Christine Lemmer-Webber @cwebber@octodon.social

Criticism, and work stemming from critical thinking is important. But self righteous poke-in-the-eyes types are a dime a dozen.

Learn to distinguish between criticisms to build up society vs criticisms to build the speaker up. And don't let them kill your constructive energy.

Anti-abuse tools which rely on centralized, wholesale surveillance, particularly when such a mechanism is the primary revenue model of that centralized system, can only get more and more abusive to users over time.

You can support my work on advancing decentralized social networks at "FOSS & Crafts Studios": https://www.patreon.com/fossandcrafts

A post explaining the rename: https://www.patreon.com/posts/same-projects-53920782

It's still covering the same work I've been doing on decentralized social networks, but also is expanded a bit. It's a bit more obviously connected to the @fossandcrafts podcast, but also @mlemweb and I have various projects to advance FOSS & free culture we'd like to explore... so your support advances all of that!

present is a function that consumes a stream of future and outputs a stream of past

unfortunately most of us are stuck with the imperative implementation

privacy is your local scope where you perform your local reasoning

maybe people who don't think privacy is important are okay with programming by only mutating global variables

the safest way to use computers is still abstinence

#introductions

Hi! You may most likely know me as co-editor of ActivityPub, the decentralized social network message which is more-than-likely how you're actually receiving this message! https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/

Other things you may want to know:

- I'm a user freedom activist (free software, free culture)
- I post a lot of leftie politics stuff
- Expect lots of tech posts around lisp, decentralized network stuff, obscure-ish programming history

pack it up pack it in
let us begin (to get on our way to the airport)

"Only make bets where if you lose, civilization has already collapsed, that way you don't have to pay it back" -- Kate Sills

A while ago I wrote up "What is a blockchain, really?" because I was seeing people talking past each other because they had different definitions: https://dustycloud.org/blog/what-is-a-blockchain-really/

Many expansions in there, but my favorite is still "Blockchain is to Bitcoin what Roguelike is to Rogue"

people read me pretty well visually and I gotta work on my voice I know I know but I'm sooooooo sick of getting sir'ed when I'm on the phone :\

down with unnecessary gendering in language tbqh, lojban's approach to pronouns everywhere

That said, the hardest part right now is getting enough resources so that I can get more help to get the work done that we have outlined. Unfortunately that does seem to involve pumping your own image.

I'm not good at that so I just learn into being excited about my work...

I'm not really interested in being a "famous person", I'm interested in getting things done. So being well respected amongst people who also get things done is a good state to be in.

This might, in the retrospect of my life, be a very socially easy time for me (despite my anxieties).

The people I want to collaborate with most seem to take me seriously enough these days (even if I'm seen as a bit eccentric), but I'm not very well known outside that circle.

flying back today... time to get ready to head to the airport...

"why have there been people talking and some sort of washing machine running in the room above me for HOURS with a constant and consecutive spattering of showering oh wait oh ahhhh okayyy"

pretty sure the people in the room above me in this hotel were having an orgy and honestly good for them if they were having fun but that's a very hard thing to sleep through

In the meanwhile, I think I'm going to try to make good on the pile of books and papers I brought with me and do some research or implementation to put myself in a better mood.

"How are you doing?"
"I've been better. Today has been hard, even though so much else has been good lately."
"Don't give up hope. Tomorrow will probably be better."
"Thank you."

Me and Kate Sills hanging out.

Kate is a really smart and wonderful professional collaborator, but even more so one of my favorite people. This trip, and even this year, was made so much better by being friends. Thanks Kate <3

conference over, sleepy as fucc

Criticism, and work stemming from critical thinking is important. But self righteous poke-in-the-eyes types are a dime a dozen.

Learn to distinguish between criticisms to build up society vs criticisms to build the speaker up. And don't let them kill your constructive energy.

Twitter implemented a "Right to Be Forgotten" type system and it's being, of course, heavily weaponized by right wing trolls especially https://twitter.com/drewharwell/status/1466531439801946113

For years I've had debates with fellow lefties where they were demanding this very system (including on the fediverse) and I would say "it's not going to work out the way you want..."

Design game rules that consider play when it isn't your turn at the table.

Become *architects of emergent topology*.