@ireneista@irenes.space cover
@ireneista@irenes.space avatar

ireneista

@ireneista@irenes.space

You are all dreams and we are happy to know you, as you are nice dreams. We are an asexual autistic trans-feminine plural system with a label collection.

We compromise with legibility only so far as to say the following: Technology Director at Internet Safety Labs; ex-Google information privacy expert. 🏳️‍⚧️🍁

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. For a complete list of posts, browse on the original instance.

ireneista , to random
@ireneista@irenes.space avatar

so we went and read the list of instances that Threads has banned for completely generic reasons

and are distressed to find we're not on it

ireneista OP ,
@ireneista@irenes.space avatar

it's a mix of instances whose purpose is to espouse hatred of various kinds, and random instances that happen to have queer people on them

but you'd never know that from reading it, you have to have already heard of them, they don't bother to explain

ireneista OP ,
@ireneista@irenes.space avatar

anyway it's very cute that facebook thinks it gets to dictate terms to the community

ireneista OP ,
@ireneista@irenes.space avatar

uh https://www.threads.net/moderated_servers for anyone curious

futurebird , to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

I understand the alternate reality about the last election. But I don't understand the alternate reality about COVID. That's the most wild thing about it.

Is it that COVID isn't really a deadly infectious disease?
Or was it made in a lab?
Or is it deadly, but the vaccine isn't real?
Or did the vaccine cause the disease?
Or is the vaccine ... mind control? IDK?

There isn't really a cohesive story so it ought to be very awkward for any politician to claim to be a champion of this theory.

ireneista ,
@ireneista@irenes.space avatar

@futurebird the foundation of consensus reality is denial

this is true across SO many areas. everyone is used to doing it: making decisions about which things are allowed to be real and which things are forbidden to be. most people are also pretty used to not letting themselves notice they do it.

ireneista ,
@ireneista@irenes.space avatar

@futurebird as to how this explains your observations: things that are designated as not real don't need to be fit into a consistent belief system. there doesn't have to be any story about why they are or aren't concerns or how we should handle them. they're just .... not real.

futurebird , to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

Is this a creepy idea for a school assignment or a cool idea?

Make Your Own Doomsday Library

You are going to live in space, or in a bunker and you will only have the materials you can assemble on a 1GB hard drive. Make a list of the books and materials you would bring and assemble your emergency library.

Optional: Create a device for reading your library that will last as long as possible.

It's an interesting exercise and might even be useful.

ireneista ,
@ireneista@irenes.space avatar

@futurebird dunno. it's certainly a thing we thought about as kids (we related way too hard to the protagonist of that one Twilight Zone episode. more than is healthy)

futurebird , to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

Exciting ant queen collecting trip in AZ. Why does it feel like all the coolest ants are in the South and South West. It's not fair.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tV1CkkkKbOM

ireneista ,
@ireneista@irenes.space avatar

@indigoparadox @kechpaja @futurebird well, at least the cultural development that they appear to have gone through in a single moment of non-time, pulled them towards mammalian beauty standards. could be worse.

rooster , to random
@rooster@chaosfem.tw avatar

Hot take: reactionaries are mad about Star Wars becoming inclusive because they see the Jedi as stoic authoritarian cops with super powers who are considered the good guys

ireneista ,
@ireneista@irenes.space avatar

@rooster yeah they don't seek to dismantle unjust power structures, they seek to place themselves at the top of them

goatsarah , to random
@goatsarah@thegoatery.dyndns.org avatar

A thing I have noticed. 2 decades ago, there was decent pharmaceutical knowledge in the trans community. We knew what GnRH agonists were and how they work. We knew that for trans girls, if you couldn’t get them, then a cocktail of spironolactone and finasteride would do a pretty good job as a replacement. We knew that cyproterone acetate worked even better than spiro, but was hepatotoxic, so be careful.

I feel like that’s all been … lost?

I suspect that until this sentence, most currently transitioning people won’t even know that GnRH agonist is the proper term for what is frequently and misleadingly called a “puberty blocker”.

How did we let all this knowledge get lost? We, as a community, used to know how to outflank attempts to stop us accessing medication.

Now the British government just go, “we’re banning prescription of puberty blockers” and everyone throws their hands up and goes, “oh well, no alternative but unopposed testosterone I guess”.

We were better than this. Why did that go away?

ireneista ,
@ireneista@irenes.space avatar

@goatsarah for the record, we don't think it's been lost, but it's definitely not talked about as much

the thing to keep in mind is this is ORAL HISTORY. getting lost is the default thing that happens to oral history. the way to preserve things is to write them down!

tintjosh , to random
@tintjosh@tech.lgbt avatar

The Neuralink compression challenge is honestly hilarious. Like, "let's build and test these extremely expensive brain implants but rely on strangers over the internet to send us ground-breaking research for free in order to make them functional"

ireneista ,
@ireneista@irenes.space avatar

@tintjosh it's still just so absurd to us that they ask for something that's clearly impossible in a math sense, and then they ALSO say it has to work on a very tiny microcontroller

ireneista ,
@ireneista@irenes.space avatar

@tintjosh we sympathize: they probably CAN'T consume a lot of power with a device implanted in the brain, because heat dissipation would cook the brain

but like also this is why nobody else went so far as to build this device and implant it in anyone, because back of the envelope math should already make that clear

ireneista ,
@ireneista@irenes.space avatar

@hrefna @tintjosh yeah absolutely

like - it's definitely true that the consistent constraint in the field has been that the skull is very good at attenuating signals, for a long time

so going invasive is an obvious thing to WANT to do... if the tech were at a point where it could be done. drilling a hole is not the hard part.

Tim_Eagon , to random
@Tim_Eagon@dice.camp avatar

It finally stopped raining, so I took my dog for a walk and encountered some of our neighborhood’s larger feathered friends…

Two sandhill cranes walking on a residential street with lush, green trees and grass.
Two sandhill cranes standing on a residential sidewalk and grassy area near a tree-lined street.

ireneista ,
@ireneista@irenes.space avatar

@Tim_Eagon oh wow, surreal to see them on a suburban lawn like that. neat!

ireneista , to random
@ireneista@irenes.space avatar

so you remember Neuralink, the brain implant that we can't really call experimental because there doesn't seem to have been any sort of, like, science going on? with the lab that was investigated for animal cruelty?

ireneista OP ,
@ireneista@irenes.space avatar

anyway they've released a coding challenge which, like, people who understand information theory will be aware that the thing they're asking for is unlikely to be possible... https://content.neuralink.com/compression-challenge/README.html

ireneista OP ,
@ireneista@irenes.space avatar

and the hardware constraints the challenge describes are very illuminating because it makes it clear that, yeah, the device could never have done any of the things anyone wants it to. they need more powerful hardware before this is viable (and they need to somehow do that without somehow cooking the brain).

ireneista OP ,
@ireneista@irenes.space avatar

they also seem to actually want a solution to this, it doesn't seem like a PR thing - notice how bare-bones that site is

ireneista OP ,
@ireneista@irenes.space avatar

we're all for bare-bones websites, mind you, the site is all that it needs to be! you may have noticed it's about the same amount of formatting as our own site has. we're not criticizing it for that, just noting that if this were coming out of the marketing budget it would use marketing language and show evidence of graphic design.

ireneista OP ,
@ireneista@irenes.space avatar

anyway, if you have a deep understanding of digital signal processing, you might enjoy this challenge which there are strong theoretical reasons to suspect is impossible, and for which there is no stated prize but presumably it would give you an opportunity to explain to a new boss why you'd like them to abuse you

ireneista OP ,
@ireneista@irenes.space avatar

if we were their investors our response would be to sell

ireneista OP ,
@ireneista@irenes.space avatar

it's amazing how they don't even, like, have a suggested methodology for how you can make sure your code will fit on their machine, they just specify the power budget. do you have an embedded systems testing lab and a bunch of very low-end microcontrollers lying around? great! because it sounds like Neuralink would like one

ireneista OP ,
@ireneista@irenes.space avatar

@skye and it's a high entropy signal

ireneista OP ,
@ireneista@irenes.space avatar

@darabos @skye no kidding

futurebird , (edited ) to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

Have you thought much about, or engaged with "liminal space" content in the past 10 years? (Through a reddit group, tumblr, compilation videos etc.)

Regardless if you care about such content now, if you ever spent some time enjoying or being disquieted by such images and media... that's "engaging"

If you don't know what this is about you have not. If you know what it's about but just never paid it any mind? Same.

ireneista ,
@ireneista@irenes.space avatar

@futurebird @mhoye 40+ is young to somebody............... (here's hoping)

ireneista , to random
@ireneista@irenes.space avatar

there's too much negativity in tech news

this is an experiment we've never tried before, but how would people like to reply to this toot with links to the coolest research (about computers or anything else) that you've seen this week?

paper links preferred, news articles are fine too if you don't have the paper or it needs to be contextualized

ireneista , to random
@ireneista@irenes.space avatar

whereas English sentence order is subject-verb-object, Unix command line semantics are verb-subject-object. in this TED talk, we will--

molly0xfff , to random
@molly0xfff@hachyderm.io avatar

"In 2024, for the first time, it finally feels like we have a critical mass of people and platforms who are interested in rewilding the internet to bring back what we lost, and create something new. ... There's a palpable feeling that this just might be the year of the open web."

is this feeling... hope? https://activitypub.ghost.org/day-0/

At various points we revisited our old idea for networked publishing in Ghost and tested a few prototypes, but we were never sure how to make it scale; nor how many other platforms would ultimately adopt it. For all its promise, ActivityPub (like many open standards) seemed to generate products with user experiences that were often confusing and convoluted. But something else happened in the intervening period between 2016 and 2024: People became increasingly fed up with the behavior of centralized platforms, and increasingly hungry for alternatives. The motivation for exploring and understanding new technologies, rough edges included, meaningfully increased. In 2024, for the first time, it finally feels like we have a critical mass of people and platforms who are interested in rewilding the internet to bring back what we lost, and create something new. In the past week alone, we've had conversations with Mastodon, Flipboard, The Verge, Buttondown, WriteFreely, and several co-authors of the ActivityPub spec. There's a palpable feeling that this just might be the year of [begin strikethrough] the linux desktop [end strikethrough] the open web.
ALT
  • Reply
  • Expand (25)
  • Collapse (25)
    • + mastodonmigration, Npars01, pluralistic
    ireneista ,
    @ireneista@irenes.space avatar

    @molly0xfff "rewilding" is a beautiful word for it

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • random
  • test
  • worldmews
  • mews
  • All magazines
    •