Let us begin with what might very well be a common situation, where a prominent author gets locked out of her own work because she uses Google Docs to draft, share, and gather feedback, and Google had determined, through it's unknowable proprietary algorithms and other data, that the documents or its content are "inappropriate" and can no longer be shared.
We put this right next to the state of Louisiana's demand, upon pain of cutting off library funding, that all libraries in their state institute censorship on their under-18 readers and require a guardian adult to give their permission to access materials that are queer, have queer people in them, or are things that white conservatives might find uncomfortable. In both cases, there are arbitrary decisions being made about what is "appropriate" and who should be allowed access to them, by entities that believe themselves unaccountable and that they do not have to describe the methods by which something is determined to be "inappropriate" and restricted. The problem is that the legislators of Lousiana are far more accountable to the people that will be affected by them than the people at Google who designed whatever algorithm caught the romance writer. The Google folks also need to be appropriately accountable when their decisions cause problems like this.
We can't expect everyone to follow the example of Courtney Gore, who got herself elected to a school board promising to root out all the leftist indoctrination, and then actually read the curriculum and the documents and found out there wasn't any of the stuff that her right-wing backers claimed was there. Not everyone will have the dedication to actually read the material, and then change their minds based on what they've seen. And several of the people who are campaigning are doing so knowing full well the thing they're supposedly going to fight isn't there.
( And there is always more inside )
Last for tonight, the still thriving scene of floppy disk users, some for necessity, some for aesthetics, some because the data itself is not likely available in any other form, even if they have likely copied the data off the floppy to have good backups for it. I remember needing to use an archive program to split the newfangled MP3 format across several floppies so that I could move songs from the single Internet-connected computer all the way over to the machine in my room, which was not so connected.
And in similar matters of "the decisions you make because they are clear defaults at the time will last forever," why vim uses the keys it does: the terminal that vim was developed on had a keyboard with a specific key layout. They keyboards have changed and rearranged their layouts since, but there you are. "It made sense at the time" is often the true justification for a lot of things that seem strange in hindsight.
(Materials via![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
We put this right next to the state of Louisiana's demand, upon pain of cutting off library funding, that all libraries in their state institute censorship on their under-18 readers and require a guardian adult to give their permission to access materials that are queer, have queer people in them, or are things that white conservatives might find uncomfortable. In both cases, there are arbitrary decisions being made about what is "appropriate" and who should be allowed access to them, by entities that believe themselves unaccountable and that they do not have to describe the methods by which something is determined to be "inappropriate" and restricted. The problem is that the legislators of Lousiana are far more accountable to the people that will be affected by them than the people at Google who designed whatever algorithm caught the romance writer. The Google folks also need to be appropriately accountable when their decisions cause problems like this.
We can't expect everyone to follow the example of Courtney Gore, who got herself elected to a school board promising to root out all the leftist indoctrination, and then actually read the curriculum and the documents and found out there wasn't any of the stuff that her right-wing backers claimed was there. Not everyone will have the dedication to actually read the material, and then change their minds based on what they've seen. And several of the people who are campaigning are doing so knowing full well the thing they're supposedly going to fight isn't there.
( And there is always more inside )
Last for tonight, the still thriving scene of floppy disk users, some for necessity, some for aesthetics, some because the data itself is not likely available in any other form, even if they have likely copied the data off the floppy to have good backups for it. I remember needing to use an archive program to split the newfangled MP3 format across several floppies so that I could move songs from the single Internet-connected computer all the way over to the machine in my room, which was not so connected.
And in similar matters of "the decisions you make because they are clear defaults at the time will last forever," why vim uses the keys it does: the terminal that vim was developed on had a keyboard with a specific key layout. They keyboards have changed and rearranged their layouts since, but there you are. "It made sense at the time" is often the true justification for a lot of things that seem strange in hindsight.
(Materials via
adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
