Fiona

That’s now how it works: In the US “justice”-system there are only extremely limited cases where it makes sense to plead guilty, because it pretty much just means that you skip the trial and get sentenced directly. Especially if you want Jury-nullification, you have to plead non-guilty so that the Jury can find you innocent despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

There’s a lot of trans-medicalism in your post comrade.

Not really, no. I’m talking about biological sex, not gender.

A trans woman is a woman, full stop.

For non-medical and non-biological cases: Yes, and no one say disputes that.

The thing is that there are some people who don’t believe that for the other cases. I’m pointing out that while it is indeed a bit more complicated and takes some work to fully get there, trans women can even medically/biologically be women.

HRT and bottom surgery doesn’t define a person’s gender. Only affirm it.

Indeed. They change the biological sex, which helps affirming gender.

That said, I do like pointing out to transphobes that I have less testosterone and more estrogen than my afab girlfriend thanks to gender affirming care.

Which makes you biologically a woman. I really think we should hammer that point home and not let people get away with it by limiting our criticism to the choice of words, when we are scientifically in the right.

Amab and afab are equivalent to biological male or female, just less explicit I suppose.

That’s the point: They are not! Any sensible interpretation of a biological sex has to look at the whole system and we have comprehensively proven that biological sex can be changed. It’s a spectrum to begin with. Refusing that is like refusing that irrational numbers exist and claiming that every number can be written as a fraction: Understandable if you subject-matter education ends in 7th grade, but not if you actually looked into somewhat deeper at all.

Would you still argue that you are more biologically female than male if you considered that your DNA in every bit of your body still has the male set of chromosome?

For starters, define male set of chromosomes. If you say XY, then you will be interested to learn about De-la-Chapelle-Syndrom and Complete androgen insensitivity syndrome.

But even if we put that aside, the thing is: Chromosomes really don’t matter all that much. The relevant differences primarily lie with organs and hormone-levels. Now, there are things you can do with gene-therapy (there was for example that trans girl who used CRISPR on herself to get her testicles to produce E instead of T). So it’s not that they don’t play any role at all anymore when you are an adult, but what matters much more is the overall metabolism and HRT is absolutely capable of switching that around.

Like: Name the difference between a post-op transwoman and a cis woman who received a radical hysterectomy. Their metabolisms are functionally identical and both will have to substitute the same amount of Estradiol, because both lack ovaries. Chromosomes really don’t affect anything here, so insisting that they create a biological distinction, when they clearly don’t have any effect anymore is completely arbitrary.

I’m not arguing against you, more so arguing that the distinction doesnt much matter and could be argued either way. I’d rather just take someone’s word for it when they say who they are. Thats the whole point isnt it, acceptance?

The thing is: That is about accepting someone’s gender, which is usually indeed the more important thing.

But biological sex of course also exists and the important thing for many of us is that it can in fact be changed and the claim that it can’t is deeply problematic and harmful.

I haven’t even had bottom surgery yet, but thanks to HRT my metabolism is much more in line with that of a typical woman than that of a man. Meaning that it is much more accurate to refer to me as a biological woman than as a biological man. So saying I’m the later isn’t just insulting, it is even scientifically incorrect. A trans woman who has received bottom surgery is in fact for pretty much all intents and purposes the same as a cis woman who has received a radical hysterectomy. Unless you call that kind of cis woman a biological man, doing the same to the trans woman is just as nonsensical.

And yes, this really affects pretty much everything: The treatment of things like brain tumors depends on biological sex and if you treat a trans woman like a man you are going to see the same bad outcomes that treating a cis woman like a man would have. Because again: Trans woman are (from a certain point in their transition onwards) biological women. Yes, it changes, get over it.

The reason to talk about amab/afab is specifically because they are the only terms that are reasonably consistent in all edge cases, except clerical errors.

Higher education is truly a scam.

It really depends. From what I hear about the US a lot of it is there. But in some ways that is also the exception.

Compare Germany: By most rankings KIT is one of, if not the top university for computer science in the country. The requirements to get a spot there are literally just that you are qualified to study (aka: have the right high school diploma) and haven’t lost your right to study computer science at a public university by conclusively failing to do so at a different German university. When I was there until 2019 we payed a bit over 100€ per semester in administrative fees and got a limited train ticket in exchange.

The only selection criteria were “did you pass your exams?” that during the bachelors were almost all written exams that were the same for everyone. What you learned was to an extend up to you, it was a university, not an apprenticeship, so there certainly was a significant focus on theory, but especially during the masters a lot just fully depended on what you wanted.

The main cost at the time was just general housing and living costs, which in my case was payed for by my mom, but for those for whom this is not an option, provided that they were either German citizens or legal residents for reasons other than the education, there was BAföG, which comes down to an interest-free loan from which you only have to pay back 50%.

And yes, I definitely learned a lot of useful stuff there.

Trace the execs

Importantly you need to trace the execs who copied it, not the ones who decided to try it the first time. Giving things a try and not immediately throwing it away when it isn’t perfect is a good thing and behavior that needs to be encouraged. The problem is when others start copying it blindly because it is new before it could demonstrate benefits. It’s the people jumping on hype that are the problem, not the people giving new things a try, even if they may fail.

There has to be a meaningful number of companies where each individually is spending more on adobe licenses than it would cost them to pay a bunch of developers to get gimp to the point where it is a fully sufficient alternative. But hey, the only thing more important to capitalists than making profit seems to be, to not go for cheaper FLOSS options, rather than spending pointlessly large amounts of money on proprietary software…

I saw “driverless waymo” in the title.

Also: Prejudice against people wearing fedoras is still prejudice and thus not really a great thing to have. One of my best friends also likes to wear a hat at times (not sure if it counts as a fedora, I know very little about heads) and is one of the sweetest people I know.

Okay, this really seems more like a case of sexual harassment, rather than harassment of Waymo customers, which was my first suspicion. Had it been the latter as part of a politically motivated action against the company I might have had a lot more sympathy, but this is disgusting…

That “m” should be a “b”. For a company that size, there is truly no excuse!

Even worse, imagine how woke the books of Karl May (not to be confused with Karl Marx) the most successful German author of all time that were originally published in book form in the 1890s [sic] would be if they came out today:

The foreword to the main trilogy would be so spicy that no modern English translation would include it. Like: He would call out the genocide of the native Americans as such and explicitly assign the full guilt for the decline of their cultures to the whites.

He would have the author-self-insert heroes telling people that use the N-word that “Once they scrape you into the ground, your white-skinned body will become straight and exactly as much a stinking carcass as a negro corpse. You will admit that, and now have the goodness to list your other merits!”

He would have trans coded characters being presented in an unambigously positive light.

And so many more incredibly woke things, like trash talking Christians that don’t respect all other humans and do evil shit…

I’m not advocating against a seatbelt, I’m advocating against not wearing it, “because I am confident that I can hold on to something in case of a collision” or similar stupid reasons. Expecting that blocking does anything to hide public posts that you can simply open in another browser (or in the same browser in private browsing mode) is not a seatbelt, it is the equivalent of a slightly stronger handle on top of the car window that is being advertized as a feature to protect you in case of an accident.

This change first and foremost makes it clear that that handle does nothing meaningful and that you should wear an actual seatbelt (follower-only posts, ideally with restricted followers) instead, if you are worried about a collision. Twitter is a public forum. You can’t tell people to leave you alone, shout with a megaphone across the marketplace and then be annoyed when they hear you. If you don’t want them to hear you, don’t use a megaphone.

The argument here is literally about stalkers. Not about random uninterested people that don’t care.

Please read again what he changed and then try to figure out why your rationale is clearly not what this is about.

Twitter massively reduced visibility for logged-out users,

I know, but it still didn’t fully remove it.

Not sure that being “more honest” is worth the price

The thing is that there really is no price, nor was there ever one. Your suggestion that you think there is demonstrates that the way blocking worked gave people dangerously wrong ideas. It’s about being clear to people what they can and cannot expect. Anything else is ACTUALLY dangerous.

As much as I despise Musk and Twitter and hope that both die a painful death, what is actually proposed here is honestly a change for the better: It’s not about preventing people from blocking users, it’s about blocked users being able to see public posts, which they could also see by just logging out. This is being honest about what a block does and avoids giving people a wrong sense of privacy that they simply don’t have on the platform. From what I’ve heard there is a possibility to post for followers-only which in combination with requiring approval to follow and that isn’t going away here either…

On Arch you can easily uninstall Linux.

The fun part is that there are even legit reasons to do so, the by far most likely one being that you want to use a different package that provides you with a kernel, such as linux-lts or linux-hardened. Definitely know what you are doing in that case though!

The backup-generator seems to be the one semi-legit use-case that keeps coming up where few people have been able to present a significantly better alternative.

I’m not saying vandalism is illegal. I’m say that it borders on immoral and that there is a better, more radical (and thus effective) alternative that one might expect to be illegal but in fact isn’t.

You can when it comes to copyright. That’s EU-law and anything else would be such a horrible idea that no country would ever set up a law saying otherwise.

If you could simply revoke copyright licenses you would completely kill any practicality of selling your copyrighted works and it would fully undermine any purpose it served in the first place.