timorl @timorl@qoto.org

To inaugurate our brand new Mastodon account, we're gonna tell you everything we know (and don't know) about MASTODON VAGINAS. As in the extinct animal, obvs.

Beautiful blog post reviewing the cognitive capacity of multiple animal species. Their work focuses on #animalwelfare and #cognition. #cognitivescience #behavior #physiology
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/tnSg6o7crcHFLc395/the-welfare-range-table

There's so much I haven't said about the making of the fediverse, ActivityPub, this moment. And so much of all of this feels really emotional for me *personally*. How we got here. The making of the spec. The huge role transphobia is playing in Twitter falling apart paralleling the huge role that trans people played building the fediverse. What I am trying my damnedest to build for the future of decentralized social networks.

There's so much I'd like to say, but talking about it feels dangerous, forbidden, selfish.

Sometimes I do kinda feel written out of all this history, but maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe it's for the best.

I didn't realize how fucked up that is until the other day when I commented out loud that I was "lucky" that I didn't get BlueSky because, given what's happening with Twitter, I'd almost certainly be getting a ton of transphobic attention right now. And a friend pointed out how terrible it was that I was even put in a position to *think* that.

Heck, up until pointing that, that's a thing I never even mentioned publicly. There you go, now you know: I was, I believe, second in the running to run BlueSky. It's not a shock they gave it to Jay Graber, I think she's great. But... (cotd ...)

Like, the obvious way to disarm Turkey of the "refugee weapon" in negotiations is to _simply take in all the refugees_. It's so blindingly obvious to me that it really worries me that neither media nor politicians seem to be even able to conceive of it.

The EU is pretty rich, and will be even richer when we start taxing the billionaires much more heavily.

Taking care of people takes work and resources, but _we have those_.

My 3yo just pronounced ambulance "am-booleans."

"What sound does the am-booleans make?"

"1 0 1 0 1 0"

ATTENTION MATH PEOPLE:
if someone studying ""computer science"" (blasphemous demon) comes up to you and asks if you want to learn about "lambda calculus", DO NOT ENGAGE! I REPEAT, DO NOT ENGAGE!!! this is how they TRICK poor innocent mathematicians into turning towards the DARK SIDE (computer).
it is NOT the calculus you know
it is EVIL
stay AWAY

It is said that during the uprising of Dresden in 1849, young Michail Bakunin instructed the revolutionaries to put paintings from the National Museum on top of their barricades. Human lives are cheap to the elites, but they'd be more hesitant to harm their own cultural heritage.

I kept thinking of this history during the past weeks, as climate activists have smeared (or glued themselves to) famous paintings. In the Netherlands, two activists have been sentenced to a month in prison just for that, even though they didn't damage any art works.

Last night #extinctionrebellion activists briefly interrupted a concert at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. They were violently dragged out by other concertgoers. (see https://twitter.com/NLRebellion/status/1587898706849927169?s=20&t=0RpQgT7zj3s987OlRkv60g).

As far as I am concerned, these climate activists once again prove Bakunin's point: the elites will only be affected (and willing to act!) when something they intrinsically value is being threatened. Which leads to two further conclusions:

i will never read the dms of any user on my server. this is the starflower.space promise. its not a morality thing i just forgot how

yo, one thing about actually abolishing oppression towards us #trans people. It requires not putting any specific puberty above another. All puberties are permanent, not just trans ones.

We have the ability to sit every person down before puberty and talk them through what it entails, and then let them choose what exactly they want to go through. Making it a explicit choice places trans and cis people into the same situation. Even with zero medical barriers to transition once someone realizes they are trans, the social barrier of what you are "expected" to be is an issue, for multiple reasons.

People who want to make big changes are often questioned and forced to prove that what they want is what they actually want, because it deviates from what is expected. People who deviate in smaller ways are punished in their own ways, with those deviations being treated as mistakes or failures, because another major role can't be easily assumed. They are pushed to drop everything that is not perfectly aligned with the role to not be constantly torn apart.

We have the technology to provide agency, not allowing its use is oppression.

@w elon is just doing dialectical materialism and transitioning twitter from a feudal to a capitalist society

OpenSSL gave everyone alarm fatigue - Xe: https://xeiaso.net/blog/openssl-alarm-fatigue

OpenSSL is a great anecdote for why we should avoid writing security-critical code in C. I'm very happy writing Haskell, certainly makes code audits a lot easier!

Logically, there can be only 9 "Double Oh" agents¹, meaning that James Bond is "seven of nine". This implies that the character not only exists in the Star Trek universe, but is both a Borg and a trans woman

¹ Agent 000, of course, would be "Triple Oh"

Parlez-vous le français ? Czy mówisz po polsku?
Do you speak Persian, Georgian, Swedish, Vietnamese, or another language?

Consider translating #FreeSoftware projects on #Codeberg, pick your #language from https://translate.codeberg.org/languages/ and start browsing projects.

#Translation

I am once again slightly-amusedly-enamored by Freefall:

http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff3900/fc03821.png

Helix: How was my story telling?
Sam: Not bad. You'll get better with practice.
Sam: Storytelling is an art that comes naturally to humans and sqids. It starts almost as soon as we can form sentences.
Dialog: My dolly wanted a cookie.
Sam: Robots see the world as it is and naturally tell the truth. It's a bad habit and with my help, one you'll learn to overcome.

Here are some of my fictional books that embody this magic+math aesthetic:

There's a dessert I've seen called "sex in a pan" (example: https://www.thespruceeats.com/sex-in-a-pan-recipe-3052370) and I made it recently, and it was DELICIOUS

I told my kids the lewd name because we live on a farm so biology is not a secret here, and they thought the name was really funny.

But the best was a few days later, when my 6yo tried to ask about the dessert and couldn't remember the name, and she called it "GENDER IN A PAN" and I just about peed myself laughing.

So Biontech is announcing they want to bump the prices of their COVID-19 vaccines to about 130€ to 175€ per dose next year. Up from the current 20€ per dose.

Manufacturing a dose of the vaccine is reported to cost slightly more than 1€.

This means that the profit margin is currently 95%.

With the price increase the profit margin would go up to something between 99.2% and 99.4%.

We will need more doses of the vaccine since the infection rates are still extremely high, and the effect of the vaccine wears off within months. Many people in the world are still trying to get hold of their first shot, because the richest countries bought up all the doses and let them rot.

The development of these vaccines was paid for by government subsidies, with guaranteed sales contracts following from it, so the 95% profit margin contains hardly any R&D, marketing, and business risk.

There is *no* reason for them to raise the prices to this extent. A 17'400% markup is excessive for a medication that everyone in the world needs.

(And at the same time we are still preventing third parties from making their own doses of the vaccines we know work, because we worship patent law above life.)

@charlotte Make sure to change your Full Name frequently as a security practice