Hazel Weakly

2.1 Lenses, Not Boxes I wondered whether this section was necessary, but games discourse seems to repeatedly find itself adrift in questions of whether _ counts as a _. We have seen the question repeatedly: Do games count as art? Do games without goals count as games? Is The Sims a game? Are hypertexts interactive fiction? Are Twine pieces literature? In fairness to the researchers cited here, all of whom I respect immensely, many of these sources pose or imply the question rhetorically. Still, the necessity of such a framing frustrates me. "Is _ a _?" is, in my opinion, a fruitless question. The question can never be answered to anyone's satisfaction, and it often serves as either a provocation to espouse politics or as a cover to institute gatekeeping. Its agenda is usually opaque to onlookers and bewildering to those trying to advance the field from across disciplines. We should be thinking in lenses, not boxes. It is always more interesting to ask "If we think of _ through the lens of _, what do we learn?" We know it is more interesting to ask "What do we learn by considering Tom Stoppard through the lens of poststructuralism?" than to ask "Is Stoppard's work poststructuralist?" And while some works may be more or less fruitful when examined through different lenses, sometimes the most unlikely pairings of lenses and objects are the most rewarding. Certainly any of the questions above would be much better served by reframing them in this way.

Wow we’re having “games are art” discourse again! Just gonna leave this here.

From my dissertation:

Empathy *has* to be taught. Humans come with a pretty blank slate, mentally. Most of our socialization is taught and conditioned; both good and bad

This is basically what I do for most talks. Technical title, few buzzwords, leaning into the techbro vibe, all of that

Then I show up in a ballgown and talk about social skills and leading people with empathy and humanity

Because yes, that’s also technical skills, and tech can be feminine too 💅

Would you believe that this is one of the biggest indicators that you have it? 😅

Communal Instructure is the Path - Jacky Alciné

Self-hosting *is* the answer. And in a way, we've historically always self-hosted our lives, stories and experiences.

We could use public infrastructure to encourage this outside of the corporate sphere, but we don't have to wait for policy to catch up.

this is what i really mean when i talk about owning our own infrastructure. it cannot just me hosting all this shit for my family and extended community. anyone who's tried knows you need support from your community well beyond sysops. but it's also unrealistic to expect a whole community to do SRE.

Oh my adhd is very diagnosed and treated and I still resist closing the distraction wormholes as vigorously as I can 😭

It’s hard to make self hosting for everyday people redundant. You are your own single point of failure. All it takes is a kid or cat to unplugging a server to charge their iPad.

This also mirrors the growing pains in industry w/ cloud vs data centers, also legacy social media, BS and mastodon.

Im legitimately just going to reference her answer whenever I’m asked this question because it’s an extraordinary answer and gets directly to the heart of the matter in such a well executed way

I cleaned out 500 tabs the other day on my phone. I’ll do the 280 on my computer at some point…

If I were brute force automating this, I’d use AutoHotKey and do it from the right click menu to script it. A bit ugly to be sure, but it would technically work

www.autohotkey.com/boards/viewt...

Unfortunately directly generating “rich text” for google docs doesn’t seem possible

I’d like to live in a world where communities uplift and support each other and are able to do so. I’m doing my best to help make that a reality, even if I’ve had to spend the last year or two putting my own mask on first :)

I liked the reference to community clouds in the ending of the article. It reminded me very much of Common Pool Resources that Elinor Ostrom talks about, or the emergent strategy of adrienne marie brown. I need to read more Ursula Franklin, but I suspect her writing is right at home here too.

The bad part, in my opinion, is that our only choices are currently techno fascism… Or the sustenance farming that killed almost everyone who attempted it. That’s not a great set of choices and it doesn’t have to be like that.

For example: the person in the article casually buying a server and dropping a few thousand dollars on it, setting up several complicated systems in it, and “only” spending a few weeks of free time doing so? Privileged. Fun hobby if you like that, though!

Some people happen to like sustenance farming and the idea of living fully off the grid! But they’re not normal. That’s fine, but it’s not workable for most people and carries an enormous amount of unstated privilege.

Sustenance farming… Well, it sucks, it’s brutal, it’s awful. No wonder people want centralized infrastructure! Groceries aren’t a concept in sustenance farming, neither is something like “food sensitivities”—you just die or accept the feudalism because you have no other choice.

The Future is NOT Self-Hosted In a world where corporations have detached buying from owning, one man attempts to do something radical: build his own cloud.

I read this article today and quite liked it

www.drewlyton.com/story/the-fu...

An analogy came to mind when reading it: if the cloud is feudalism, self hosted is sustenance farming.

Ohh I see why that was breaking then. Yeah the text expander would have to type it. Or you could have it copy to clipboard somehow and then you could right click and paste from markdown after… autohotkey could probably do a lot of that?

It’s so ridiculous lol

It’s in the right click menu too. But yeah it’s there! Sorta kinda at least 😅

If you use chrome you can paste and copy into/from google docs with markdown. It’s not super amazing and it has some limitations but it’s at least there. I keep chrome around specifically to paste markdown into gdocs using that :)

This is so cute it might get me wearing ties again 👀

Why kids still need to learn to code in the age of AI  - Raspberry Pi Foundation Our new position paper sets out five arguments for why we think that kids still need to learn to code in the age of artificial intelligence.

Can't recommend this from raspberry pi foundation enough to anyone with an interest in developer education or the potential impact of LLMs on software engineering, it's really fantastic www.raspberrypi.org/blog/why-kid...

You bravery’d too close to the sun

TERFs won't believe someone is a woman until they see her make a man a sandwich.

"Go to the library and learn to be a dev, I promise no one will stop you" was said to me. Except the parent who mocks your interest and demands you watch your siblings, and the 20 minute library limit on computer time, and how it's dangerous to cross the street, and hell, libraries being defunded

Just to layer onto this, "what could explain this state of the world that ISN'T just saying oh well I guess everyone who didn't succeed is stupid and deserves it" is the only, the ONLY possible route to ever changing anything

"people just deserve it" is thought-terminating for a reason

You did not need to call me out this directly 😭

This paper gave me an extraordinary amount of enjoyment. Oh *whew*

Yeah it is, unfortunately (from everything I’ve read)

I mean the *math* is sound. It’s not like quantum teleportation of macro scale objects where we kinda just gloss over “the hard parts” (aka everything)

So it’s probably more like cold fusion, being eternally ten years away from reality