To nobody's surprise the network I shilled a couple months ago that was niche and fun has now made it to r-slurred masses, and it's probably gonna tbh but i dunno man, people don't like this Elon Musk guy very much.

tl;dr Twitterstrags ruin everything and don't listen to 's lies. He's simply [[[filtered]]]

also tl;dr: https://shitposter.club/notice/APKkND0tCtuy4cAF4y

---

First off, I'm going to start off by shilling good instances. Peep their local timeline and users, get an idea of how it works.

Good instances

If you want to get on the good Fediverse, join some of these instances.

• shitposter.club

• seal.cafe (hosted by our friend @kroner, includes Marsey emojis)

• sneed.social (I recently noticed this one and I really like it)

• rdrama.cc (reg's open, our official one , nearly 1.8k fricking emojis and all the Marsey emojis from here, synced)

  • Will probably run Treebird, my own lightweight frontend soon as default, other frontends are broken so if you want a twitter experience, use fe.soapbox.pub. Here's a very old build of Treebird while im still working on the async codebase refactor

• cawfee.club

• outerheaven.club

• udongein.xyz

• kiwifarms.cc (Literally never up since the Keffaling)

Teh History

A snippet quite literally taken from Wikipedophilia for teh lulz

In 2008, the social network identi.ca was founded by Evan Prodromou. He published the software GNU social under a free license. It defined the OStatus protocol.

This is all you BIPOCs need to know. The GNU bros and Free software chuds basically put the concept of decentralized social media into action. Nowadays, GNU Social is pretty dead, it hasn't gotten any updates besides a few pokes, even the official GNU Project account is hosted on Mastodon for fricks sake.

I joined GNU Social around 2018, but only to peep it for like 5 minutes and lost interest as I wasn't really into social media or even shitposting and I was a tad bit younger.

Mastodon was born

I'm jumping from 2008 to 2016 here because frick all happened besides the community growing and some oldstrag networks like shitposter.club (still alive and thriving on Pleroma!), sealion.club, and a bunch of others I always forget. Mastodon supported the OStatus network like the rest of them did. Pleroma was born a few years I believe after Mastodon (and some others were born but everyone forgot about those). Mastodon is written in Ruby, which is a piece of shit unscalable meme language that resulted in Mastodon being slow as fricking dogshit, pumping its peepee into the mediocre speed (but good scalability) that is PostgreSQL. Pleroma was born due to Mastodon's poor performance concerns and, quite honestly, also has performance issues but is written in a much cooler meme language, Elixir. Can also run on a Raspberry Pi its so lightweight, but PostgreSQL ruins the fun of that.

ActivityPub (or as Carp calls it, ActivityPup) is the standard for Federation proposed by the W3C, you know... the people who lifted up the web, also a bunch of Jews i dont like but whatever. This is where everything has headed since, it's a seemed to hold up well. Gargron adopted it early, making Mastodon well known for ActivityPup. Pleroma added support and switched over to it. Basically everyone seemed to slowly abandon GNU Social somewhere around this point as the implementations of ActivityPub got more stable.

I used to have an Image booru called thebub.club which was full of oldstrag memes comparing Gargron to a Jew and all the other stuff and all the "happenings" and fun stuff on the network.

Alright, so basically, EVERYONE who used GNU Social fricking despised Mastodon. Mastodon only cared about branding, being as slow as possible, and blocking a million instances. It was probably the first time in the history of the network where blocklists were a thing, it was basically a "Mastodon" disease.

Not even to mention it didn't truly give a shit about federation, but mostly just hating freeze peach. Did you know? Both Pleroma and GNU Social have never had "flagship" instances, ever. Pleroma's developer doesn't even stay up to date on his own software, and yeah, GNU Social never had a main network, it just made software. This encouraged people to create their own instances of the software and encouraged Federation, it works. Mastodon? Lol, two flagship instances (mastodon.social, and mastodon.online), and a third one owned by some very greedy dude called mstdn.social (but not really flagship, just only cares about the branding). You can see how this hurt federation, with mastodon.social having 800k users, m.o having 143k. (confirmed though the api btw)

I wasn't lying about Mastodon being terrible software that can't fricking scale, every admin on large instances has to have beefed up servers to Federate alone, when Pleroma doesn't seem to have these issues as much.

Eventually, more software spawned. Soapbox was created by Alex Gleason, a well known TERF vegan r-slur who got banned from Pleroma's development team lmao. I've been developing Wormhole, the Marsey approved backend in C++ (and im developing a frontend for Pleroma/Wormhole/Mastodon, but im not shilling that as it isn't related since im only talking about backends). There's also Honk which is proof-of-concept but idk much else.

Now there are journ*lists being bullied off the network

---

Anyway, I think that's all the important bits, also the stuff I know. There's instances which have spawned, but I really only wanted to roll out a history of the software and people behind it.

@nekobit @DrTransmisia @garlicdoors @schizo @jannies @lain discuss

Orange Site:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33493433

JUST IN: Elon Musk confirms some Twitter employees sold verification badges behind the scenes under previous management.

— Watcher.Guru (@WatcherGuru) November 5, 2022

@schizo @nekobit @Bardfinn @garlicdoors @DrTransmisia discuss

Orange Site:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33486497

Discuss

List of Companies who have suspended Twitter Ad’s:

General Mills
CVS
United Airlines
GM
Audi
Mazda
Porsche
Volkswagen
American Express
Coca-Cola
Johnson & Johnson
Levi Strauss
Spotify
Ford
Dyson
Forbes
DIRECTV
Nintendo
Unilever
PBS

— PoliticsVerse 🇺🇸 (@PoliticsVerse) November 5, 2022

Nintendo

@BeauBiden @Soren @SlackerNews discuss

this is who administrates your network

Orange site: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33481576

Alright, let's mention the elephant in the room.

Earlier this week, the article announcing the 1.65 release of the Rust programming language included this little aside:

Before going into the details of the new Rust release, we'd like to draw attention to the tragic death of Mahsa Amini and the death and violent suppression of many others, by the religious morality police of Iran. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahsa_Amini_protests for more details. We stand in solidarity with the people in Iran struggling for human rights.

This isn't the first time the first blog has mentioned world events. In the 1.59 release announcement, they said this:

Today's release falls on the day in which the world's attention is captured by the sudden invasion of Ukraine by Putin's forces. Before going into the details of the new Rust release, we'd like to state that we stand in solidarity with the people of Ukraine and express our support for all people affected by this conflict.

And earlier, for the 1.44 release:

This is a shorter blog post than usual: in acknowledgement that taking a stand against the police brutality currently happening in the US and the world at large is more important than sharing tech knowledge, we decided to significantly scale back the amount of promotion we're doing for this release.

(There might have been others I missed.)

Each of these asides has been... controversial, to say the least. Many people are opposed to the use of a tech forum to broadcast political messages. And these asides have each been posted as-is, with no justification behind them and no hint that a justification is even necessary or wanted.

There's a clear disconnect in the community: for some people, these messages are so self-evident that they shouldn't even be considered political. For some people, they reflect a worldview that they don't necessarily agree with, and when they don't, still don't want to be pushed without their input in the name of a community they're participating in.

Also, let's stop mincing words for a second: a big part of the issue is that these messages are progressive, and reflect a progressive agenda. A lot of people in the Rust community aren't progressive, or not progressive of the specific US flavor that dominates western social media, and so feel extremely threatened when the Rust blog makes these political statements.

Anyway, it's a difficult subject to discuss with a cool head, and the community has retreaded arguments for and against ad nauseam. So I thought I'd write a short summary of the arguments that come up most often.

Are politics relevant in tech?

Some people don't want any political messaging at all.

They believe that Rust is a technical tool, and its release announcements shouldn't serve as a peanut gallery for ongoing civil unrest.

The main counter-argument is that technology is inherently political because cowtools such as machine learning can be used by governments or corporations in ways that are politically charged.

The counter-counter argument is that while some tech is directly political (eg face identification tech), in this specific instance, civil unrest in a single country has no obvious relation with a new compiler release of a general-purpose programming language.

Another argument I've see is that, even if Rust isn't usually political, human right issues are worth mentioning anyway because they are so important that they're worth crossing the usual boundaries of discussion.

Maybe it's worth making some people uncomfortable to signal-boost a message that people otherwise wouldn't hear because of their echo chamber.

The counter-argument to that is that issues mentioned on the blog have been high-profile and impossible to miss for anyone following mainstream US media. Arguably, the blog isn't so much signal-boosting "X happened" so much as signalling "we take this side on X".

(That last part has been a sore subject in tech circles lately, regarding the Black Lives Matter protests. A lot of sites have added banners supporting the movement. A common complaint was that these banners made the site's UX worse, not to help the user of the site, but to signal to everyone that the site owners were on the good political side.)

The choice of subject

The three subjects that have been deemed worth a mention so far definitely feel partisan.

The asides are US-centric, focus on subjects of interest in the US discourse and are US-sided and progressive.

The blog has had an aside on the death of Mahsa Amini in Iran, but not on the brutal murder of Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi by US ally Saudi Arabia. More recently, the blog had nothing to say about the political persecution and extradition of Julian Assange to the US. The blog hasn't mentioned the criminal murder of Shireen Abu Akleh by the Israeli military.

Yes, the issues the blog mentioned were real human rights issues, but selective coverage of human rights is propaganda. It serves a specific, US-centric agenda. To people who don't agree with that agenda, it can feel like they're receiving propaganda they didn't ask for, that they don't agree with, and that they're still being made to give a platform to by participating in the Rust community.

Also, it deserves to be said, but sometimes people are wrong? Sometimes the message being boosted will not be consensual.

Imagine if the Rust team had, in 2002, broadcast a message saying "We stand with the US intervention in Irak to remove the weapons of mass destruction owned by the regime"? Or in 2020, "We stand with the peaceful protesters fighting for democracy in Washington DC, and we strongly believe that all accusations of election fraud should be taken seriously and investigated"?

It's not obvious what process the Release Team is using to decide whether an issue is partisan or consensual enough to be signal-boosted.

My own take

That being said, it can be argued that some imperfect human rights coverage is better than no coverage at all.

As I said above, maybe human rights are important enough that we should talk about them even when it's not quite convenient or polite.

Here we get into my personal opinion: some things are right and some things are wrong, and if your mind is clear enough, it's possible to tell them apart regardless of your ideology.

Putin's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine and the tens of thousands of deaths that followed were wrong. Assange's imprisonment on bogus charges, and his sham extradition trial are wrong.

Sometimes things are wrong enough it's worth spending the time to hammer them in, even if that creates controversy and hurt feelings.

But there has to be a process. If you really want to push human rights, and not just a watered-down version of the US progressive agenda, you need to have some way of selecting worthy causes that isn't just whatever was last on mainstream channels. You need a set of criteria for what is and isn't worth mentioning. These should be documented, and ideally be something other than "Whenever the release team feels like it."

Tech doesn't have to be political. A compiler can just be a compiler. But if you're going to do politics, the least you can do is not half-butt it.

https://poignardazur.github.io/2022/11/05/political-messages-in-the-rust-blog/

Birdwatch is a collaborative way to add helpful context to Tweets and keep people better informed

Birdwatch is a pilot program that aims to create a better-informed world. It empowers people on Twitter to collaboratively add helpful notes to Tweets that might be misleading.

• Contributors write and rate notes

Contributors are people on Twitter, just like you, who chose to enroll in the pilot to write and rate notes. The more people that participate, the better the program becomes. Learn more about how Birdwatch works.

• Only notes that people find helpful appear on a Tweet

Birdwatch doesn't work by majority rules. To identify notes that are helpful to a wide range of people, Birdwatch ratings requires agreement between contributors who have sometimes disagreed in their past ratings. This helps prevent one-sided ratings. Learn more about how Birdwatch identifies helpful notes.

• Twitter doesn't choose what shows up, the people do

Twitter doesn't write, rate or moderate notes (unless they break the Twitter rules.) We believe giving people a voice to make these choices together is a fair and effective way to add information that helps people stay better informed.

https://twitter.github.io/birdwatch/#

Here's the onion link : http://bookszlibb74ugqojhzhg2a63w5i2atv5bqarulgczawnbmsb6s6qead.onion/

Remember, piracy is morally and ethically okay.

---

Mild sneed in /r/Piracy : https://old.reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/yll45h/zlibraryorg_is_fricking_gone_and_we_can_only_blame/?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/ylrbjq/zibraryorg_will_always_be_there_use_this_guide/

https://cantsayanything.win/2022-10-transparent-moderation/?talk

Orange Site:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33475391

https://old.reddit.com/r/CantSayAnything/

http://antirez.com/news/138

Orange Site:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33473497

https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/ym7fzz/in_defense_of_linked_lists/

https://old.reddit.com/r/programmingcirclejerk/comments/ym7rs8/a_node_pointing_to_null_is_a_metaphor_of/

https://x.com/antirez/status/1588603683570601985#m

I've just spoken to a Twitter employee who works on climate, and they said their unit was simply cut off without warning. https://t.co/hig7DoDEG0

— Dave Vetter (@davidrvetter) November 4, 2022

Every time I see someone who's been laid off they're always working in an even more ridiculous department than the last one.

I wonder if every tech company is like this now or if Twitter is especially bad?

Orange Site:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33467652

Discuss

Orange Site:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33458563

Edit: https://goodereader.com/blog/e-book-news/z-library-domains-are-seized-and-pirate-book-site-is-dead

https://torrentfreak.com/tiktok-blocks-z-library-hashtag-pending-piracy-investigation-221031/

It's still available on Tor

http://bookszlibb74ugqojhzhg2a63w5i2atv5bqarulgczawnbmsb6s6qead.onion/

Orange Site:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33460970

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32972923

https://old.reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/yll45h/zlibraryorg_is_fricking_gone_and_we_can_only_blame/

(It's the TikTok s fault)

https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/yln9aj/zlibraryorg_is_fricking_gone_and_we_can_only_blame/

https://old.reddit.com/r/zlibrary/comments/ylmkt1/alternatives/

https://old.reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/ylmjz1/tiktok_blocks_zlibrary_hashtag_pending_piracy/

https://old.reddit.com/r/zlibrary/comments/ylmkqq/a_workaround_yall_tor_browser_works_click_send_to/

https://old.reddit.com/r/zlibrary/comments/ylma04/how_to_get_access_to_z_lib_again/

https://old.reddit.com/r/zlibrary/comments/ylko3f/is_zlibrary_down/

https://old.reddit.com/r/zlibrary/comments/ylkc8m/z_library_pooping_down/

https://old.reddit.com/r/zlibrary/comments/yljn16/oh_god_what_now/

https://x.com/search?q=zlibrary%20down&src=typeahead_click&f=top

Imagine coming to an X.org developer conference and seeing this shit, and this random heckin valid grill in a cloak for some reason

It's apparently an "English V-Tuber", and this shit is making me want to gouge my ears out.

I'm not dissing the good work here, but jesus fricking christ, this has got to be the most obnoxious thing I've ever listened to

They apparently live in Tokyo as their Twitter says but they don't speak a single bit of English and they don't seem to have an accent

also

Some background

When they're not busy designing pride flags the folx at Microsoft spend their time coding shitty software. Among these is the new Windows Terminal.

Casey Muratori is a programmer who, despite never releasing anything, clearly considers himself to be some kind of genius.

With that out of the way, here's the drama:

ACT 1: THE ISSUE

Frustrated with the slowness of Windows Terminal when printing colors, Casey submits a github issue. He even develops a benchmark application to accurately measure the speed.

After a bit of back and forth Casey starts to becomes frustrated:

Am I missing something? Why is all this stuff with "runs of characters" happening at all? Why would you ever need to separate the background from the foreground for performance reasons? It really seems like most of the code in the parser/renderer part of the terminal is unnecessary and just slows things down. What this code needs to do is extremely simple and it seems like it has been massively overcomplicated.

He receives this legendary response:

I believe what you’re doing is describing something that might be considered an entire doctoral research project in performant terminal emulation as “extremely simple” somewhat combatively. I am not aware of the body of work around performant GPU terminal emulation

Casey gets angry:

When we're at the stage when something that can be implemented in a weekend is described as "a doctoral research project", and then I am accused of "impugning the reader" for describing something as simple that is extremely simple, we're done. Consider the bug report closed.

After which a different Microsoft employee goes in on him:

You were overly confident in your opinion, but I hope [what I linked] helps you understand that it's actually really darn hard.

Basically the whole team agrees that what is being asked of them is extremely difficult. While Casey is insistent that it's trivially simple.

So who is right? A team of senior engineers in a trillion dollar company or a reclusive game dev?

ACT 2: A WEEKEND PROJECT

Casey tweets the following:

I take back literally everything I said about Microsoft taking an interest in fixing their terminal.https://t.co/K9ojvy1liX

— Casey Muratori (@cmuratori) June 17, 2021

And, over the following weekend, he implements from scratch a terminal that works in the way he proposed. It's ~100x faster than Windows Terminal:

(video timestamped to the part with the pretty colors, although the rest is fun too)

Twitter thread with some juicy questions from the audiance

Then this happens:

Afterward, the same dev [lhecker] also used a fake name to hang out on our groomercord and talk about Windows Terminal without telling anyone who he was. I figured it out and confronted them, and they failed to see anything wrong with that behavior. It's a really special team they have there.

— Casey Muratori (@cmuratori) May 6, 2022

ACT 3: MICROSOFT BENDS THE KNEE

Over the following months, there is an embarrassed silence from the Microsoft team. Eventually they release a blogpost basically admitting they were wrong, but don't mention Casey by name. Note that the person making the post is the one who snuck into Casey's groomercord.

Casey tweets:

When I tell the Windows Terminal team something is simple, I am "misguided", being "somewhat combative" and am "impugning the reader". But a year later when they call the exact same thing "trivial", that is just, you know, them writing a blog post:https://t.co/AXrgZjvUPT pic.twitter.com/UTDrD9s0o6

— Casey Muratori (@cmuratori) May 6, 2022

And finally one of them makes a post on Hacker News seething about the whole thing. Quotes:

We get it, Microsoft sucks, we should all be fired, rah rah rah.

-

Casey, I'm sorry. We made a mistake. I made a mistake! We didn't know what we didn't know, and thought we were clever enough to pass for it.

-

I just don't know what else he's asking for here. Credit? Us to die screaming? The blog post is matter-of-fact, and Casey is right: however, he said himself that it was trivial to do this. Is it not acceptable that we use the same language?

Truly a new low for Microsoft.

---

Want more nerd drama? See the previous post in this series.

It's going to be unveiled here in three hours:

Which company’s is next too do layoffs? Discuss.

^{Trans lives matter}

Affirmative action in American college admissions may be about to end. On October 31st the Supreme Court heard two cases in which lawyers argued that the current practice---which allows universities to favour applicants of some races over others---violates civil-rights laws and the constitution. Judging by the sceptical questioning of the conservative justices, who thanks to Donald Trump now command a majority, the question is not whether such preferences will be restricted, but whether they will survive at all.

For more than 40 years the court has allowed some positive discrimination. But it has done so with discomfort. Too-obvious tactics like racial quotas, or awarding points for skin colour, were ruled excessive. The compromise was to consider race as one part of "holistic admissions" in a way that made its weight hard to discern. In 2003 Justice Sandra Day O'Connor declared the practice ought to be time-limited, expecting it to be unnecessary 25 years from then. If the court rules as expected in June 2023, five years ahead of Ms O'Connor's schedule, there will be some sorrow, but hardly the same backlash as met the overturning of the right to abortion set in Roe v Wade. Surveys show that majorities of African-Americans, Californians, Democrats and Latinx all oppose the use of race in college admissions (and in other areas). The demise of this unpopular scheme will offer a chance to build something better.

A diversity of backgrounds in elite institutions is a desirable goal. In pursuing it, though, how much violence should be done to other liberal principles---fairness, meritocracy, the treatment of people as individuals and not avatars for their group identities? At present, the size of racial preferences is large and hard to defend. The child of two college-educated Nigerian immigrants probably has more advantages in life than the child of an Asian taxi driver or a white child born into Appalachian poverty. Such backgrounds all add to diversity. But, under the current regime, the first is heavily more favoured than the others.

Racial preferences are not, however, the most galling thing about the ultra-selective universities that anoint America's elite. The legal case against Harvard, one of the universities defending itself before the Supreme Court, has prised open its admissions records to show the scale of unjustified advantage showered upon the already privileged---disproportionately those who are white and wealthy. A startling 43% of white students admitted to Harvard enjoy some kind of non-academic admissions preference: being an athlete, the child of an alumnus, or a member of the dean's list of special applicants (such as the offspring of powerful people or big donors).

A cynic could argue that racial balancing works as a virtue-signalling veneer atop a grotesquely unfair system. A study published in 2017 found that most of Harvard's undergraduates hailed from families in the top 10% of the income distribution. Princeton had more students from the top 1% than the bottom 60%. When this is the case, it seems unfair that it is often minority students---not the trust-funders---who have their credentials questioned. University presidents and administrators who preen about all their diverse classes might look at how Britain---a country of kings, queens, knights and lords---has fostered a university system that is less riven with ancestral privilege.

Unfairness in American education will not be fixed by one court ruling. But it will shock a system in need of reform. Legacy admissions should be ended. Colleges claiming that alumni donations would wither without them should look to Caltech, mit and Johns Hopkins---top-notch institutions that ditched the practice and, as The Economist went to press, still seemed reputable and solvent. Blunt racial preferences will probably need to be replaced in response to the Supreme Court. But a less socially divisive system based on income could take their place. That would do a better job of taking actual disadvantage into account. It would still favour non-white and non-Asian Americans, because they are more likely to be poorer, but would do so using a racially neutral method.

In some ways, the question of who gets into a handful of elite universities is a distraction from the deeper causes of social immobility in America. Schooling in poorer neighbourhoods was dismal even before covid-19. The long school closures demanded by teachers' unions wiped out two decades of progress in test scores for nine-year-olds, with hard-up, black and Latinx children worst affected. Efforts to help the needy should start before birth and be sustained throughout childhood. Nothing the Supreme Court says about the consideration of race in college admissions will affect the more basic problem, that too few Americans from poorer families are sufficiently well-nurtured or well-taught to be ready to apply to college. However the court rules, that is a debate America needs to have.■

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2022/11/02/american-society-is-so-focused-on-race-that-it-is-blind-to-class