End of month dump - April 02022
Apr. 30th, 2022 11:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptHello! Let's start with brownbetty showcasing some of the ways to make the Dreamwidth experience better on mobile devices with limited viewports. I'm sure there's also more work on that happening in the codebase, but I have a sneaking suspicion many of those things that would make it better for mobile might involve having to first decipher what was going on in the Fitz dorm room that produced those decisions, how to untangle them, and then how to implement a replacement in such a way that doesn't break something that relied on this piece of code all the way over yonder.
I think that when someone talks about the idea of the profession of librarian being dangerous to the health of those who undertook it, there's a couple of things to think about, like the physical dangers of some of the materials (mostly gone now), and the attitudes that the people using the library, and the people working with the women at the library, might take toward them (so both the stereotype threat and also the very real threat from people like Melvil Dewey, most famously given the boot from the American Library Association on accusations of sexual harassment, and also variously accused of being a racist and an anti-Semite, who the summary quotes as someone who believed that women doing librarianship would be bad for their mental health. Gee, I wonder why.) In an environment where administrators, legislators, and the population seem to be very hostile to the idea of finding something in the library that disagrees with their incorrect views of the world, it certainly seems likelier, despite it being Dewey quoted, that there are more physical and mental health issues in the profession than there might have been earlier. At least we have the ability to name them and believe that they might find a forum, even if we don't fully believe that they'll ever be properly addressed. Vocational Awe is still being used to suggest that libraries do more with less in the current pandemic era and to shoulder libraries with even more burdens, but without additional funding, staffing, or space.
Gilbert Gottfried, a person you could recognize as soon as he opened his mouth, is voicing ducks and parrots for the audience beyond at 67 years of age. You had to like both his voice and his delivery (and his penchant for making crude jokes) to like him. He probably had something to say about Will Smith slapping Chris Rock, but I don't like him enough to go look for it. He can mostly occupy the point of the parrot and the Hollywood Square.
After months of ducking, dodging, and denying that they'd done it, Boris Johnson and his minister, Rishi Sunak, were fined for breaking their own rules about large gatherings when there was lockdown in the UK over the pandemic. That's unlikely to bring about any resignations, because, well, these are the kinds of people for whom resignation doesn't enter their minds, even well after they've done all of these things that should cause someone to lose confidence in their ability to govern a year one class, much less a government.
Intercepted communications suggest that deliberate murder of civilians by Russian soldiers in Ukraine was planned for as part of a war strategy, which is the sort of thing that you would normally put someone on war crimes trials for. There are other issues at hand, as several oligarchs of the oil and gas sector of Russia and their families are dead, with the connection being that all of them are of have been staged to be murders of others and then murders of the self.
The state of Florida intends to revoke the special independent district status of the Disney park in the state in retaliation for the corporation pointing out that the clearly discriminatory bills are clearly discriminatory. In the BBC piece, there's also the suggestion that some Republicans might oppose Disney keeping the copyright on Mickey Mouse because they dared voice an opposition to clearly discriminatory Republican state policy. I agree that Disney shouldn't keep the copyright on Mickey Mouse indefinitely, but that's not the reason to do it.
Whenever there's enough of a trend, it starts to seem like books are all about that trend, in an ouroborous kind of manner, whether it's about generations of women and a narrative over time or some other thing. Which I'm going to stick next to The Two Ring Test, a short story and explanation about what happens in a world where we've used machine learning principles and biased datasets to create a society that functions smoothly, but also potentially lacks people who can make great leaps forward, because the system has tried to train the individuality out of everyone, and a complaint about the lack of matriarchal societies in fiction, and an intense concentration on gender plague novels when matriarchies do appear.
The difference between official Soviet ideology and the practicalities of living in he USSR with regard to sex work, that suggests that sex work was sufficiently remunerative as to be worth the increasing amount of risks that also accompanied engaging in sex work. Which might have been avoided had the USSR (or any other nation-state or similar) decided to take up the long-standing demand for universal basic income.
A look into how people who are already outside the lines of polite society might find friendship with each other, even if one of them engaged in behaviors a more 21st c. audience would find entirely unacceptable (while the others might have moved much closer to being inside the boundaries of respectability.)
What food is considered healthy and nutritious and what food is considered junk has much more to do with the class and race of the people consuming the food than the nutritional value of the food. Because a lot of "junk" food is actually calorie dense and really good for someone who is food insecure, and convenience food is really helpful for people who don't have the time to prepare all of the "healthy" food that requires eight hours of soaking and three hours of cooking, or who have disabilities that prevent them from handling knives or being around hot stoves.
The previous administrator of the United States is currently being fined $10,000 USD daily for contempt over not producing all requested documents with regard to a subpoena issued by the New York Attorney General over allegations of tax fraud.
Hiding erotic paintings behind still lives of fruit and the practice of photography in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
In technology, a person who paid nearly $3 million USD equivalent in cryptocurrency for an NFT of the very first tweet put it up for auction, thinking he'd be able to make nearly $48 million for it. The high bid he got was $280. But sure, tell me that crypto and NFTs aren't a bubble likely based on a scam.
If you, like Greenpeace, want to track tankers full of petroleum, especially those leaving ports of the Russian Federation, you can build a bot to use publicly available data to do it. Which only works as well as those ships that broadcast their GPS coordinates, like they're supposed to according to maritime law.
The smart home company Insteon has flown by night, leaving people who relied upon their cloud services and home automation units without the ability to use what they've paid for. The good news from this is that the proprietary protocol that Insteon used for their material has been reverse-engineered sufficiently that the devices and the hub can be put to use in another home automation solution, hopefully one with more local powers and less likelihood of depending on a fly-by-night company to stay in business (and avoid getting eaten by a bigger company that wants to make their success part of the bigger company's portfolio.) Home Assistant says they have a method to get a hub working again if someone tried to factory reset the device and now they can't get a key from the defunct servers to get the hub up and running again.
In greater potential upset for people, a tech billionaire spent significant money to buy Twitter. Which made some people very nervous about whether they would be able to continue using that platform. That nervousness is a direct result of the big players in the room deciding they wanted everyone in their walled gardens, without exceptions. And while there's still the Indie Web and the Fediverse and places like Dreamwidth that are outside of those walled gardens, there has to be both federation powers to let them band together and the ability to avoid getting bought out or crushed by a bigger competitor, especially if you can inter-operate with those walled gardens. The tech billionaire also outlined his vision for how much moderation the platform needed, which amounts to "none but what the laws of the United States demand," which will be difficult to make work in countries that do not use U.S. law as their baseline, but which also bodes ill about the possibility of persons being returned to the platform who have rightly been red-carded.
For technology doing more good, Rwanda has a drone delivery system for blood and blood products, and when the conditions are correct for being able to fly a drone, the drone is almost always faster to the destination than travel by car. There are still some details that would be nice to know, about whether drone travel is cheaper per unit or not, but it seems like there's definite potential for drone delivery of critical medical supplies in places where there isn't a lot of urban concentration.
Last thing for tonight, The story of how the Phallological Museum came into being, which, as one might guess, started with a single penis and then expanded greatly to cover many species' organs. If you should happen to be in Iceland, you, too, can visit the penis museum.
(Materials viaadrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, and anyone else that's 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.)
brownbetty showcasing some of the ways to make the Dreamwidth experience better on mobile devices with limited viewports. I'm sure there's also more work on that happening in the codebase, but I have a sneaking suspicion many of those things that would make it better for mobile might involve having to first decipher what was going on in the Fitz dorm room that produced those decisions, how to untangle them, and then how to implement a replacement in such a way that doesn't break something that relied on this piece of code all the way over yonder.I think that when someone talks about the idea of the profession of librarian being dangerous to the health of those who undertook it, there's a couple of things to think about, like the physical dangers of some of the materials (mostly gone now), and the attitudes that the people using the library, and the people working with the women at the library, might take toward them (so both the stereotype threat and also the very real threat from people like Melvil Dewey, most famously given the boot from the American Library Association on accusations of sexual harassment, and also variously accused of being a racist and an anti-Semite, who the summary quotes as someone who believed that women doing librarianship would be bad for their mental health. Gee, I wonder why.) In an environment where administrators, legislators, and the population seem to be very hostile to the idea of finding something in the library that disagrees with their incorrect views of the world, it certainly seems likelier, despite it being Dewey quoted, that there are more physical and mental health issues in the profession than there might have been earlier. At least we have the ability to name them and believe that they might find a forum, even if we don't fully believe that they'll ever be properly addressed. Vocational Awe is still being used to suggest that libraries do more with less in the current pandemic era and to shoulder libraries with even more burdens, but without additional funding, staffing, or space.
Gilbert Gottfried, a person you could recognize as soon as he opened his mouth, is voicing ducks and parrots for the audience beyond at 67 years of age. You had to like both his voice and his delivery (and his penchant for making crude jokes) to like him. He probably had something to say about Will Smith slapping Chris Rock, but I don't like him enough to go look for it. He can mostly occupy the point of the parrot and the Hollywood Square.
After months of ducking, dodging, and denying that they'd done it, Boris Johnson and his minister, Rishi Sunak, were fined for breaking their own rules about large gatherings when there was lockdown in the UK over the pandemic. That's unlikely to bring about any resignations, because, well, these are the kinds of people for whom resignation doesn't enter their minds, even well after they've done all of these things that should cause someone to lose confidence in their ability to govern a year one class, much less a government.
Intercepted communications suggest that deliberate murder of civilians by Russian soldiers in Ukraine was planned for as part of a war strategy, which is the sort of thing that you would normally put someone on war crimes trials for. There are other issues at hand, as several oligarchs of the oil and gas sector of Russia and their families are dead, with the connection being that all of them are of have been staged to be murders of others and then murders of the self.
The state of Florida intends to revoke the special independent district status of the Disney park in the state in retaliation for the corporation pointing out that the clearly discriminatory bills are clearly discriminatory. In the BBC piece, there's also the suggestion that some Republicans might oppose Disney keeping the copyright on Mickey Mouse because they dared voice an opposition to clearly discriminatory Republican state policy. I agree that Disney shouldn't keep the copyright on Mickey Mouse indefinitely, but that's not the reason to do it.
Whenever there's enough of a trend, it starts to seem like books are all about that trend, in an ouroborous kind of manner, whether it's about generations of women and a narrative over time or some other thing. Which I'm going to stick next to The Two Ring Test, a short story and explanation about what happens in a world where we've used machine learning principles and biased datasets to create a society that functions smoothly, but also potentially lacks people who can make great leaps forward, because the system has tried to train the individuality out of everyone, and a complaint about the lack of matriarchal societies in fiction, and an intense concentration on gender plague novels when matriarchies do appear.
The difference between official Soviet ideology and the practicalities of living in he USSR with regard to sex work, that suggests that sex work was sufficiently remunerative as to be worth the increasing amount of risks that also accompanied engaging in sex work. Which might have been avoided had the USSR (or any other nation-state or similar) decided to take up the long-standing demand for universal basic income.
A look into how people who are already outside the lines of polite society might find friendship with each other, even if one of them engaged in behaviors a more 21st c. audience would find entirely unacceptable (while the others might have moved much closer to being inside the boundaries of respectability.)
What food is considered healthy and nutritious and what food is considered junk has much more to do with the class and race of the people consuming the food than the nutritional value of the food. Because a lot of "junk" food is actually calorie dense and really good for someone who is food insecure, and convenience food is really helpful for people who don't have the time to prepare all of the "healthy" food that requires eight hours of soaking and three hours of cooking, or who have disabilities that prevent them from handling knives or being around hot stoves.
The previous administrator of the United States is currently being fined $10,000 USD daily for contempt over not producing all requested documents with regard to a subpoena issued by the New York Attorney General over allegations of tax fraud.
Hiding erotic paintings behind still lives of fruit and the practice of photography in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
In technology, a person who paid nearly $3 million USD equivalent in cryptocurrency for an NFT of the very first tweet put it up for auction, thinking he'd be able to make nearly $48 million for it. The high bid he got was $280. But sure, tell me that crypto and NFTs aren't a bubble likely based on a scam.
If you, like Greenpeace, want to track tankers full of petroleum, especially those leaving ports of the Russian Federation, you can build a bot to use publicly available data to do it. Which only works as well as those ships that broadcast their GPS coordinates, like they're supposed to according to maritime law.
The smart home company Insteon has flown by night, leaving people who relied upon their cloud services and home automation units without the ability to use what they've paid for. The good news from this is that the proprietary protocol that Insteon used for their material has been reverse-engineered sufficiently that the devices and the hub can be put to use in another home automation solution, hopefully one with more local powers and less likelihood of depending on a fly-by-night company to stay in business (and avoid getting eaten by a bigger company that wants to make their success part of the bigger company's portfolio.) Home Assistant says they have a method to get a hub working again if someone tried to factory reset the device and now they can't get a key from the defunct servers to get the hub up and running again.
In greater potential upset for people, a tech billionaire spent significant money to buy Twitter. Which made some people very nervous about whether they would be able to continue using that platform. That nervousness is a direct result of the big players in the room deciding they wanted everyone in their walled gardens, without exceptions. And while there's still the Indie Web and the Fediverse and places like Dreamwidth that are outside of those walled gardens, there has to be both federation powers to let them band together and the ability to avoid getting bought out or crushed by a bigger competitor, especially if you can inter-operate with those walled gardens. The tech billionaire also outlined his vision for how much moderation the platform needed, which amounts to "none but what the laws of the United States demand," which will be difficult to make work in countries that do not use U.S. law as their baseline, but which also bodes ill about the possibility of persons being returned to the platform who have rightly been red-carded.
For technology doing more good, Rwanda has a drone delivery system for blood and blood products, and when the conditions are correct for being able to fly a drone, the drone is almost always faster to the destination than travel by car. There are still some details that would be nice to know, about whether drone travel is cheaper per unit or not, but it seems like there's definite potential for drone delivery of critical medical supplies in places where there isn't a lot of urban concentration.
Last thing for tonight, The story of how the Phallological Museum came into being, which, as one might guess, started with a single penis and then expanded greatly to cover many species' organs. If you should happen to be in Iceland, you, too, can visit the penis museum.
(Materials via
adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, and anyone else that's 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.)
