Kevin Kuhl

Viktor Orban banned pride events in Hungary, the people took it as a challenge and just had the largest pride march in their country's history.

Someone on Twitter writes: "I've been thinking a lot of the left-wing valorisation of personal ugliness. It's partly ordinary social rebellion ("looking nice" is conformist; think of punks and skinheads and other groups who make themselves look offensive for its shock value). It's hard to give examples because I don't like singling people out for their looks. But the more cultish trans activists seem to believe that the uglier a man when wearing women's clothes, make-up etc. the better. (Accepting the ugly is a sign of commitment to the cause.) And partly, I think, it's about victimhood culture. The uglier you are, the more you are to be pitied and that's a currency you can use. Hence the celebration of obesity (though I think Ozempic will end this eventually) and of all kinds of defiant unsexiness."

It's true that progressives valorize "ugliness." But I think this person doesn't interrogate this position enough and thus lands at the wrong conclusion.

Let me give you my perspective on ugliness. 🧵

Godel's is a bit more subtle. This is a rough gloss on the notion of modal ontological arguments: plato.stanford.edu/entries/onto...

I mean, none of the cases in the first skeet seem to require positing a soul for explanation to me (all are handled by either psychological or biological theories). Having a false premise isn't begging the question though 🤷

No? If by question-begging you mean assuming the conclusion you're trying to prove. This sounds kind of like a spin on inference to the best explanation, which can kind of *look* question begging.

By Default, Signal Doesn't Recall Signal Desktop now includes support for a new “Screen security” setting that is designed to help prevent your own computer from capturing screenshots of your Signal chats on Windows. This setting is a...

📣 The rush to add AI into everything is a big threat to privacy, as we've been saying.

MS Recall's screenshotting everything is a (not) great example of exactly why.

So, Signal took steps to protect everyone using Signal on Windows 11 from Recall's privacy invasion.👇

signal.org/blog/signal-...

This is exactly what I mean when I say that it is impossible to reduce friction, only to move it around.

The text-making-up machine dropped the friction of "research" to zero, but every single person downstream of that "research" who has to act upon it now shoulders a double workload.

My biggest wish for people to learn is that the wrong kind of cynicism about politics renders our class enemies as magical all powerful wizards who cast spells in fucking Hogwarts that can't be stopped.

The right kind says they're human beings with names and addresses and places of work

Might be more work than it's worth, but pandoc is magical for avoiding Word. It can take markdown or tex and convert to docx/rtf.

Elon Musk’s DOGE is gutting the US Digital Service and its citizen-focused approach to tech development is going with it.

This week Kate Green and Milo from @altusds.bsky.social join @parismarx.com to discuss how government can build technology differently.

Full ep: techwontsave.us/episode/269_...

This is inaccurate. There is no known vulnerability with Signal's core tech. The memo was discussing phishing attempts, which Signal has worked to mitigate. And it was hastily reported.

It's important not to spread misinfo that can confuse people into moving away from meaningfully private comms.

A lot of tech people think (or claim to think) people want "innovation". We don't. We want stability. I want tools whose affordances stay the same, that let me do the thing I want to do without having to think about the tools.

The Digital Packrat Manifesto DRM and big tech's war on ownership has led me to make my own media libraries, and you should too.

I wrote something for @404media.co about how streaming and DRM and AI playlists have gone too far.

It’s time to return to the Old Ways. 🏴‍☠️💾

What Is It like to Have a Gender Identity? Abstract. By attending to how people speak about their gender, we can find diverse answers to the question of what it is like to have a gender identity. To some

🚨This is not a drill!🚨 After years in the making, my paper on GI is finally out in MIND, one of the most prestigious philosophy journals in the world, of all places.

⬇️Why this is the most important paper on gender you’ll read this week, a thread:🧵

So one of the things that I think is lost on AI proponents is what I call the card catalog effect, a thing I shouldn’t call it because a lot of people probably have no experience with a card catalog.

Lenovo pricing is very weird. I feel like they price with discounts in mind - both consumer and business purchases. Some x1 carbons have a 45% discount right now. But the interesting thing will be fluctuations in the base price because of tariffs.

you should have a website: a manifesto

nora.zone/manifesto.html