#002025 – 13 de Dezembro de 2024

Já perto, o vento atira-me com chuva gelada e horizontal. Abrigo-me precariamente numa paragem de autocarro e lá chamo o Uber. Os dois metros até entrar no carro, faço-os com o carapuço. Dentro está confortável e quente, e a música é uma agradável bossa-nova, na voz da Maria Rita. Passado um par de minutos num silêncio tranquilo, e porque o motorista se chama Mateus, penso, que bom ter apanhado este brasileiro, e arrisco: “que música boa, lá fora está inverno mas aqui é... tropical”. Mateus respondeu-me num belo e inequívoco sotaque do Porto: “é, vou ouvindo rádio para me distrair, é trânsito o dia todo. Mas às vezes mudo de rádio e tá a dar a mesma música”. O meu comentário teve o efeito inesperado de rebentar aquela bolha momentânea de sossego. Lá fomos falando a caminho da Praça Velásquez, vendo o semáforo fica vermelho mais que uma vez. Ao chegar, os poucos metros até à clínica foram de vendaval, quase cinematográfico. Quase me apeteceu ter uma gabardina esvoaçante, em vez do hoodie. À espera da consulta com o nutricionista, escuto a habitual muzak, de tons jazzísticos, desta vez com temas natalícios. Mudou o ecossistema, os cliques do rato da recepcionistas e as buzinas dos automóveis lá fora compõem a atmosfera sonora. Antes do último ponto final, escuto ainda uma folha a ser impressa e um telemóvel a vibrar.

Never fear changing scenery

Some days the sun Never rises. Shroud of guilt weighing Like an elephant

Crushing the Breath of Hope, Stifling the blood of The future.

Another day delivers Brilliance and warmth Burns away the clouds of Hopelessness.

The rays of faith Slay the great beast Filling with an undeserved Strength and desire

Burning now with joy Melting the heart of ice As it is held up to the sun Suddenly shining like a mighty one

And leave the world A better place For the price that was paid

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Welcoming comments and critique since 1984

#poetry

I'm writing this mostly for the sake of my own mental accounting, so I can look back at this years from now and gauge whether my assumptions or position has since changed.

Until recently I had no idea who Jesse Singal was. I still don't know much, but my Bluesky feed has told me all I really need to know:

• Jesse Singal's presence on the mainline Bluesky network makes many tens of thousands of people feel unsafe.
• Several people whom I defer to for their expertise in community health have proposed Jesse's removal from the network as the best course of action.

There's been a lot of talk about whether Jesse's behavior has explicitly violated Bluesky's Terms of Service, i.e. their declarative community rules. But a community is primarily successful on the merits of its implicit ruleset, as determined by cultural norms.

Emerging out of this debacle, two things stand out to me as techno-social utilities currently lacking in Bluesky:

• Multiple sandboxes
• Community governance

Multiplayer Sandboxing

Many have rightly pointed out that this clash between Bluesky's moderation policies and the wishes of the community would have been a trivial issue in the ActivityPub-powered fediverse. In the federated model, Jesse would “simply” have to find himself an instance that aligns with his values and general demeanor.

That's not to say Bluesky has to be fully federated in the same way as ActivityPub to support a similar kind of community sandboxing. That “simple” after all is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

Massively Multiplayer games like World of Warcraft, which are operated as fully centralized cloud services, still have multiple different instances for their players to inhabit. Partly this is due to scaling concerns that don't apply to Bluesky's architecture, but these games also have specific types of instances that allow players to self-sort into the style of gameplay they're looking for.

The most common distinction is between PvE (Player versus Environment) and PvP (Player versus Player) instances, or designated zones therein.

This separation is necessary because while some players just wanna enjoy the expansive world and story on their own terms, others enjoy the thrill of clashing with player-characters who present a greater threat than any dungeon boss the game can muster up, since they can literally chase you to the ends of the earth with the tenacity that only a human foe possesses.

We don't all want the same things in our online experience, so it's essential that we have separate sandboxes to play in. I am not however advocating for an instance-picker at the start of the Bluesky signup process, nor is this about seperating The Good Place from The Bad Place.

What I'm saying is that the decision space available to the T&S team becomes a very binary block-or-not when Bluesky is operated as a monolithic super-instance with no further segmentation possible.

Jesse Singal makes my friends deeply uncomfortable, so I don't want him in the same room as us, simple as. That doesn't mean I think Jesse has no right to exist on the open social web. We need a separate room for Jesse.

I can't say yet exactly how I think this should work, but I've jotted down some initial thoughts on “How fedi-instance belonging can be resolved”:

1. be a member of more than one instance (think dual citizenship)

2. able to view/follow any public instance’s local feed

3. default way for instances to ‘disagree’ should be default-hide whole instances, not hard block (no walls between tenants, just tall shrubs)

4. ratio-blocks per instance should block user from that instance

5. instance-blocks are enacted democratically

This isn't specific to any protocol, it's just what I believe ought to be possible as a happy middle ground between the prior art of the AP-based fediverse and the emerging ATmosphere.

The main idea here is multi-instance belonging. You may already be familiar with composable moderation; let's also have composable spaces. The difference is that moderation protections are chosen defensively, whereas we choose our spaces on the basis of being drawn in by the people already there, and the notable absence of those who are not.

Erin Kissane talks about picking the right pair of shoes. I recently heard her say on a podcast that we shouldn't have to pick just the one pair; that's exactly what a proper implementation of nomadic identity ought to make possible for us. Credible exit implies a pluriverse if spaces to enter and leave at will.

Let the server instances provide the party venue and then, if you're feeling the vibe, Bring Your Own Identity over for a good time.

Community Governance

'Is Bluesky Decentralized?' has been an ongoing conversation (a delightful one at that). Technicalities aside, it's pretty clear that governance power in the Bluesky community is highly centralized.

Christine Lemmer-Webber's definition of decentralization applies just as well here, even though we're not talking about protocols:

Decentralization is the result of a system that diffuses power throughout its structure, so that no node holds particular power at the center.

Stack as many moderation services together as you want, but there's only one institutional node with the power to delete Jesse Singal from Bluesky inc's public square.

That centrality of authority is exactly what is making a lot of people very upset, especially when the authority insists that their hands are tied so long as there’s no egregious violation of their ToS, as if there cannot be other levers of change to address edge cases unfit for standard procedure.

Note: I vehemently disapprove of anyone who directed their anger at the Bluesky team in harmful ways. The best explanation I can come up with for their behavior is that they want the people in authority to experience the unsafety that was imposed on them by the authority’s inaction. I understand the emotional response, but I do not excuse it, and I hope the worst offenders have faced consequences for the harms they caused. Be better.

It seems pretty clear that if the network held a referendum by putting the issue of 'Ban Jesse Singal?' to a vote, the network would vote him off the island. This can be inferred from the very loud signal of Jesse being the most blocked person on the Bluesky network by a large margin.

And this is where instance segmentation comes in to lower the stakes, because the people of Bluesky Island can then resort to shipping the unwanted resident over to a neighboring island, as opposed to dropping him in the water.

I don’t have all the answers, but I believe there’s a great opportunity here for liquid democracy in action. Democratic community governance is arguably even more challenging than designing a user-friendly, open and plausibly decentralized social network, so I know I'm asking for a lot.

Still, if you have brought 25 million people together and you're not trying to leverage the wisdom of the crowd for communal sense-making, what is the point of your platform?

I got somebody absolutely gorgeous photos and I'm fucking exhausted I'm about to go pass out.

Yesterday when I was out in the blackness of the night, the sky was very cloudy and so it looked like a sort of blanket over the stars which weren’t visible, but they gave a silvery golden glow to the dark clouds. It looked ominous but yet at the same time not bleak

It looked more like a gothic horror sky than a cyberpunk like sky with the TV set on a dead channel. (That with the TV is from the opening in Neuromancer, Chiba City Blues or something. It’s one of the best openings I’ve read.)

Nonetheless, there was in the middle of there, in the sky, a little square shaped window in the clouds and through that opening shone the full moon. I saw the full shape of the full moon through there. Just for ~ five minutes.

If that isn’t a sign from above, a signal to keep struggling or whatever, then I don’t know what is!!?

Ambivalence .

My life is a fruit salad of sorts. There’s kiwi and pineapple, apple and banana, right?

A lot.

Now I just need to get the onions out of there, as they are ruining it, obviously..

There are two pieces right now which I’ll need to carefully extract.

The first one is all of my managers like I told about some days ago.

The second, most pungent one is a bit tricky as it involves my sister.

One can argue that one should not let such things affect, and just eat the salad, as it’s nutritious and all of that.

That may very well be true, but I’ve got my sense of smell back and it amplifies the pungency of the taste.

The taste of bullshit.

Je suis faible, et la technologie moderne ne m’aide pas : il suffit parfois que j’entende parler d’un livre intéressant pour qu’il rejoigne presque immédiatement ma « pile à lire ».

C’est ce que s’est passé avec ce livre Avant nous le Déluge !, sous-titré L’humanité et ses mythes, dont j’ai entendu parler son auteur, l’anthropologue Jean-Loïc Le Quellec, dans l’émission Les idées larges sur Arte Radio. Le sujet m’a tout de suite passionné et l’approche du livre me semblait intéressante :

Une déambulation dans les mythes qui accompagnent l’humanité. Comment ils émergent, se partagent, circulent. Un émerveillement de récits, dans le monde entier, depuis nos origines.

Depuis le début de l’humanité, nous inventons des récits, les mythes, pour mieux comprendre notre monde. Jean-Loïc Le Quellec les collecte, les étudie, les compare, à toute époque même la plus reculée, dans tout peuple, dans autant de langues que possible.

On explique l’universalité des mythes aujourd’hui par une transmission au fil des migrations. Cette diffusion n’est pas systématique, elle se fait ou pas, ou de différentes manières, dessinant ainsi les évolutions des peuples en une fabuleuse cartographie historique du monde.

Mythes cosmogniques ou héroïques, animaux mythiques (jusqu’à notre pangolin)… L’auteur nous emmène dans une histoire infinie, poétique, puissante, pour réfléchir au rôle des mythes dans notre humanité.

Ce tour du monde nous invite à nous détacher de notre perception européano-centrée, à revoir nos certitudes (mythiques elles aussi ?). Une lecture jouissive et éblouissante.

Si je devais présenter cet ouvrage, je dirais qu’il s’agit d’une bonne introduction à la mythologie comparée, c’est-à-dire la discipline qui cherche à étudier et comparer les mythes de plusieurs peuples, dans le temps et dans l’espace.

C’est une bonne introduction car l’auteur fait preuve de pédagogie pour présenter et expliquer les concepts de base qu’il mobilise, les illustrer par des exemples parlants, le tout dans un style qui m’a semblé accessible à toutes et tous.

Par contre, je suis un peu resté sur ma faim pour deux raisons.

D’abord, j’ai trouvé que la structure du livre était un peu chaotique : si l’auteur propose un cheminement de chapitres en chapitres, sa logique n’est pas toujours évidente, et j’ai trouvé qu’il faisait parfois des digressions qui peuvent être intéressantes mais dont je me suis parfois demandé ce qu’elles faisaient à ce moment du propos.

Ensuite, j’ai regretté que l’ouvrage reste un peu superficiel sur la mythologie comparée proprement dite. Les premiers chapitres, qui définissent la notion de mythe, l’histoire et l’actualité de leur étude par les mythologues sont bien sûr nécessaires, mais prennent finalement beaucoup de place dans un ouvrage qui ne fait que 260 pages. De fait, cela laisse moins d’espace pour entrer ensuite dans le détail de la mythologie comparée proprement dite. Il y a bien sûr des exemples et des leçons à en tirer, mais personnellement j’aurais beaucoup aimé en savoir plus.

Je le redis donc : ce livre est à mes yeux une bonne introduction à la mythologie comparée, à lire pour une première approche de la discipline si le sujet vous intéresse.

Pour en savoir plus après cette initiation, je vais pour ma part me pencher prochainement vers un ouvrage qui s’annonce plus complet et plus complexe : Cosmogonies, La préhistoire des mythes de l’historien et mythologue Julien d’Huy, que Jean-Loïc Le Quellec a justement préfacé et qu’il cite dans ce livre.

Three distinguished car manufacturers are considering merging to improve their overall standing in the global automotive industry.

According to press reports Wednesday morning, the two Japanese carmakers are in discussions to consolidate under a holding company. The reports also said that Mitsubishi Motors, which has been working closely with Nissan since 2016, might join the grouping.

Nissan, Honda and Mitsubishi confirmed the reports in nearly identically worded statements released later in the day. The three said they are considering a number of options including the plan mentioned in the press reports. (Japan Times)

According to @thejapantimes@mastodon.social, nothing official has been decided yet between Nissan, Honda & Mitsubishi, although I do not expect them to merge due to their distinct cultural differences.

While it would be cool to see them merge as one (note: what would they call the newly formed company‽), I expect we will witness a greater collaboration between the three, with each trying to complement the others' weaknesses with their respective strengths.

It is impossible, they say

Denying the results

Telling us we are mistaken

Ridiculing us to our peers

And then

When they can no longer deny

They steal the work

And call it their own.

#writing #poetry

Prayers, etc.: * 04:00 – Prayer to St. Michael the Archangel * 06:00 – praying The Angelus * 06:45 – praying the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Holy Rosary, followed by the Memorare. * 07:20 – praying to Atone for Rome's 2025 Jubilee Mascot. * 10:45 – Readings from today's Mass include – Epistle: Phil 4:4-7 and Gospel: John 1:19-28. * 12:00 – praying The Angelus * 17:45 – prayerfully reading The Athanasian Creed, followed by today's Daily Meditation found in Benedictus Magazine. * 18:00 – praying The Angelus * 19:00 – praying the hour of Compline for tonight according to the Traditional Pre-Vatican II Divine Office, followed by Fr. Chad Ripperger's Prayer of Command to protect my family, my sons, my daughter and her family, my granddaughters and their families, my great grandchildren, and everyone for whom I have responsibility from any demonic activity. – And that followed by the Tuesday Prayers of the Association of the Auxilium Christianorum.

Health Metrics: * bw= 214.51 lbs. * bp= 147/84 (69)

Diet: * 06:30 – toast & butter, 1 banana, 1 seafood salad sandwich * 10:30 – cheese * 15:00 – 2 pieces of fudge * 16:30 – 2 pork chops

Chores, etc.: * 04:00 – listen to local news talk radio * 05:15 – bank accounts activity monitored * 11:30 – following news reports on OAN * 13:00 – listen to relaxing music and leisure reading * 14:00 – help Sylvia pack * 15:00 – leisure reading * 16:00 – local news and weather * 16:30 – follow news reports on RAV.

Chess: * 09:30 – moved in all pending CC games

posted Tuesday, 2024-12-17 ~19:30 #DLDEC2024

#002024 – 12 de Dezembro de 2024

Aos 13 anos, comecei por escrever crónicas. Isso parou quando li um livro do Miguel Esteves Cardoso e, por comparação, percebi que o fazia muito mal. Virei-me para a poesia até ler os Poemas Completos, do Herberto Helder, aos 19 anos. Há muito tempo que escrevo ficção, hábito de que não me consigo livrar, por mais que leia histórias, sobretudo de ficção científica. Não sei o que isto diz sobre a minha persistência. Ou sobre a minha sanidade.

hello internet. it’s granny yuai again.

u kids think it’s coolbeans that nowadays the volume dingus is swipy.

please no today i accidentally blew out what’s left of my hearing.

u just think it’s good because we had to put up with this junk for four f

ckin years.

but in ye olden days u could read stuff behind the dingus.

i wish they would keep the good things.

love

granny yuai

Here is the thing: my friend has come visiting.

I got one of the VR head set from him because he got the new one. With the new one he can become batman.

My wife says you shouldn’t put it on because meta the company behind Facebook will scan your brain and that’s true, I think. I did it anyway. I used the VR headset to check my Facebook, because it came preinstalled and I’ve not checked there in ages. There were pictures of children and 🧦 sock deals etc. so same as I remembered it. And then there was a police game in which you shot people and were supposed to do it to the beat of the music and dodge. I played for five minutes yesterday and today my legs ache.

I used to be a fitness man with legs like steel springs but now they look like a normal person’s legs and I am thinking I ought to do something about that. Maybe play that police game every day? Maybe, we will see. I am used to rest my formidable torso on two pillars like timbre and it’s a dissonance between how I feel and what I look like 💀 that ought to be corrected. I miss going to fitness dance classes.

Anyhow

We’ve been driving my friend’s monster truck, like a type of car the Brits used to win WWII with, the defender or challenger or something; a massive steel beast which looks like you’re supposed to fit two bazookas to the roof of, to go buying some cool stuff in the big city. He’s got an interest in Warhammer 40k which has a rich lore that does seem fascinating. I met a guy once. Must’ve been fifteen years ago. He had a beard and glasses, long hair, an Amon Amarth T-Shirt, who said that Warhammer 40k was his primary interest. I remember it crystal clear. A strong memory.

Anyhow.

so my friend is playing space marines. He paint them yellow which is the same colour as that of his heart. Or similar: the Gold.

Now we are watching Christmas program on the TV they are making dick cheese(!) for Christmas and I’m sceptical.

What else is there? I’ve been doing some carpentry and have built a kitchen island for when my sister in law will hopefully come visiting this summer, then we can make pizzas again but this time there’ll be plenty of room for that.

The fishing rods I bought for them is still in my mum’s barn.

The love of my dog is big, although she is so small. I bury my face in her warm fur when I am sad and it helps.

I cannot describe accurately how much she means to me.

My little dog.

We are getting another dog after Christmas. A puppy named Bjorn.

It’s a food for thought that you could love two dogs (we will see), that when you divide your love in two, it doubles. (profound)

My mum hit her head on a spa of all places a few days or weeks back, which is ironic because she spends all her free time climbing scaffolds, driving ATV:s, using the chainsaw or the tiger saw, and basically any type of saw or power tool, just fixing things like a tornado (which is not a very good metaphor because tornadoes tend to destroy things whereas my mum fixes them). I find it some food for thought that it is while relaxing on a spa she gets the injury. (!!)

She’s fine now.

All is fine.

I think.

Most things are probably fine.

I’ve bought me a Christmas present, a refurbished steamdeck and it arrived today. After unpacking and putting in the charging cable, I’ve started the deck. Sadly, I’m stuck in an installation problem, and I’m unable to complete the setup. 😢

Besides the current problem, the steamdeck feels incredibly good and lightweight. The haptic is remarkable and fits perfectly in my hands. The buttons also have nice feedback so far. And I’m eager how the haptic is while playing a game. Let’s hope that the setup issue is only temporarily and solved quickly.

After some thoughts, my decision was pro steamdeck. I’ve been the owner of a switch for around 4–5 years, and I’ve played a lot on it. My biggest issue with the switch is, that most of the indies games I want to play, have a release far beyond pc/steam releases. The same goes for PS5 and the PlayStation portal. On the portal I’ve played Sonic Frontiers, and it made a loooot of fun, but that’s it. The other games are mostly TripleA games which I don't feel like doing at the moment. I am currently much more interested in small indie games. While the switch is cool for party games and the PlayStation portal for big cinematic games like God of War: Ragnarök (which I did not touch since I’ve owned it) or Spider-Man 2 (which is a great game). The steamdeck has a bigger range of games AND is open. I love that they’ve gone with Arch Linux. Which I used the last 15 years, before owning a MacBook for the last 2 years. 👌

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60 of #100DaysToOffload

#log #steamdeck

Thoughts?

Whenever I talk to fellow developers, the topic of impostor syndrome inevitably comes up. This ‘syndrome’ describes the collection of self-doubts surrounding one’s professional accomplishments, despite evidence to the contrary. Sometimes it can go as far as truly believing you are a fake, a fraud, and it’s only a matter of time until everyone finds out and you lose your job and everything that comes with it.

There are a lot of things in our world that can cause us to feel fear, anxiety, trepidation, worry. Some of those things may show up in a professional setting. But that doesn’t mean it’s impostor syndrome; and some of these feelings may be stirred up by situations or people outside ourselves. For instance, if you have a marginalized identity, you’ll spend the better part of your career having to convince people that you actually do know what you’re talking about, to the point where you kind of do start to doubt yourself. I wouldn’t call that a syndrome. It’s not a personal psychological problem; it’s a sociological one.

And let’s say you’re dealing with a lot of unresolved trauma from your past; perhaps because of bullying, your childhood home, or relationships later in life that were damaging. Perhaps you went through some serious illness, lost your home or safety net, or even worse. These terrible events leave us with long-term scars, lingering negative feelings, and whilst you can process a lot in therapy I have also learned there is only so much you can do to heal. A part of healing is also accepting that life has bruised you up in some way. And these feelings then might affect you at work; you become more sensitive to rejection, for example, or you struggle relating to your colleagues, or you can’t deal with heated discussions. As a result you might start to think you are bad at your job. Does that mean you have impostor syndrome?

Developers are generally very smart people, who are typically aware of how much they don’t know, and in comparison, they might start to think they are ignorant or unskilled. Added to that, developers are often opinionated, with strong ideas about what’s right or wrong, and most of them continuously search for what is the ‘right’ way to do things in order to solve the complex software problems they face daily. Finally, when excellent developers do their job well, it’s less noticeable. Much like the common misconception of there being no big Y2K software crash on January 1st in the year 2000, so it must have all been overblown, right? No, the reason nothing big happened, is because a lot of people worked hard to prevent it. When systems run well, with little problems, the efforts of those making that possible are not as visible. All of this often makes developers think that everyone else seems to know what they’re doing, and they themselves are clueless. It’s the reverse of the Dunning-Kruger effect, and so perhaps is the ‘real’ impostor syndrome, at least in our field.

But the reason I’d like to caution against naming any anxiety or insecurity around your job as ‘impostor syndrome’ is because it makes it harder to tackle. You can just say, well, I have a syndrome and leave it at that, not digging deeper into the cause of these feelings, and challenging them. If you are constantly gaslit into thinking you couldn’t possibly understand code as well as men do because your brain isn’t wired for math and logic (some A-grade nonsense that I actually believed when I was younger), then you don’t have a syndrome — you’re just surrounded by jerks. If you are constantly stressed out because you are dealing with unresolved trauma, you might have a syndrome, but it’s the ‘post-traumatic stress’ one, not the ‘impostor’ one.

Now that you’re slowly beginning to question whether you are an impostor of having impostor syndrome…

(a two-toned illustration in washed-out brown and green-beige colors, with on the left a lightbulb with a line-art brain inside it on a dark brown background, and on the right a woman’s silhouette, thinking with a hand under her chin, with a line-art brain inside her head, on a light background)

Did you know that the impostor syndrome was first named as a phenomenon amongst high-achieving women?

Did you know it was found to be more common amongst BIPOC students in the US?

Did you know it affects marginalized employees much more strongly?

The truth is that many of us do struggle with the self-doubts surrounding our profession that are typically described as the impostor syndrome. But I think we need to re-examine what this means for us, consider why we are framing it as a personal problem, and start addressing the real causes.

This isn’t a syndrome. It’s just the same thing it always was, repackaged into a more insidious form: the people around you and/or society at large is telling you you are not good enough, and that you are lesser than others. Because of your gender, your skin color, your sexual orientation, your mental and/or physical health, your religion, your ethnicity, even your appearance. Sadly, many of us are still treated as second-class citizens because of these aspects of our identities, too; and it’s not improving any time soon.

So please, keep this in mind, for now and the years to come:

You are not an impostor. You are just living in a world where a lot of people are benefitting from you second-guessing yourself at everything that you do. And it’s easy to say, “don’t let them”, but that’s still putting the burden on the person. We should be addressing this as a group, in a broader scope, because it’s affecting so many people in a bad way.

How? Well, you’ll never guess. It’s an acronym with three letters and one ampersand.

As a final consideration, it is also normal to experience some stress, some anxiety, some self-doubt. This is part of the process of growth and challenging yourself. It turns out that you only obtain the confidence you need to do a thing after you did the thing — so unless you are a perfect being who never does anything new for themselves, chances are you’ll always feel a bit uncomfortable. This dissatisfaction with yourself, or your environment, doesn’t mean there is something fundamentally wrong with you. It just means you see room for improvement and you are working on it. But it is markedly different from the long-term thinking pattern of self-sabotage that impostor syndrome entails. Knowing that you can still improve doesn’t mean the current you is a fraud, after all.

In addition to the Christmas Cookies pictured in yesterday's post, the young cooks prepared more Christmas treats. Seen here with the Gingerbread Houses they made are my daughter, one of my granddaughters, and my great grandson.

posted Tuesday, Dec 17, 2024 at ~11:20 AM #QNDEC2024