millie

You know what they say: fives have lives, fours have chores, threes have fleas, twos have blues, and ones don't get a rhyme because they're garbage!

If you read the article, they're raising the concern that we might have the technology to destroy a potential Martian ecosystem before we have the technology to detect it. The question isn't what we currently are aware of, it's whether we might be losing a one-of-a-kind resource that we're completely unaware of.

If there's life on Mars of any kind, that's extremely profound. It would give us a chance to study life on another planet and compare it to our own. It may be that there's no ecosystem on Mars, but it's probably worth it to make absolutely sure that that's the case before we go destroying what might be there.

It may be that we won't have the opportunity to screw Mars up for decades, or centuries. But it'd probably be a good thing if we'd give it some serious thought as a species first.

Birdo is even trans!

Yeah. We probably should.

Changing our behaviors isn't a binary, though. It takes effort. Sometimes it takes changing the world around us first to accommodate new behaviors, or waiting for the right opportunity. And given all the other things we should also be changing, prioritizing matters.

Finding a Lemmy alternative is somewhere on that list. Is it anywhere remotely near the top? No. There are a great many other things to do. It's probably closer to the top of alyzaya or Chris's lists than mine; close enough, it seems, to be carried out even.

But it isn't about trying to figure out who's a shit and point fingers at them while loudly demonstrating non-shit behaviors. If we actually want to make the world better, we need to figure out how to work together rather than just glue everything in place.

People are so defensive about being wrong. And why wouldn't they be? Whether you look at how things are set up in school or the cruelty and corruption of the prison system, or the poverty-reinforcing measures set about in our banking and credit rating systems, the elements that we need to grow past push this tendency to categorize people and sort of socially compartmentalize their various experiences.

End up in the right categories and you don't really have to worry. Companies will throw free cellphones at you just for breathing. End up in the wrong categories, and you're going to have to struggle against a system that's built to keep you from getting back up.

We can spend eternity playing with the categories, moving around between them or building or diminishing their relative social power. We can change the criteria that we categorize people by, or try to keep them the same. But in the end we're not really going to make much forward progress until we let go of thinking we know the potential of every human being at a glance. We don't.

What we can do though is be patient, speak our minds honestly, set boundaries, allow others their own autonomy, and try to help ourselves and other humans open up and grow rather than close off and shrink.

In any case, the world is complex. It's silly to try to boil it down into absolutist binaries. It's also probably really bad for your cortisol levels.

People talk about forking open source projects as if you just push a button and it happens on its own. I mean, okay, that's the first step, but maintaining an repo is a whole thing. Saying 'well just fork it then' is only a viable solution if you have the the means, the time, and the inclination. It isn't really an exclusive alternative to criticism, but another, much narrower, potential additional path.

It would certainly be good if people would fork all the useful projects made by devs who are interested in promoting social conservatism masquerading as 'apolitical actions' that attempt to reinforce the existing status quo of power. I'm not sure how likely it is, though. Certainly less so than bringing criticism to the table.

Nothing about being a non-native English speaker requires you to stubbornly continue to use specific language. I have many non-native English speaking friends. Generally they actually want to know how their words are being taken, and will make corrections to be sure they're not saying the wrong thing.

You know, like, as one does when learning another language. I'm not going to insist on using English grammar rules while speaking Spanish and then just tell all the Spanish speakers to stop being so political at me when they correct me. That's nonsense.

Absolutely this. Twitter-level toxicity coming out in this thread from outside instances is already a bad indicator of the kind of communities that are peripheral to open source.

I mean, the whole point is kind of that the problem is getting defensive rather than making a change.

That's the root of a lot of these problems. People are intimidated by 'wokeness' because they think that caring about how they affect other people means that if they have the wrong idea they're irredeemable. Clearly that isn't compatible with continuing to feel alright about themselves, so they become defensive and double down. But the reality is, if they'd just like, quit it with the callousness and cruelty they'd be eliminating the problem to begin with.

Lack of acknowledgement of there being an issue becomes the primary motivator for making the issue worse.

It's like becoming a hoarder because you're too embarrassed to acknowledge what a mess your house is to clean it. Rather than pick the trash up off the floor, they shout about how clean their house really is and how deluded we all are for talking about the smell.

Y'all just don't even bother moving your eyes over the text before you post, do you?

It's almost like the philosophy behind a software matters to its long-term stability. Like, as if devs might find reasons to, I don't know, reject PRs, ignore bugs, and trash their users when they come to them for help.

Weird that the content of someone's mind might affect their actions or be an indicator of what level of trust they should be extended!

Who cares? It's run by reactionary incels, transphobes, and racists. https://cmdr-nova.online/2024/07/03/serenityos-and-ladybird/

This just makes me think of eBaum's world.