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When you buy a car with a combustion engine and get tired of it constantly breaking down:
😂😂😂

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"The numbers are likely to get much, much worse."

A new study shows that infant mortality is worse in states with #abortion restrictions, based on data that predates the fall of Roe v Wade. From our friends at Truthout: texasobserver.org/infant-morta…

#news #politics #USpol #health #healthcare #ReproductiveJustice #RoeVWade #racism

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So glad none of the little siblings live near me, I would go bankrupt on spending money on giving out big bags of sweeties

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Ugh, when your server gets DOSed by activity updates.

Well, at least I was able to fix it via tuning it seems.




This is two years old but could easily be mistaken for current news.

Also a great summary of the whole situation and still entirely relevant.

youtu.be/INCXqWzH5vk?si=8fUbaE…

#israel #israel-gaza #Israel-GazaWar #Palestine #palestine-israelConflict



Ooof, just watched the new episode of Dimension 20.

Dropout is genuinely super fantastic about content warnings on their content... but they fell a little short on this one, mostly because they did something new and extreme... and didn't realize that they needed stronger warnings.

And of course in the FB group there are a whole bunch of people going "It's not their fault you didn't read the content warnings" like douches.

#Dimension20


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Palestine/Israel, international politics

It's so damn difficult to talk about Israel and Palestine. Knowing more of the history hasn't made it any easier: it's just shown me that far too many people have deeply partial, simplistic perspectives that they hold with great confidence.

That goes for people on both sides, but perhaps especially for those on the 'both sides' side, if that makes any sense.

There's a great temptation to throw up our hands and say 'well people on both sides have behaved atrociously' as if that's the end of it.

It's not. The injustices are not evenly distributed. The power is very far from evenly held. Western media is also very far from even-handed in this.

But there certainly have been far too many atrocities committed by people on both sides of this conflict. Largely motivated, on both sides, by entirely understandable fears.

I just don't think routine, everyday, government-backed crimes are automatically more acceptable than desperate, sporadic attacks without widely-recognised state backing. If it's murder when terrorists kill civilians, it's still murder when soldiers do it. Double standards about these things leave an intensely bitter taste in my mouth.

I wish none of this was anything to do with me, but the situation has been sustained by the financial and military backing of Western governments. As citizens, we have a moral responsibility to get some insight into that, and the long history of the region. That means gaining the background knowledge to notice half-truths and systematic biases from our news media and politicians.

But it's so exhausting, and dangerous, talking about this in a way that even attempts any nuance.

So I post here, where probably hardly anyone will read it, let alone people who are otherwise in my life. Of all the social media platforms I'm on, I think this is the least hostile to nuance and rumination.

Thanks for reading, if you read this far.

This entry was edited (1 year ago)

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in reply to Ferrous

Palestine/Israel, international politics
Personally I think, speaking in general, the state backed atrocities are even less acceptable, but it require way more energy than I have to communicate that in any vaguely nuanced way, so I mostly don’t, and just avoid supporting such countries financially and otherwise, though that is rather hard in some cases…


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A Detective Sabotaged His Own Cases Because He Didn’t Like the Prosecutor. The #Police Department Did Nothing to Stop Him.
==

Across the country, police have undermined and resisted reform. To protest a prosecutor, one detective was willing to let #murder suspects walk free, even if he’d arrested them and believed that they should be behind bars.

#StLouis #Missouri #Crime #CriminalJustice #Courts #News

propublica.org/article/homicid…

in reply to ProPublica

We something similar in San Francisco where police deliberately stopped enforcing laws to "make a point" against a progressive prosecutor. And it worked too. The cops got their budget boost & the progressive prosecutor was recalled, because people were upset about the lack of police action.
in reply to ProPublica

it seems that police hate to be accountable when they behave badly. Waaaaa!

Excellent investigation and reporting as always. Thank you!





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Horny posting on admin, smh ​:neocat_owo:

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>follow request
>Harry Potter reference in bio...?
>denied

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I want to run tabletop games, be emotional support, teach people techie shit, and contribute to programming projects or building small programs for people who'd benefit from them.
in reply to Shiri Bailem

Managing a food forest, helping others build sustainable housing, and making music. Maybe being a part of a small herd of goats for weed control purposes. Maybe a couple of corvid friends.


It's really wild coming into Baldur's Gate 3 after playing Solasta.

If you're not aware: Solasta is an unlicensed D&D 5e game that uses SRD content plus some of their own content to flesh it out some.

Interestingly enough, I'd absolutely say that Solasta is waaaaaay more faithful to D&D than BG3 is. And it's battle system is much better done, both between being more faithful and supporting things like proper flight and spider climb (as opposed to BG3 which doesn't have spider climb and implements flight as just a fancy long range jump basically).

It does a much better job of short rests vs long rests, let alone fast travel. Solasta doesn't have you warping back to camp mid dungeon, but instead you have to find a safe spot to camp in the dungeon if you want a long rest. And fast travel is done by accelerated movement rather than warping, so you can't use it to magically escape a dungeon.

That's not to say Solasta is outright better.

BG3 shines on drastically better story and voice acting, as well as making your dialogue choices really feel meaningful. I was never able to bond with my own characters really in Solasta like I can in BG3.

Oh, and BG3 feels like a complete package since so many races and classes in Solasta are behind DLC.

If someone told me they wanted to play BG3 specifically for the 5e combat and mechanics, I'd definitely point them to Solasta over BG.

#DungeonsAndDragons5e #DungeonsAndDragons #BaldursGate3 #BG3

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in reply to Shiri Bailem

The main thing that counts for me in both games is multiplayer, and Solasta severely lacks in that department. Both games are absolutely amazing though 😁👍
in reply to Prostheus

@Prostheus hell, Solasta is even weird on the single player... 4 "custom" adventurers with extremely generic dialogue (supposedly the "personality" changes it? But not in any way I've noticed)

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If two autistic people share a similar stim behavior, is that a stimilarity between them?

#ActuallyAutistic

@actuallyautistic

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in reply to Izabela, Soon Again A Runner ActuallyAutistic group reshared this.

I'd like to think there was a stimilarity between me and my mother when she was doing effleurage on my upper back.

(What I call effleurage is a very light caress, and is actually what the French word means. Well, more light *touch*, than light *caress*.)

@actuallyautistic


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It’s so sad that Elon Musk died of ligma
RE: mstdn.social/users/murphyslawy…


It's a beautiful day on X-Twitter, and Elmo's latest wheeze of presenting news articles without headlines or any other context is going exactly as you'd expect.

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#AskFedi

For those educated outside of the US, when are you required to start leaning a second/foreign language in your education, and how many years are you required to take secondary/foreign language classes?

For context, where/when I was in school in the US, no foreign language classes were even available in grade school (5-14yo) and only 2 years required in highschool (15-18yo), with a max of 4 years available. (I did 2 years)

Higher education can be extremely expensive here, and unless it is required for their major, many do not continue foreign language classes after highschool.

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in reply to Mar

"I'd like to share later some thoughts about my experience of learning foreign languages in the US. I know it is not exactly what you asked! But I think it is an interesting conversation."

That would be great! Looking forward to it!

I've been finding all the replies very interesting!

in reply to Eric Kevin Davy reshared this.

This was so much more difficult to write than what I thought!
Initially I came up with a long rant, which I deleted last night. This second time is equally long, but I think I've done a better job at extracting the main ideas.

First, as a white Latina woman, I have the privilege of not experiencing much discrimination -that is, unless I talk. But unfortunately, I've experienced discrimination, microaggressions and even overt aggression related to me speaking Spanish and my country of origin.

This made me think that the situation in the US may not only be a lack of language education in k-12, but perhaps also an active suppression of foreign languages other than English (languages from the global south as well as Native American languages). But this is just an hypothesis.

What I have observed is that not many people seem interested in learning languages (except international students), and not many kids from bilingual families maintain their second language when growing up. People can have many hobbies and cultural interests, musical instruments, sports, etc. But no second language.

I interpreted this as a mix of:

1) there is no immediate practical incentive. What practical reasons are there to learn another language other than English? The only incentive I heard was to "help immigrants that don't speak English" (but again, this frames the second language as a negative thing). Learning and speaking a second language takes effort and energy. If you don't practice it, you forget it.

2) difficulty of choice and practice. With few practical incentives, from all the possible languages, what do you choose? Do you learn Spanish? Ethiopian? Ukrainian? Mandarin? Lushootseed? And once you choose, where do you practice it?

The "difficulty of choice" has been the reason cited by my school district on why they don't teach any second language: they told me our city has immigrants with so many languages that the district cannot make a fair choice. They obviously cannot have one teacher for each language, they cannot choose one language over another, so they don't teach any.

(as a parenthesis, that does not seem to be a problem for our library, which recently started having story time in English, Spanish and Mandarin, has occasional programs about Lushootseed, and has children's books in Ukrainian, Russian and French. People, if you are in the US, please support your local library!).

The burden and microaggressions that came from our school district for having a bilingual kid (no longer bilingual after starting kindergarten), plus my gut fear of not wanting to speak Spanish in public for fear to be profiled as an "undesirable immigrant," makes me think there are deeper cultural roots beyond "a second language is not offered at school".



Injury, but it's only a cop and no visible injury; laughing at someone's pain and misfortune, but again it's a cop

Oh dear god, I watched Last Week Tonight and have been introduced to cop slide.

And I can't stop looping this one: youtube.com/shorts/_EqrIX6J92s

in reply to Shiri Bailem

Injury, but it's only a cop and no visible injury; laughing at someone's pain and misfortune, but again it's a cop
Police or not, who released such a slide?
Who approved it?
in reply to Raroun

Injury, but it's only a cop and no visible injury; laughing at someone's pain and misfortune, but again it's a cop
@Raroun In the US, those were entirely normal slides for the longest time. Those slides were the normal in my childhood and only sometime since then they started treating them as a hazard.


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I feel really sorry for whoever wrote today’s Quartz newsletter.

Shiri Bailem reshared this.



Gotta admit... I'm sold on Kagi.

The experience and quality has been fantastic using their free tier (100 free searches a month), enough that I decided to pay for it to keep using it.

Gist: it's a search engine that chose to rely on subscriptions instead of ads and data mining... and it shows in the quality of the search results. There isn't a whole page of them linking to other partner or owned services before you get any results. On top of that there's a crapload of customization and control of your experience (such as choosing what things it tries to automatically answer).

As mentioned, there's a free tier of 100 searches a month, that's actually good for most people to use for a week or two. No sensitive data needed, so I recommend giving it a try.

kagi.com/

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in reply to Shiri Bailem

Yeah the customization is really where Kagi shines. It's actually a *tool* designed to help you, instead of being designed to generate ad clicks.

in reply to Shiri Bailem

hey, just so you know, this status includes an attachment with missing accessibility (alt) text.



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Another thing I’ve noticed this week; I’ve blocked half a dozen guys for trying to defend various sex pests, and all of those guys have either used a different account or a different social media to get in touch to tell me why I was wrong to block them.

It’s almost like they really struggle to understand the concept of consent on any level.

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Saw this and decided to share my commentary on it because it's extremely harmful:

Unfortunately nothing here is valid. They've solved the finger problem and it's pretty much only old models that show up there. People are bad at even as well (let alone the fact that real faces are asymmetrical). Purposeless or lack of intent is also common in human art (there are whole art styles around it). And lack of perspective often is because the real art it's emulating lacks perspective.

And those AI detection pages are very very inaccurate. They can't remotely tell you if it's actual AI work, just if they think there's a chance of it being AI work.

All of this, including the detection sites are causing problems for real people who get accused of their very real artwork being AI. People get shut out of communities and told that they need to entirely change their personal style if they want to be accepted because it's too "AI like".

And finally the comment about it taking an incredible amount of resources: it actually takes remarkably little. You can run these AI systems on a single desktop computer with a low to mid range graphics card. (One of the problems for these AI companies and one of the reasons they're so widespread is because it's so easy and cheap to run it yourself)

Note: I don't have the energy for an image description, if you reply with one I'll edit this post to include it.

in reply to Shiri Bailem

hey, just so you know, this status includes an attachment with missing accessibility (alt) text.


Ooh, this is exciting. I'm eager to see what they decided on for free vs paid, especially what additional features they're going to offer on paid that they can't/won't offer before then?


Unknown parent

jenifer daniels ♎ :verified:

@gregly no the post office employees will do that too. basically, HHS paid for the test months ago, they were shipped to central USPS location, USPS handles requests of and distribution via their database.

this was planned in advance of shut down.

@peterbutler @robert

in reply to jenifer daniels ♎ :verified:

@gregly this is what's called "fee for service" in business.

lots of business is marketed as being delivered by one entity but that entity really farmed out the work.

(ghost kitchens are fee for service. one company provided the recipes, built in customer and brand marketing, the other provides the kitchen and chefs.)


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neurospicy, business, discrimination

@autisticadvocacy
@actuallyautistic

Accommodation Or Abuse: The False Choice Managers Have With #Neurospicy Employees

Do you want to be a leader or manager who actually works *with* your neurodivergent employees, or do you want to create a hostile, toxic, and *inefficient* work environment because of the fragility of your ego?

ideatrash.net/2023/09/accommod…

#adhd #audhd #autism #business #discrimination #neurodivergent #neurospicy

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in reply to Steven Saus [he/him] ActuallyAutistic group reshared this.

neurospicy, business, discrimination
..because running an efficeint business for the collective good comes in second place to wedging oneself into the structure and not being shown up for any perceived deficiencies.

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in reply to Steven Saus [he/him] ActuallyAutistic group reshared this.

neurospicy, business, discrimination
@autisticadvocacy @actuallyautistic
And nearly all the accommodations are good for all employees - noise dampening, better lighting, quiet spacers, more attention by everyone to our different styles of communication etc etc.
It should be a no brainer, but ...

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Just a reminder:

Mastodon != ActivityPub != Fediverse

It's been driving me up the wall how often people act like Mastodon is a synonym for both AP and Fedi.

in reply to Shiri Bailem

The real problem with AP is it doesn't support blogging and podcasting solutons. I think it's related to the 500 character limit /s
This entry was edited (1 year ago)
in reply to ראַף 🟣

@raf@babka.social@shiri@foggyminds.com the actual thing I wanted to add but ap does not properly support is an tumblr-ask style thing. A post in wich user A sends a "dm" to user B asking one thing and user B answers publicly showing A's initial message.

Like it would require all fedi software to support this kind of stuff...
#Ther-more-I-think-on-it-the-more-I-can-think-on-a-hacky-solution-actually

in reply to ראַף 🟣

@raf WordPress, Plume and Writefreely can all do long form blogging over activitypub, and Castopod does podcasts over it. The 500 character limit is imposed by your instance (or I think by Mastodon itself?), I'm on an Akkoma instance and I have 5000 characters, a previous instance I was on had 10000!
in reply to Velveteen

@Vel 💽 @raf I think you just missed the edit to add /s before sending this, it was a joke sarcastic response
in reply to Velveteen

@Vel 💽 @raf it takes a while for the edit to propogate. You sent 10 minutes after the edit, but it could be an hour from now before your instance gets the edit.
in reply to Velveteen

@Velveteen
Yea I was trying to pretend all those and Funkwhale didn't exist! The reply needed to be more over the top
in reply to ראַף 🟣

@raf @Vel 💽 Poe's Law, there's no point at which you are over the top enough to convey that you're not serious
Unknown parent

Shiri Bailem
@raf @gabboman probably would help to edit and include the /s tone marker

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Adult Content
  • Sensitive content
  • Filtered word: nsfw

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This is totally a sub toot.

Please take care when posting using the @actuallyautistic and #autistic if you're not autistic.

You know how you're hyper aware of dog whistles about being trans, or white supremacy?

If you're not often in autistic spaces, you're probably *not* aware of abelist dogwhistles about autism.

Here are some:

Autism being a super power

Referring to using autism as an excuse

Insisting that others use "person first" language

Referring to functioning levels.

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in reply to Steven Saus [he/him] ActuallyAutistic group reshared this.

Regarding this discussion, maybe a list directory with histories and previous discussions? More for reference and education than you can't talk about this.
in reply to JR the Frog 🐸 ActuallyAutistic group reshared this.

@jr_the_frog
Kinda what I'm thinking; the logistics and moderation (and managing balance without falling into the trap that US media has fallen into) is definitely the hard part.

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?, ai stuff
Just wait until chatGPT outputs "redistribute wealth to the masses" and watch it disappear off the face of the earth

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