Stacy Dickerman

My most beloved human in the whole entire world is getting top surgery, and could really use your help to ensure that they have a smooth recovery. More details here: ffnd.co/OHaAl0

I guess I have to give my monthly reminder that the alternative to fascism is not doomerism or accelerationism. It’s finding and building resiliency and community. The alternative to fascism is embracing our shared humanity and one another not by falling further into the trap of atomization and fear

Post your favorite Doctor Who, wrong answers only

armored ice truck agents on top holding beads

i feel like the spirit of 'no cops at pride' extends to 'no ICE at motherfucking mardi gras you goddamned ghouls[derogatory]'

(I’d rather be doing linguistics, but I don’t hate IT and I do legitimately like helping people. Which is pretty fucking good under capitalism, if you ask me.)

(The only reason I do IT now is that I had a jerk boyfriend in college who essentially force-taught me to be a Linux admin, it then turned out to be a thing that I was actually interested in on my own, and then I was able to leverage my years of running multiple OS-es into a desktop support career.)

(Also, 3.5 was that I WANTED to become a linguistics prof, even went to grad school for it, but ultimately chose to leave for a variety of complicated reasons, not the least of which was my physical and mental health.)

(The physics prof at my college turned out to be a complete jerkface and someone who was just impossible to work with. Turned a lot of other students away from doing physics, too. Fortunately for me, I took linguistics in my first semester, fell in love with that, and the rest was history.)

if you went to college
1. what was your career goal when you started?
2. your initial major?
3. if you changed majors, what did you change to?
4. what do you do now, professionally?

1. Astrophysicist
2. Physics
3. Languages/Linguistics
4. University IT

Hot take: The Middlebury Language Schools should provide immigration support to their alumni.

DAYS OF AWWWWW(E) YEAH

You’ve been kidnapped. The characters from the last TV show you watched are trying to rescue you. Who is coming to save you?

(I trust one set of these goobers to be successful a lot more than the other.)

I tried to make a terrible comic but I’m bad at it

#makeaterriblecomicday2024

why are you lgbtq+. wrong answers only.

Finally caught the gay after fucking so many guys who turned out to be queer.

At least I only have one bad dad to reckon with these days. Unfortunately, he is the worse of the two.

Legit just ranked my three least favorite holidays in my head, and today is at the top. Happy Bad Dads Day to all who celebrate!

knuckle tats that read

FEEL / INGS

This is pretty normal, from what I understand, but I buy and read German children’s books.

Forced immersion! Going to the Middlebury Language Schools for German helped me get conversational in a way I’d never managed before.

Oh, B) for sure. Especially memorizing noun classes for all the words.

(I realize this is not helpful.)

INTO MY FACE

The Recipe w/ Kenji & Deb (affable + low stakes), Xai How Are You? (affable + Talmud), Let’s Learn Everything (affable, very fun, not sure how low stakes you’d consider it)

39+ bsky, drop a pic with ur age

40

All the movies had it wrong. Civilisation is not going to buckle under an evil superintelligent AI while the plucky humans fight it against overwhelming odds. Instead, civilisation will buckle under a mediocre idiotic AI while a few humans use it to get rich and most close their eyes to the danger.

Narrator: HOW TO DELETE A FILE T-Rex: Highlight the file and press delete! DONE. T-Rex: Onlyyyy that just moved it to temporary buffer. Right!

T-Rex: This buffer is called a "trash can" or a "recycle bin" because of metaphors. Okay, to delete a file, highlight it, delete it, AND empty the buffer it's moved to. Dromiceiomimus: Only THAT just deleted it from the file table, but the data's still recoverable on the disk.

T-Rex: OKAY. Delete the file, and THEN, rewrite the data on the disk with something else. Utahraptor: Nice! Utahraptor: Buuuuut it could still be recovered forensically. T-Rex: DELETE THE FILE, PURGE THE BUFFER, OVERWRITE THE DATA WITH AN ALTERNATING SERIES OF 1S AND 0S TEN TIMES, and then - then! - your file is finally deleted!

Off panel: True! But have you done the same with any temporary files or shadow copies? Did you remove any offsite or cloud backups? What if they use a soft delete and - T-Rex: NEVERMIND, DATA IS FOREVER, JUST NEVER WRITE ANYTHING THAT YOU DON'T WANT WEIRDOS TO READ

when i say "forever" i'm only referring to data that you either don't need or actively want gone. data you actually care about will disappear in seconds and somehow be fully unrecoverable. this is due to an ancient and planet-wide curse that cannot be lifted.

www.qwantz.com/index.php?co...

Johns Hopkins COVID Long Study The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health is conducting research about the COVID-19 pandemic. Participate in this one-time, 10-15 minute survey.

Johns Hopkins is doing a long-COVID survey and apparently is having trouble finding controls -- people who haven't had COVID. If this is you, consider giving them some clicks.

@violetblue.bsky.social thought you may want to boost.

covid-long.com

we have a democratic mayor, a democratic governor, two democratic senators, and a democratic president and the cops are still free to treat protesters like enemy combatants.

watching the videos out of bay ridge, brooklyn, today of NYPD beating the shit out of protesters it’s unbelievable how many cameras there were. cops assaulting people in broad daylight on camera and they keep going because our leaders have made it clear they’ll never suffer a single consequence.

- Generative AI can't do facts
- Generative AI can't reason
- Unless a model tells us what it's trained on, we should assume it's participated in the largest copyright theft in history
- No incremental improves are going to change this