Andreea

@gotofritz@hachyderm.io as far as I read it, it makes the point that people should know whether AI did or didn’t play a role; and if yes, which—because so far everything has been swept under the rug and no one is even asking anymore.

As for the rest, depends what you think the target is, but the whole title of the newsletter already hints at it. And it’s not even a niche view that tech billionaires, amongst others, helped get Trump into power and lead the world here. https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-billionaires-war

Either way, her comments are open!

Loved this Carole Cadwalladr piece.

I’m glad someone else spelled it out too. The world stopped making sense in a way that used to be journalism’s job to partially help with. I used to find a long magazine piece or a careful bit of reporting and feel like, ah, yes, here’s the general shape of things. Now I read the news and feel more disoriented afterward than before.

I don’t know if sense-making moved to 3-hour-long “podcasts” aka people just talking for a long time because working and parenting a toddler render me immune to this format. But somehow I don’t think so.

https://broligarchy.substack.com/p/is-this-the-broligarchys-first-world

RE: @BrideOfLinux@mastodon.opencloud.lu

Nothing about software is inevitable. People choose to do this, even when it costs others.

For a while I couldn’t figure out how to connect two things publicly: how to write about our attempts to sustainably restore a 140-year-old house alongside the software work that we do.

In my heart and head they’re expressions of the same thing. We do both sustainably, climate-resilient, a little solarpunk inspired (which is a broad and vague concept but more on that later).

And the more we live inside it, the more obvious it becomes: everything we believe about building software is reflected in what we’re doing to these walls.

I think the people we most want to work with would immediately understand why.

I think I know how to write about it now, or at least start. A post incoming. As soon as I find a good illustration, which may take me…some time.

If this sounds interesting to you, what would you most want to hear about?

The local municipality has spent all morning cutting about half the trees that line the village for currently mysterious reasons and the sound of chainsaws hacking at them all morning has rubbed me totally the wrong way.

Over the weekend I spent some time clearing out my desk. Sifting through a box of old postcards, it was like doing a bit of archaeology of childhood friendship.

Handwritten letters and cards were most frequent when I was 10-14. We used to write to each other when we were more than ten kilometres apart for two weeks and they all sound like dispatches from another world.

My neighbor wrote formally from the mountains to inform me I was her best friend, and asked me not to forget her during the two weeks she was gone. Another friend reported from the Black Sea. Someone sent three lines about an elderflower Fanta flavor of the season. “It’s good, I just had one here, I think you’d like it. Looking forward to trying it together.” That was the whole thing. Another one said: “I’m bored but the nice kind. Looking forward to being bored together again when I’m back.”

Looking forward to being bored. Different times indeed.

We used to put sooo much effort into it all. Finding the right cards, writing a few of them for your friends back home, buying the stamp, going to the post office, waiting. You sent a piece of yourself into the slow machinery of the post and hoped it arrived before the moment had passed. Usually it did, barely so, which made it feel like a kind of miracle every time. I loved checking mail every day and remember the thrill of getting something.

To new followers joining from a boosted post: hello, hi, and thank you.

I’ll be honest: I’m not at my most composed right now. I’ve been struggling to find my words lately. I’ve been grieving from a distance for mothers and fathers burying their children after indiscriminate bombings. For families rationing food in tents elsewhere. All engineered or prolonged by men with no skin in the game, who aren’t facing any consequences.

I think about everyone but I can’t stop thinking about the parents and what they are going through.

The international, and particularly European response has been one of the great disappointments of my lifetime. We can do better than this. We must.

Anyone else in the northern hemisphere emerging from winter feeling like they need to be completely rebuilt from scratch?

And I don’t mean tired. I mean that specific kind of depletion after you’ve been inside so long, so cooped up that the first warm day doesn’t feel like the relief you so wanted. It feels overwhelming. Like your nervous system forgot how to receive the sun.

I cycled home yesterday in actual warmth and had to adjust back to it. Eight children in the playground felt like…a lot.

First day with 16C after what felt like a long, very cold winter and I can’t get myself to work with all this sun. Given news that it might snow again in a couple of weeks time, I think it’s time to charge my own solar batteries for a while, touch literal grass and tidy the garden and log off 🪴 🪏

Found myself typing an email to someone in my native language and the AI built in kept underlining words in red that I know for a fact are correct.

At first it was easy to ignore but by the end of the email there were so many“wrong”words underlined that it was thoroughly annoying.

I don’t doubt my own language skills but I can imagine if you actually accepted the “corrections” you’d end up with gibberish.

Today’s creative process: open document. Switch to iPad later. Delete incompatible word processing app. Reinstall app. Return to computer. Now also incompatible. Update entire operating system. Stare at progress bar for 20 minutes. Update the app too. Try to remember what I was writing in the first place. Very glamorous life.

Took a step back from Mastodon these past few weeks.

On one hand, life and work.

On the other hand, it is an echo chamber that I choose to be in, and it’s easy to get stuck in the “everything is awful” loop.

But I can’t let it drain me.

I am finite.

I can’t carry the home, the news and the work all at once.

Sometimes that means not reading the news for days. Relaxing by checking antiques on listings apps, books, and indulging in obscure textile designer back catalogs and letting whatever happened process in the background.

And that’s ok.

Happy Monday from that stage of parenting a toddler where you try to change their diaper, they escape, and think it’s very funny they pooped on the floor instead 💩

A post is doing the rounds in my feed that two AI safety researchers recently quit and made the news.

One quit by giving a cryptic warning that "the world is in peril", advised contemplating beauty, and another warned about the perils of parasocial relationships people are developing with LLMs.

On one hand, they did quit, which is more than most do. You don't reform a system from the inside, and they found out the hard way.

BUT they helped build this, got their stock options and their salaries, and NOW they have concerns and tell everyone to be careful?

Another part of me is like, why do we care about what they think? Geoffrey Hinton quit Google with similar warnings three years ago and everyone cared for a week.

Instead of wondering "what could they have possibly meant", wow, so cryptic, we could be looking at something more tangible instead: legislation!

Also, it’s an IPO year. Everything could be marketing at this point.

But let's assume good faith. At least one of them used their platform on the way out to warn of specific dangers.

I figured someone, somewhere, is trying to grow food that doesn’t murder the soil. Someone has terabytes of wildlife camera monitoring and drowning in footage. Someone has a brilliant idea and absolutely no software skills or budget. Maybe we can help. We’re just people who can code, but maybe “just people who can code” might be exactly what someone needs right now. We’re already collaborating with some rewilding projects, and we’d like to do more of it and meet more people trying to do things that matter. The few people we talked to, who are fighting the important fights, are using broken tools, or no tools at all. Maybe we can be of use to people protecting and restoring ecosystems, innovating sustainable food systems, or those tracking what’s actually happening to the living world around us. We don’t have all the answers. I don’t even have most of the questions most days, and I’m trying my best to learn. But we’re good at software, we can build things that work, and we’d rather build things that matter. To end this thread, I’m casting a wide net but if you’re trying to save one specific part of the world and software is the thing standing between you and doing it better—please talk to us! We want to meet you. #OpenScience #Conservation #RestorativeAgriculture #RegenerativeAgriculture #EcologyInAction #CitizenScienc #Biodiversity #ForestRestoration #Agroecology #SoilScience

#introduction

I co-own a software studio,@tooinconsistent@social.tooinconsistent.com together with @siwek@social.tooinconsistent.com and others. We build custom software and our own apps.

Right now we’re building an end-to-end encrypted app for democratic organizations. Think decision-making infrastructure that doesn’t force groups to choose between chaos and hierarchy. (Currently in alpha testing, measuring twice before we launch to avoid data loss. Come say hi if you’re into #encryption and want to help. We plan to make it #opensource, and I will post a bit about our journey.)

I’m also a mother. Motherhood clarified my beliefs and increased my confidence in myself given *gestures wildly around* the world we live in.

I care about #climate , #TechEthics (unfortunately my industry), and urbanism. I’ve come to hate cars. #FuckCars. Too many, too loud, destroying everything good about places. I choose what’s in my power: electric bike, trains, solar, walking, no car for as long as I can avoid it. Not perfect, just trying to do the least harm with what I know.

I’m renovating a 19th century house and thinking a lot about craft, longevity, and respecting what came before while adding new things. I’m trying to let that sensibility permeate into the kind of software we build, to make things that last, for a world still worth inhabiting another 100+ years from now. I’m interested in #SmallWeb, #RightToRepair and similar initiatives.

I’ve lived in five countries by accident, rather than design, and now speak just as many languages, some badly. Bună, hi, bonjour, hoi, dzień dobry.

I garden, read (mostly nonfiction, sometimes #scifi ), write when motherhood allows it, look for beauty in the chaos, am partial to green tea, dark chocolate and have a weakness for #sękacz / #Baumkuchen, and joke that we build software for a world on fire, the antithesis to whatever the tech bros are doing.

Would love to connect with parent-builders, #solarpunk dreamers, #urbanism folks, #IndieWeb people, journalists, creators, critical thinkers. People trying to change the status quo, or at least not make it worse.

Do say hello! 👋