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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I skim them all. The options I wrote are soft parodies of what each said. There’s a ton of problems with this model of governance, but I’m no voting member, so my opinion has no impact.

    That said, it makes it so a single posture has to be voted on in its entirety, which is dumb (as some legislative bodies of the world have proven). As a result, nuance is erased alongside with any sense of ideological vision or compromise, and instead it promotes vagueness in every action and glacial institutions that break slowly break apart.

    The very person who wrote the proposal that won reacted to winning with:

    I regret the loss of contributors (which would have happened with either option winnign [sic]). It is just too early to take a final decision on the mater [sic]. Let’s revisit this in two years or so, and let this mess of a GR be a warning for our future selves.

    The proposal was designed to win time without having to take any real stance while taking the smallest loss of contributors in the process. And thus it was written as the most milketoast nothing burger. When an infinite set of possibilities exists that actually do address real concerns like climate impact, social impacts, copyright and legal problems related to generated code, etc. in relation to the principles and overall values of the project. Instead, they are deferring the practicalities to pull request’s bickering.

    But again, I’m not a voting member or contributor. So my opinion is null. I still think the way the process is designed and conducted is stupid and prone to cause the eventual failure of debian via governance collapse.



  • Gee, I don’t know. Let’s see if that has been said anywhere, shall we?

    Sponsorships tell a similar story: men typically get $50,000 annually, while women make about $15,000.

    Where does the money come from?

    Organisations like FIVB have standardised payouts at major tournaments, but league salaries and endorsement deals remain uneven. Differences will persist until sponsors and broadcasters invest equally.

    Why would that this sponsor and broadcaster pay differently?

    One of the most significant problems female athletes face has nothing to do with the sport itself. It’s how they’re shown in the media. Far too often, the focus is on their appearance rather than on what they can do. In volleyball, that means more talk about kit choices or body image than actual skill or game stats. It’s frustrating when talent gets pushed aside for appearance.

    Would you look at that statement? Maybe there are things beyond the surface level that influence people’s decision making at a structural level?

    Over the years, coverage has been overly sexualised, which hasn’t helped. That said, social media has started to shift things.

    What Women’s Volleyball Tells Us About Equality in Sport

    But what the hell do I know. I’m just a sociologist during his coffee break pondering about how invisible things like social constructs alter individual beliefs and decision making. I’ll go back to work, bye.


  • The Debian vote was so stupid:

    Option A: Psychotic breakdown
    Option B: Ethical impracticality
    Option C: Political extremism
    Option D: Two contradictory things at once
    Option E: Something that doesn't prevent the other options but packaged with something nasty and unpalatable
    Option F: Sensible but ultimately vague and action-less common place neutrality.
    Option G: Nuclear option
    Option H: Do nothing
    

    It was such a brain dead exercise in futility. It was designed for the winner from the start.

    Nussbaun’s comment on the result is hilariously dull:

    On a very personal note, I regret that the winning option does not acknowledge all the legitimate concerns around AI: environmental impact, copyright and licensing uncertainty, the health of Free Software communities, and the strain of aggressive scraping on the open web.

    The GR results give us raw numbers about our opinion, and a direction, but we have a lot of work ahead of us to act as a community and understand how we can continue to accommodate the very large minority that would have preferred to ban or discourage AI.

    Lucas

    ¹ obligatory disclosure: the script used is AI-generated

    Yeah, the option that doesn’t say anything won. Who knew?…wait yes, mathematicians, they knew. The most important part of a survey is choosing the options carefully.



  • Great, none of the articles mention the issue of sponsorship or the gender aspect of bias in sports regulations.

    By the way, it’s not cool to link without reading the articles.

    Last month, bikini-wearing athletes again made headlines when the European Handball Federation fined Noway’s beach handball team for wearing shorts rather than the required two-piece bathing suits.

    There are still problems with the lack of choice, why?

    Ultimately, the 2016 FIVB uniform guide actually offers more options for women than it does for men […] who are stuck with a tank top and shorts as their only style choice.

    Wouldn’t it be interesting to try to understand why this is this way?

    “There are also certain times of the month that wearing a bikini isn’t always such a comfortable option, especially when you’re on TV.”

    Interesting testimony. Should we actually ask a follow up question to the person who said this to hear her opinion about why being on TV is a factor…Nope, too late, narrative is done, article is over.

    Like, seriously, I’m not talking about infantilizing women or restraining options. Quite the opposite. I’m talking about turning your damn brain on and actually look at the world with curiosity beyond the common places of thought terminating memes, cliches and manufactured narratives. It’s not hard as long as you are focused on actually having healthy discussions instead of being obsessed with being right on the internet (the worst kind of right).






  • When you see that still the most used screen resolution is 1080 and even the very few people who are upgrading, do so only up to 1440. It is easy to see that graphics stopped being impressive a while ago. It seems that a long time ago people were still arguing FPS vs Resolution. FPS wins every single time. 24fps is fine for movies, it might add to the cinematic look. But in an interactive medium, FPS is king. Give me low latency and fast response times over anything else. People don’t notice when games look like shit, but they do notice when the gameplay is laggy or buggy. Most friendslop (compliment) games are very simple and basic in their looks, but still capture the gaming and streaming culture for months at a time. While AAAA games are now struggling to stay relevant beyond the launch week. It is the same trend as with movies. Blockbusters break records and then nobody ever remembers they even watched it. I guess that the algorithmic fragmentation of culture is finally catching up with us all.


  • Honest talk. There’s actually a mini crisis in birding and animal photography because of the use of AI. Images generated or altered with AI without disclosure are being published as facts in scientific journals and misleading research efforts on the health of animal populations which are vital to guide conservation efforts. Many biologists and scientists depend on the photographs of amateur or professional wildlife photographers. AI is inducing error and noise in the information they get to work with.




  • Almost there but not quite. I’m not a lawyer, but have friends who are. The two examples are actually equivalent. Because, by principle, laws evaluate actions. Not consequences or intentions, those can be qualifiers in criminal cases, or discussed in civil cases. But in general the law prefers to deal with things that happened, not risk or what could happen. As it is far less ambiguous to argue that someone did something, than arguing whether or not something could’ve happened.

    That’s why pre-crime was such a big deal in the sci-fi movie Minority Report. Similar to thought crime, it is a tough ethical and legal discussion without a clear possible answer that doesn’t lead to violent authoritarianism.

    “I was speeding but nothing bad happened” is equivalent “I was shooting in his general direction not at him, I missed every time”. That’s still attempted murder and the former is still speeding. The crime is the action, not the result.



  • Bad news buddy. Ethics are politics. If anything politics is the warfare for the implementation of ethics. You can’t be ethical yet unwilling to enforce your ethics, and the only way to do that is to engage in politics. That’s just the only way to influence the behavior of other human beings.

    The worse part is that tech culture has failed to understand that all and any technology is part of the conflict to define politics. Whether you like it or not. Anything that involves a person besides yourself is political, because humans are political animals.