Dear god, I feel like I need to shout this from the rooftops because every time I mention it in passing, it feels like someone's jaw drops in astonishment:

YOU CAN HAVE BOTH A PENIS AND A VAGINA! IT'S CALLED A PENIS-PRESERVING VAGINOPLASTY (if you're AMAB) OR A VAGINA-PRESERVING PHALLOPLASTY/METOIDIOPLASTY (if you're AFAB)!

YOU CAN HAVE BOTH! YOU'RE ALLOWED TO HAVE BOTH!

It's so frustrating to see Microsoft copy inventions from the Linux world and act like they're new. Ads in the start menu? Come on, we had that in Ubuntu back in 2012 already, you're late to the party *again*.

americans won't buy small cars because they don't feel masculine enough, and they love masculine cars. in this essay i am defending that the increased prevalence of femboys in the american media landscape is a plot by car companies and ecological activists to get americans to finally buy smaller cars

We just open-sourced DOS 4 (and found binaries of Multitasking DOS 4) https://www.hanselman.com/blog/open-sourcing-dos-4

The mistakes we have been making in agriculture EXACTLY mirror the mistakes we've been making in society.

This may sound trite, but it's a VERY simple and blunt truth: the more diversity, the better. Whether we're talking about plants in the ground or people in your community. Without diversity, we will die.

The harder we try to exert control, the worse the consequences come back around to bite us in the ass. Whether this is about forcing crops to grow in straight lines and killing everything that isn't the desired product, or forcing people to behave in a certain manner-- it works the same way.

Hubris leads to unforseen consequences-- and keeps us repeating the same mistakes over and over and over again long past the time we should've learned better. The arrogance of insisting we know better than nature, the obsession with manipulation, keeps us from admitting conventional wisdom is flawed. Even when it is killing us.

We can do better.

The results sound too good to be true, and yet... The measurements are right there. Better than most of us would have ever imagined. Even with the proof RIGHT THERE on the farm next door, neighbors will still insist on sticking to the doomed methods we've been taught are the "best" way (indeed, entrenched obsolete agricultural policies will actually penalize doing anything differently).

This farmer got a kick start, when 4 years of total disasters kept him from harvesting anything from his ranch-- inadvertently resting and replenishing the depleted soil. He took a big risk, switching to no-till; he actually sold his tilling equipment in order to afford the no-till drill seeder.

His land is now 5x as fertile as that of his neighbors, and sits pretty while they flood in the rain.

No pesticides. No herbicides. No synthetic fertilizer. No ploughing.

Throughout this video, he keeps emphasizing how crucial it is to incorporate carbon into the soil-- for production, for profit. He's not even talking about atmospheric CO2-- it just so happens that sequestering carbon in living ecosystems is the best way to produce food.

Even though he's still probably a pretty conservative guy, still treating animals like walking coin purses, even he has been learning how to work WITH the land.

Why isn't this sort of thing all over the news? Why isn't it taught in every ag school? This video and others like it have been increasingly making the rounds, but...

When it DOES show up in the news, what do we see?

...Frightened, struggling, impoverished farmers protesting in horror because the government is restricting their fertilizer use.

Remember that poem about washing the dishes? And how if you drop one on the floor, maybe they won't tell you to wash the dishes anymore...?

When environmental policies are enacted, it works in much the same way as many policies for social justice-- if it's implemented in the worst ways, guaranteed to piss people off, it compromises the results. Then people can claim "See?? We tried! And it doesn't work!"

Command farmers to use less fertilizer without explaining WHY, without massive educational campaigns showing how regenerating the soil actually works, leading with punishment instead of excitement-- and the environmental effort is shot in the foot. Stirring up resentment against the whole idea. Protecting the companies that profit off the doomed status quo.

Same thing when drugs are decriminalized in some half-assed way WITHOUT implementing sufficient treatment programs. Same thing with some Affirmative Action over here but not touching the mass incarceration or poverty or other systemic drivers over there.

We can't halfass things anymore. We can't settle for the performative and poisoned false "reforms" that won't actually get the job done.

Real solutions take big changes. It takes thinking profoundly differently. Tear apart every unexamined assumption.

#Agriculture
#RegenerativeAg
#Soil
#Topsoil
#Farming
#Grazing
#Pasture
#ClimateChange
#SolutionsExist

https://youtu.be/uUmIdq0D6-A

There was a Nazi Patriot Front rally in Southern California at the start of April. No public outrage over antisemitism followed. Then there was a Nazi rally last week in Southern California too. Nazi salutes and antisemitic k-slurs. Again: no public outrage over antisemitism. Today there was a pro-Palestine protest at USC condemning genocide and suddenly everyone calls antisemtiism? Anti-Palestine reactionaries claim they care about antisemitism but they’re silent when it comes to real Nazis.

This is a good and normal website

offf, this story about how Google made google search into a pile of seagull shit hits me hard:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

Around the time of this story, I was living through a similar situation in my work life (on a much smaller scope, of course, WordPress.com first, Tumblr later).

Back in 2019, working on WordPress, I started finding myself, almost weekly, arguing against people who wanted to take the product we were working at and made it worse if that mean they could squeeze 0.1% more revenue from it

The 0.1% figure is not even a random number: I remember this speciffic A/B test on WordPress.com that was declared a success and shipped to 100% of the users because it increased the free-to-paid conversion by 0.1%. Soon after it was released, I found out that as a side effect, it increased the churn of free users by 20 something %,so I called for an urgent rollback and removal of the change. So I was promptly explained that we didn’t care about free-users churn, because finance had calculated the average long-term value of the free users to be something like $2 per year, and the increase in conversion was bigger than what we could get from them.

Everything became about growth hacking. Everything became thinly-veiled dark patterns. In our private dev slack channels, we joked that since it was impossible to make it smaller or less conspicuous, the next thing the growth team was going to ask us to do was to make the ‘free plan’ button flee away from the mouse pointer when the user tried to click it. We kept making our product worse, we kept consciously crippling the cheaper versions so we could force people to move to the more expensive options.

Back then I was the lead of one of the two dev divisions working on WordPress.com, so my job was mainly to discuss what we were going to be doing, when and how. And I was getting drained by a constant state of fight against a constant wave of shit they wanted us to build. So much than by the end of 2020, the CEO quietly told me to follow the growth team plans and shut up or step down.

So I requested to move to tumblr, because I thought the pastures were greener over there. But it was all the same: Adding login walls to what we were pretending to be “the last bastion of the free internet”, cramping in embarrasingly obvious money-making schemes disguised as features, and making them silently opt-out instead of opt-in so the less people the possible would deactivate them, having to fend off the pressure from the CEO to make everything algorithmic timelines because, you know, tiktok makes a lot of money and why aren’t we, etc etc.

I found myself in a place where building something good that people enjoy using was no longer a priority, but tricking people into generating more money for the company was. And when I looked around me, I could see that happening everywhere else, not only in my company. Experiencing the start of the enshittification years from inside wasn’t easy.

And, as in the article, the people who decided to turn the shit-metter up to 200%, have a name, in every case. And these people, no matter if they are called Sundar and Prabhakar or Matt and Mark, are destroying the internet. These people are milllionaires, or billionaries, and are destroying our shared, common spaces to squeeze some extra cash from us.

That’s why the fediverse and its principles are important. Because that’s how we take back internet from their dirty hands. That’s how we make internet resilient against them. That’s how we build the commons.

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There's an alternate universe where Netscape Navigator embedded Lua instead of inventing js, and I'm not sure if that's a better world or not.

it's actually incredible that chrome completely breaking on wayland is not a release blocker? it just does and that's nothing and it gets shipped to stable anyway? how is chromeos even a real thing sold on devices if it works like this?

I don't know who needs to hear this (that's a lie: ~80% of drivers) but when you're in a turn lane or an exit only lane, you should still signal to confirm to those around you that you are aware of the lane you're in and where it's about to go.

Who killed Britain?
This Danish article has the correct answer: Thatcher.

"Around two-thirds of Britons believe the country is in decline, and it's not hard to see why. Real wages are lower than 15 years ago. A third of British children grow up in poverty, many millions have to skip meals every single week. The UK is not just significantly poorer than France, let alone Germany or Denmark. The poorest 10% of Britons now also earn less than the poorest 10% in Slovenia...

"A particular story of decay still plagues the country... and it goes something like this: the 1960s and 70s were a dark time... Then Thatcher came and saved it all with economic common sense, tax cuts and a necessary showdown with unions... But that narrative is fundamentally wrong... Margaret Thatcher did not increase the growth of the British economy... The post-war period, including the 1970s, was the time of high growth and major transformations... an economic model reminiscent of the one found in the rest of Western Europe was established... In the 1980s many countries lowered taxes, removed regulation, encouraged deindustrialization and privatized public enterprises. But Britain took exceptionally radical action. Today, it is Europe's most financialized economy, with very high inequality - and a very low level of both public and private investment in the economy.

"Four criminal acts have destroyed the economy.... Monetarism in the 1980s, deregulation in the 80s, the austerity policy of the 2010s and Brexit. All motivated by the same economic thinking... free market fundamentalism."

https://www.information.dk/udland/2024/04/hvem-slog-storbritannien-ihjel?kupon=eyJpYXQiOjE3MTM1MjQ5MzUsInN1YiI6IjIyMjUyMDo4MTkwMzUifQ.9_7QOpyn65Fg3-8EP-Enfg

How much of the infuriating trend of people listening to videos on speaker in public places is linked to all the flagship phones removing the 3.5mm headphone jack, I wonder. Once any old pair of cans on a string would work, but now if you want to listen to phone audio you need bluetooth ear phones, and a solid 80% of those seem to suck eggs.

United States: we'll impose sanctions on a single, very specific IDF unit for egregious human rights violations

Every Israeli politician: this unit is no different from the rest of the IDF

#Israel #Palestine #Gaza