I've been thinking a lot about what a friend pointed out - that mixed gendered spaces often quickly become male-exclusive because men tend to have much higher tolerance for arsehole behaviour than women, so it only takes one dodgy person to destroy a community as all the women basically leave. Once such a community has heavy male bias it can hardly recover, and its lack of representation means it can hardly succeed in any social, cultural or technical aims. Rings true for the extraordinarily bad gender balance in free/open source software in the context of the Stallman report.
I've been thinking a lot about what a friend pointed out - that mixed gendered spaces often quickly become male-exclusive because men tend to have much higher tolerance for arsehole behaviour than women, so it only takes one dodgy person to destroy a community as all the women basically leave. Once such a community has heavy male bias it can hardly recover, and its lack of representation means it can hardly succeed in any social, cultural or technical aims. Rings true for the extraordinarily bad...
Your friend’s observation about men is a variation on Gresham’s Law, which originally said bad money drives out good but applies to everything. Bad roommates drive out good roommates, for example.
Has anyone coined a law for the tendency for social systems to degenerate to their lowest common denominator? Other than the second law of thermodynamics, I mean.
If you are in a ‘movement’ or group or political party that is mainly composed of men…maybe think why. Libertarianism is an example: Almost entirely male.
"I've been thinking a lot about what a friend pointed out - that mixed gendered spaces often quickly become male-exclusive because men tend to have much higher tolerance for arsehole behaviour than women, so it only takes one dodgy person to destroy a community as all the women basically leave."
Next time someone calls themselves a 'futurist', maybe read the futurist manifesto they're alluding to..
"We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.
We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice."
Btw the techno-optimist manifesto quotes and references Marinetti who wrote both the futurist and fascist manifestos
Next time someone calls themselves a 'futurist', maybe read the futurist manifesto they're alluding to..
"We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.
We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice."
Another academic conference with trendy eco themes but no environmental policy or statement, no info about online attendance, and no travel info apart from airports. We really need to shift these head-in-the-sand norms.
I'm looking forward to 1993
Edit: some context:
- This wasn't a proposal for a european rail network, it's a rough transfer of the London Underground map to Europe
- It does show that the eurostar would go from a lot of UK stations, a plan that was sadly cancelled
- image borrowed from @rhodri
I really wish there was a culture in free/open source software of actually telling the person who made the thing when you do something good/interesting/cool/weird with it, used it in a workshop/teaching. It's super nice+motivating when I hear about tidal being used on a course or something, but it's generally only by chance.
I guess it's another case of people adopting the at-a-distance customer-supplier relationship of commercial/proprietary software, when free/open source _should_ take a friendlier approach
@yaxu It's kind of standard behaviour in the open source game engine world - people tend to naturally form a community around the projects and show off what they've done. It's probably just a result of it being more visibly creative though?
@yaxu related: I just reviewed a paper which provided citations for all of the software tools, but none of the datasets that were used to validate their workflow. I found it to be an odd disconnect.
@yaxu I drive-by liked this toot yesterday. Today I came back to look it up and share it too. I intend to be the change I wish to see! Thank you.
Sometimes when I've done this in the past, I've imagined that the creators of successful projects would be too busy to care or acknowledge otherwise contentless thank-yous from users. But in practice, I have discerned no upper bound to the project size for which authors are gleefully grateful.
We're looking for 'patterny' performances for a 'pattern club live' event in Sheffield UK mid-April. Can be algorithmic/acoustic/instrumental/traditional/improvisational/noise/ambient/choreographic/techno/whatever.. basically looking for performances exploring the further reaches of patterns - repetitive, polymetrical, symmetrical, interference patterns etc. Slightly shoddy/handmade stuff is fine. Suggestions including self-suggestions welcome! The stream archive of the last one is here, but always looking for something a bit different: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dixc2zwK8I
We're looking for 'patterny' performances for a 'pattern club live' event in Sheffield UK mid-April. Can be algorithmic/acoustic/instrumental/traditional/improvisational/noise/ambient/choreographic/techno/whatever.. basically looking for performances exploring the further reaches of patterns - repetitive, polymetrical, symmetrical, interference patterns etc. Slightly shoddy/handmade stuff is fine. Suggestions including self-suggestions welcome! The stream archive of the last one is here, but always...
People all round the world celebrating the longest day or night, by typing code into their computer to make patterns. 72 performances, one performance every 20 minutes. Enjoy !
Live coding: a user's manual is out this week, published open access by MIT Press. I have my copy already, after many years it's real!
I just put up a placeholder website, and will upload the pdf, epub and mobi ebook files there on Tuesday, maybe making a web version. It'd be interesting if people started contributing edits, adding extra chapters etc..
@yaxu "This book is open access, and will be freely available for download from this website in PDF, Mobi and Epub, from its formal publication date on 22nd November 2023."
@yaxu Uff… that's tough. Thanks for posting this, I think we need in-depth analyses like these to understand what's going on and call out rent-seekers before there's no alternative infrastructure to rely on.
I'm very sympathetic with revisiting Free Software and I see some of the development described in the article as being enabled by the division of Open Source from a more radical Free Software movement, but that's only a very vague idea and there's a reason why Free Software is in the narrow niche it is in.
@neauoire one of the weird things about FOSS-dedicated people is they'll write a lengthy blog post describing in detail how the FOSS model has been subverted and is working against its original goals, then at the end insist that it's still the right thing to do and we just need more FOSS to fix it.
If you're near Sheffield and like algorithmic dance music, please come to this event on Friday, featuring Rian Treanor, @ojack, @kindohm, @sophie and me (both solo and in collab with Damu as CCAI) https://ra.co/events/1551715
Sorry to bring twitter here but this is a perfect example of fundamentally conflicting beliefs held by racists. The second tweet immediately follows the first one but also directly and clearly contradicts it. Imagine there is a real person between this, holding these deeply conflicting attitudes. This is cognitive dissonance and won't be a happy situation for them, as well as making them look stupid and doing profound harm to others. So why do they do it?
@yaxu what looks like cognitive dissonance to you and me can be easily explained on their part as just having a different set of baseline assumptions. For example, 2 does not contradict 1 if you believe that racism is only the act of an individual doing or saying racist things to another individual. Or if you believe that 2 is simply dangerous grandstanding that does no anti-racist work.
Gregory's Server
@yaxu
Your friend’s observation about men is a variation on Gresham’s Law, which originally said bad money drives out good but applies to everything. Bad roommates drive out good roommates, for example.
Has anyone coined a law for the tendency for social systems to degenerate to their lowest common denominator? Other than the second law of thermodynamics, I mean.
@yaxu You're explaining why I won't share all-gender public bathrooms with disgusting slobs known as men.
@yaxu
If you are in a ‘movement’ or group or political party that is mainly composed of men…maybe think why. Libertarianism is an example: Almost entirely male.
"I've been thinking a lot about what a friend pointed out - that mixed gendered spaces often quickly become male-exclusive because men tend to have much higher tolerance for arsehole behaviour than women, so it only takes one dodgy person to destroy a community as all the women basically leave."