claim that the fediverse is secretly diverse, and why anyone making that claim sounds suspect to me. Sure there are a ton of great Black and other POC folks you can find on here, if you look hard. But it's nowhere near the levels of diversity and community that were on Twitter. Which you would know had you been following those people before, so now I have to assume you weren't, and wonder why you feel qualified to make statements about diversity even though you haven't made an effort to engage with diverse voices before?
Also, if you were actually following some of the excellent POC voices on here, you'd know that across different servers and interest groups, almost every group has had a discussion of #FediSoWhite at some point. If all the Black people you follow are independently talking about the lack of community and diversity here, you've either got to believe them or start putting on your clown makeup, and the later is absolutely a choice.