Social - Alice Ice

Social - Alice Ice

aliceice | @aliceice@social.aliceice.de

A scary quick calculation: there are 10,375 Starlink satellites in orbit https://planet4589.org/space/con/conlist.html, all coming down within 5 years.

That's an *average* of 5 or 6 a day for the next 5 years. And the v2's are bigger than the v1's. v2's are (conservatively) 1000kg and (conservatively) half aluminum. That's 2.5-3 tonnes of aluminum per day. 8 times the natural infall rate of aluminum (and there's lots of other scary things like lithium). What will that do to our atmosphere?

SpaceX is awful.

are everywhere, but investigators are fighting back:

🌍 https://scim.ag/42dMPBg

To verify images, digital forensics investigators will often check whether the geometry of the scene is realistic. In a real photo, lines that run parallel in reality—like floor tiles—should meet at a single vanishing point. In this image, however, the dotted lines do not meet in a single point, indicating it is a fake.
Image: an AI-generated image of soldiers marching down a hallway in three lines, wearing fatigues and carrying rifles. Four dotted white lines have been added over the image, running along the floor tiles visible in the foreground and extending back to where the vanishing point should be, behind the soldiers. Instead of meeting in a single point, the lines all cross at different points. Investigators also examine reflections. The lines connecting points on an object to matching points in its mirror image run parallel in reality, so similarly should meet at a vanishing point. In this image, the lines again do not converge on one point, revealing it to be a fake.
Image: An AI-generated image of a plastic cartoon dinosaur toy with its reflection visible in a small mirror. Four dotted white lines are layered over the image, connecting points on the toy with the same points on its reflection: the top of its eye, the end of its jaw, its hand, and its foot. The lines extend out to the side of the image, where they all cross at different points rather than meeting at a single point. Shadows can be a giveaway, too. Because the Sun is so far away, its rays are essentially parallel when they reach Earth's surface. That means that the lines connecting points on an object to the shadows they cast in sunlight should also intersect at a vanishing point. In this Al-generated image, that is clearly not the case.
Image: An AI-generated image of colorful, semi-transparent plastic cubes arranged in a group in a city plaza. Six dotted white lines are layered over the image, connecting corners of several cubes with the corresponding corners in their shadows. The lines extend upward off the edge of the image, toward where a vanishing point should be. Three of them converge on roughly the same point, but two extend further, and one cuts across all the others at an angle.

She is soooo awesome <3

How senior engineers are *really* made
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Y0MS-TZN1OE

Please boycott JK Rowling. I do not have the health to listen to defenders of Potter on why they won't boycott. Take that somewhere else please.

For those boycotting, here are alternative worlds from authors who are supportive of marginalized people:

* Young Wizards series by Diane Duane
* Emelan series by Tamora Pierce
* Akata Witch series by Nnedi Okorafor
* Animorphs series by Katherine Applegate
* Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan
* Legendborn series by Tracy Deonn

Share others below!

TIL crows, starlings and similar birds only *look* black to us — they’re actually very colorful in ways human eyes are unable to perceive. 🤯

Remember that next time people can’t see your “colors”.

Some colors just require different eyes.

Infographic showing what a crow looks like to other crows vs humans and why

Funny how AI bros never name their bot Dave and treat it like a new friend. Their mate Dave.

Instead they give it a woman's name and flirt with it. Very odd behaviour.

Most of the streets in my neighborhood are paved red, which in NL means “full-width dual bike/car, cars are to take the bikes seriously”

Just saw a toddler wheeling down the middle of the street at 0.1kph with an ever-growing parade escort behind him

"Trans children have such awful lives, isn't it better for them to not suffer?"

Transness is actually really awesome. It's the transphobia that sucks. If everyone responded to trans kids coming out with "thanks for telling me, I love you" and being affirming, trans kids would have GREAT childhoods.

When you read about Bans of Social Media for Teens and Age Verification, you must remember what it truly means:

• Official identification of every adult using social media.

• Deanonymization of every account, endangering groups that often rely on pseudonymity for safety, such as victims of domestic violence, victims of stalkers, people of color, and LGBTQ+ people.

• Putting every adult at great danger of exploitation, fraud, and identity theft by forcing them to share their official ID with a for-profit third-party company with no incentive to protect it. Breaches have already happened.

• Constructing a system of mass surveillance to attach every comment on social media to a legal identity. Effectively allowing authoritarian governments to silence their critics and opposition.

• Potential for dystopian censorship and cutting off means of organization for groups of resistance to oppressive regime and organizations.

• Endangering children online by putting a clear identification beacon over every child or family with children online.

• Endangering the data of children who will inevitably try to pass as adults, and have their information collected by the third-party for-profit company.

• Diminishing the value of official identification due to the inevitable data breaches, eventually pushing the system to require even more intrusive identification techniques, such as iris scans and fingerprints.

• Installing a system of mass surveillance capable of attaching even more information to everyone's legal identity. With a potential to built list of people in certain groups, and scale-up state censorship and discrimination in unprecedented ways.

• The list goes on and on.

This isn't about protecting the children.
It never was.

Do not be duped by this excuse used to convince you to let go of your human rights. They are only trying to manipulate people lacking information.

Stay informed on the issues related to Age Verification, and push back for your rights to privacy and democracy.

The future depends on us.

as some of you know, I was raised in a fundamentalist proto-maga environment, and so I have extensive first hand experience with cognitive dissonance and cult tactics

I wanted to point out that if someone wildly disagrees with you: they’re not lying. No matter how stupid or obviously wrong you think their take is, they’re not lying to you about what they believe; almost no-one does that.

To be clear, I’m not talking about national politicians or billionaires or obvious influence campaign bots. I’m talking about real, normal people that you know perfectly well are real, normal people but their take is so ridiculous or extreme to you that you feel tempted to conclude they’re lying.

There are real, actual reasons they believe those things and real, actual reasons they feel the need to tell you about it. If you can’t engage with that, you’ve not only already lost any chance of convincing them, but you’re setting yourself up to believe patently untrue things yourself, because you have taught yourself to shut down contrary thoughts with “they’re lying.”

accepting that the people I was told were agents of Satan *weren’t lying about their beliefs just to hurt me* is a big part of how I got out of fundamentalism.

Brutal.

When Microsoft acquired GitHub.

Saw an article about this that linked to a video on another platform. I don't love posting content from elsewhere, but I will make exceptions....

Most autistic people, despite everything, actually like being autistic.

Not all, of course. But most of us.
And I don’t just mean ‘making peace with it’.

I mean: it's bound up with who we are.

A thread 🧵

1/11

(refs at the end)

Good news for our trans friends:

The European Court of Justice on Thursday ruled that European Union nations must provide transgender citizens with identification documents reflecting their "lived gender" rather than their gender at birth.

To translate this for non-EU people, it's the equivalent of the US supreme court (the ECJ here) ruling that states (the EU Member States here) must respect people's gender choices.

Source: https://www.euractiv.com/news/gender-changes-must-be-recognised-across-borders-eu-top-court-rules/

So yeah, bottom line: I will not tolerate this identity verification bullshit on any platform.

I will not allow my absence from said platforms to dictate my ability to participate in public life.

And I will build spaces that respect and empower my neighbors.

It’s going to be inconvenient, but it’s also punk as hell, and the right thing to do.

Finally, to the authoritarian pricks trying to destroy my home, online and off; fuck you, I hope you choke.

As age-verification bullshit becomes more common, I am determined to simply not participate in any service or video game that requires it. The day I see the prompt, is the day I leave.

Maybe the government’s hope is that I stop participating in society, but I assure you that I will not. I’ll find or build alternatives, and refuse to comply with bad law.

I hope you will, too.

And as a silver lining, maybe the weird internet we end up creating as a result will suck less than the current one.

is gathering gesture typing data, so that we can implement a alternative to the closed gesture typing library Heliboard currently relies on. The data we collect will be released under the CC BY-SA 4.0

I also made a video including details & instructions.

Boosts Please! The greater the diversity of people & languages in the data, the better we can test for correctness.

PT: https://makertube.net/w/cQECfDkuLGR9eUQquUEo4K

YT: https://youtu.be/CyjumVTWtJA

Text (instructions only):
https://github.com/Helium314/HeliBoard/wiki/Tutorial:-How-to-Contribute-Gesture-Data

Call to action to cis people: be assholes anytime you get asked for your sex assigned at birth. Write letters, complain to staff, refuse to answer. Make it impossible to collect sex assigned at birth. Be really offended that anyone would ask you. Make enough noise that if trans people want to quietly not answer or give whatever answer feels correct to them, no one will notice.

@smallcircles @unattributed

Hmm... Well.... I thought at least a good year about these questions and did not yet come up with better words.

I mean, yes, our journalists are creators, which clarifies that. But then our users would be consumers and thats not better. And I cant call them journalists as not every user is one. So client maybe? But that would be a better fit for the Organizations as they are the ones talking with sales and paying the money.

All in all: I really am at a loss for better words here.

Nonetheless, thank you for your time 🙏🏻

@smallcircles @unattributed

I do know about bounded contexts and DDD. Our code is structured to make clear in which context we move. I guess its more of a "Ubiquitious Language" Problem when talking with people about what we need to do and what not.

Did I mention that not *all* our "users" are journalists? Some are just "consumers". So I still need a word to mean both at the same time as they are the ones to get authorized to different parts/services of our Software.

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