Alex / catileptic

after more than a decade as an intruder in the software development industry, i feel like i've finally seen enough of technology & politics to retroactively contextualize all my pain

the way my body looks and my insistence on coherent affect really did not make me a "good programmer" from the point-of-view of my former colleagues and superiors

now i can "see like a government". i can also see like the profit-driven industry that is allergic to affect as such

related: https://ashwinsundar.com/posts/legibility-and-programming/

i attended a collective reading of the Vectorialism zine, published by UnderGND[dot]online: https://undergnd.online/zine#vectoralism

i was immensely excited to read this, since i work as a software developer (so i am part of the "problem"), i work on tech advocacy (which is a category completely omitted in the zine) and i tinker and (self)deploy tech, so i'm presumably also called on to be part of the solution

first things first: reading a zine together with others is amazing. i highly recommend it.

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@apti@mastodon.online signed an open call to MEPs to protect rights and reject the call to delete transparency safeguard in AI Act

i love the angle in this letter, that predicts companies might save around 100 euros by not doing the work of registering themselves in a transparency database (if they provide high-risk AI systems but disagree with the high-risk classification)

100 euros saved and guaranteed erosion of trust and accountability. a bargain!

https://www.accessnow.org/press-release/a-call-to-eu-legislators-protect-transparency-safeguard-in-ai-act/

#aiact

#fosdem gave me an opportunity to have several chats about living under the specter of war and the specter of fascism the idea i has in my head, going into #fosdem, was "doing nothing is not an option" in our talks, folx were expressing that they don't read the news. some said they feel powerless, so they prefer to "not know" this led me to think about how i can embolden and encourage people to engage with the world in a way that specifically gives them the experience of having agency

@edri@eupolicy.social has published their position on the now-published, no-long-a-leak Digital Omnibus proposal: https://edri.org/our-work/commissions-digital-omnibus-is-a-major-rollback-of-eu-digital-protections/ i wrote up the stance we take at @apti@mastodon.online in #Romanian: https://apti.ro/content/GDPR-facut-ferfenita-sub-numele-digital-omnibus whichever you read and share, the message is the same: the Digital Omnibus amounts to deregulation and a love letter addressed to Big Tech. it risks dismantling the hard-won system that kept our personal data safe, in the EU.