I think correcting them is reasonable. If they are an ally, they will take it in their stride, correcting themselves and moving on.

Additional context for this perspective: I am a cis woman who uses she/it pronouns. It makes me feel uncomfortable when people use they/them for me, because it evokes a gender anxiety in me, similar (but distinct from, obviously) to what a trans woman might feel if someone used they/them pronouns for her. I did “try on” they/them pronouns for a while, way back, and it made me feel deeply uncomfortable in a way that made it clear that they weren’t a good fit for me.

Whilst I agree that they/them is better than he/him in this context (and there may be instances where the situation doesn’t feel conducive to correcting someone), I also think that correct pronouns are correct pronouns, and incorrect ones are incorrect. Like, there is, in some sense, a clear binary here.

A lot of progressive folk tend to default to they/them pronouns for people they don’t know, and I have been very proud of myself lately for telling people that I use she/it pronouns, and politely correcting people if they get it wrong thereafter (I may stick to telling people she/her if I am in a less queer space). Given that I don’t regularly experience gender dysphoria, the little splashes of dysphoria I feel when people they/them me are fairly tolerable. However, I have found that when I do check people on using the correct pronouns for me, it feels very good. I think it comes down to agency (especially as I am a cis person who has thoroughly interrogated the question of “Am I a woman tho? Because if you’re not, that’s totally chill — you have options”, and concluded that I am, in fact, a woman. It makes it feel like more of a choice than if it was just foisted upon me against my will (I mean, it sort of was foisted upon me, but I put a load of stickers and spikes on my AGAB, and now it feels like mine)

Sorry, I don’t have useful suggestions, I’m just curious — what does stalled mean, and how does it happen? I made mead many moons ago and I don’t remember the term from back then, so I’m wondering if I just got lucky

You are delightful, and I really appreciate you, and this comment of yours. I didn’t know about this, but you’ve piqued my interest enough that I’m going to go read more about it now. It’s super cool!

On one of the BlueSky threads going over over the test code, one of the things they uncovered was some stuff running as root which in no world should be necessary. He may not have just prompted Claude to “convert test suite to python”, but there’s a lot there that seem like clear red flags in terms of AI slop code.

Which is no surprise, really, given that properly proof-reading AI code is often much more labour intensive than just writing the code oneself. It’s easy for things like this to slip through the cracks, even if you are trying to check the AI output

I once had a crow friend who would knock on my window if I was late coming out to give them their seeds. It was just the one crow that was bold enough to do this. Sometimes he’d do it way earlier than usual, and I am 100% confident that he wasn’t mistaken, just being a cheeky asshole and trying his luck. I miss that asshole bird.

I’m trying to persuade my partner to play it with me at the moment. He seems open to it, but experiences inertia around starting a new game.

A white supremacist who has a disproportionate amount of influence in the company

E-ink screen is easier on the eyes, and also helps the battery to last for way longer than a phone would. Some people also appreciate having the compartmentalisation of a separate device that’s just for reading — fewer distractions.

My phone is pretty heavy, and reading on it can hurt my hand after a while, especially as there isn’t an ergonomic way to turn pages (the app I use can have it so the volume buttons turn the page, but they’re not positioned well to do that).

“Like, the new textile mills may have been massively disruptive to people who had previously been skilled labor, but at least the efficiency gains meant that you could make a lot more cloth a lot faster. The affected workers bore the cost, but anyone could reap (some of) the benefits.”

Though with the textile mill thing, the quality of the cloth is much worse; I have a few historical reenactment friends who have been unable to find linen of the quality that even poor, working class people would have used (and Bernadette Banner has a recent YouTube video on the topic that my friends found validating and cathartic to see).

I’m not disagreeing with your point or anything — this is a bit of a tangent. I guess the point that I’m making is that textile mills did make everything worse, in terms of the availability of quality cloth, but this problem wasn’t noticed for a long time because the mills also made cloth cheaper for the average person. Whereas AI doesn’t even give us a benefit like this (which is why my comment is mostly irrelevant to your point and is just some bonus info because I’m a nerd)

“However, STEM folks tend to reassert the authority of science as an institution of capitalism and settler-colonialism by not recognizing that these are not “illnesses” or pathological conditions naturally. Yes, they are behaviours that we have no reason to believe are divergent or new from typical human life, and their status as pathological is conditional on the specific social and material conditions that are facilitated by this system.”

There’s a lot in this that I agree with, but in the past, I have been quite irked by people who take a hard line version of this stance, who say that I’m being ableist by referring to myself as disabled. Whilst the majority of things that being autistic and ADHD cause me to struggle with that are better understood as a function of our environment, there are plenty of ways in which I would consider to be independent of societal structure.

For instance, I struggle with sensory hypersensitivity, such that a bright sunny day, or loud sounds cause me physical pain, and also cause me to become fatigued quickly if exposed to them for a while. This sucks, and I think it would even in a society that was structured radically differently

Gosh, there are so many that I am struggling to retrieve one in particular. As someone with a long history of mental health problems (including chronic suicidality) and just generally shitty life circumstances, I can confidently say that I wouldn’t be alive now if not for the countless acts of kindness that I have been the recipient of. It’s led me to develop a personal policy of extending random kindness liberally, because I know from the recipient side that what might seem like a trivial act could literally save a person’s life.

It’s led to a nice reinforcing cycle, in which I have been inspired to extend kindness to people who needed it, even when I was feeling out of my depth or anxious. I don’t know if I’ll have saved any lives, but I am confident that there are a handful of times where my actions will have left a lasting impact on a stranger. That makes me feel more connected to people, and life in general, as well as making me more open to receiving help when I need it.

Edit: I do have one instance that comes to mind, though it definitely isn’t the best fit for the question — it just came to mind because writing my previous paragraph reminded me of it due to how this one small instance has shaped me so greatly.

Now I’m writing this out, it feels silly that this affected me so much, but basically when I was in 8th grade, when I was walking out from school, a cool girl in the year above me complimented me on my bright red trench coat I was wearing, saying that the colour really suited me. Although we ran in the same circles, I didn’t know her particularly well at all, so this really took me by surprise.

Additional (slightly cringe, but in a charming way, because I was a teenager) context is that my school had a school uniform, and because I wanted to be seen wearing this nice new coat I had, I had made specific effort to stuff my much more convenient blazer into my overfull school bag so that I could be seen wearing the coat on my way out from school (it was spring, so not super cold). Even by regular teenager standards, I was super insecure and desperate for validation, and receiving such a sincere and unexpected compliment gave me such a boost that the memory is seared into my brain.

The lasting effect on me is that whilst the vast, vast majority of my clothing is black, there are a few splashes of red to be seen, because of how I internalised that compliment. And every time someone compliments me when I’m wearing something red, I think of this girl whose name I can’t even remember, and I smile.

On top of this, I have become known amongst my friends as someone who is very good at giving compliments to people on their appearance, and who gives them freely, even to strangers. I developed this habit because of how impactful this super trivial compliment was on me when I was in an especially vulnerable place. And whenever I tell someone “I love your dress, that colour really suits you” or similar, I am reminded of how we all have the power to brighten another’s day, should we choose to

Based

Because the journals existed as massive, financially powerful entities. There were negotiations over open access arrangements a few years back which led to things like “gold open access”, which involves papers being free to read, but costing a heckton for the researcher’s in “Article Processing Charges”. This happened because the journals effectively argued that “even though we’re functionally useless in the modern day, and don’t even provide services like copyediting or typesetting support for researchers, you can’t just make research actually be fully open, because then we would no longer be able to be absurdly profitable. Won’t someone think of the profits?!”. And then their influence meant the open access agreements were half baked and insufficient.

However, there is a continuing movement that is pushing for actual open access — “Diamond Open Access” doesn’t charge either the researchers or the readers of papers. It’s still small, relatively, but it’s growing, especially in the global South or amongst independent researchers who can’t afford absurd Article Processing Charges. Profit driven journals have prestige on their side, but I reckon that Diamond Open Access will continue to grow as research funding becomes more scarce relative to the amount of research being done.

“The diamond model has been especially successful in Latin America-based journals (95% of OA journals[1]) following the emergence of large publicly supported platforms, such as SciELO and Redalyc. However, Diamond OA journals are under-represented in the major scholarly databases, such as Web of Science and Scopus. It is also noteworthy, that high-income countries “have the highest share of authorship in every domain and type of journal, except for diamond journals in the social sciences and humanities”.”

(Source: the linked Wikipedia page)

And what’s worse, when there were some big negotiations on open access a few years back, the agreements were wholly insufficient and still disproportionately enriched the journals at the expense of researchers; “Gold Open Access” journals will publish the research unpaywalled, so anyone can read them, but will charge absurd “article processing charges” that are often thousands of dollars, shutting out researchers with less financial means (such as those in the global South or independent researchers).

Fortunately there is a growing movement who gives a fuck about actual open access; Diamond Open Access research involves no fees to either the author or the reader. This is how it should be.

‘The diamond model has been especially successful in Latin America-based journals (95% of OA journals[1]) following the emergence of large publicly supported platforms, such as SciELO and Redalyc. However, Diamond OA journals are under-represented in the major scholarly databases, such as Web of Science and Scopus. It is also noteworthy, that high-income countries “have the highest share of authorship in every domain and type of journal, except for diamond journals in the social sciences and humanities”.’^[1]

The future is here, it’s just unevenly distributed

[1]: Source: the linked Wikipedia page

Whilst I always drew mine with a somewhat fuller figure, as someone who has done a heckton of hobbyist fashion design (which is to say that I sew clothes and costumes, and I’m shit at following patterns so I do stuff myself), I actually really like the stylised proportions used in fashion design.

At first, I started out drawing figures that were more anatomically correct, but I ended up switching to a more stylised design; it made it easier to think in the broad strokes that were helpful for the early concept design stage (for instance, figures a typically drawn 9-10 heads tall rather than a more realistic 7-10 heads). Although, like I said, I tended to draw mine with a bit more junk in the trunk (and the bust), the figures were still far more slight than I actually am. For instance, although I’m quite broad shouldered, I found that using a croquis (this is what they call the figure templates used — it’s French for “sketch”) with fairly narrow shoulders made it much easier to tell from the concept sketch whether the garment was going to include structured elements near the shoulders.

I did do sketches that were more anatomically realistic once I got further down the design pathway, and was beginning to think more about how to actually execute the ideas, but the stylised drawings were always the thing that made it easiest to see the overall idea I was going for.

Define robot.

I don’t think I am a robot, but the world often makes me feel like I am (it’s the 'tism)

Great explanation. I’m a biochemist who loves nerding out about this stuff (and practicing science communication), so I came into this thread prepared to explain more about this works. However, your comment has left me with nothing to do but to be appreciative of your excellent comment

I’m a queer cis woman who knew a lot about how HRT changes the body due to also being a nerdy biochemist, but even so, it blew me away to actually see how much stuff changes when I had a partner who started HRT when we were together.

It’s super interesting because some of the changes I’ve seen trans folk report are things that are rarely, if ever, documented in scientific literature. It’d be real cool if we lived in a world where we could lean more into the insight we can collectively build if trans people are more actively included in research.

I say “lean more into”, because there are researchers out there who recognise the epistemic power to be found in respecting and valuing trans people. For instance, one of my favourite bits of research of the last few years was this 2022 study which used tissue donated by trans men undergoing phalloplasty surgery to show that previous estimates for the number of nerve fibres in the human clitoris was a severe underestimate.

Part of why I love it so much is the picture of the lead author in the press release I linked above. Behold, Blair Peters M.D., who looks exactly like the kind of person I’d expect to be leading research like this (affectionate tone). When I saw this, I checked their academic page to see if they had pronouns listed, and indeed they do.

Talking about this study is a wee bit of a tangent to my main comment, but I included it because it always makes me smile, and I hoped it would make you, the reader of this comment, smile too.

Oooh, pretty! I especially like the red dress, and the outfit on the bottom right, they really suit you.

I also love anyone who wears black lipstick. Nothing strikes fear into the hearts of men like a bold lipstick, and black is the boldest one can be in this respect

Edit: I totally know the difference between left and right, and definitely didn’t get those mixed up

Props to you for taking your outrage and funnelling it into something productive. I’m a nightmare for saying “I’ll do it later”, which, of course, means I never will (though I’m getting better at not doing this).