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Like, suppose that one adopted the position that "There is no useful purpose served by trying to assign every single human the category Biologically Male or Biologically Female." Suppose that society adopted that position widely. Suppose that "sex" was dropped from all forms and databases, sports were either desegregated or if necessary segregated based on some measurable characteristic relevant to that specific sport (e.g. weight or strength), doctors would have to actually examine each patient's specific history around organs and hormones and so on before making medical decisions.

Suppose all of that, and answer this question:

What bad thing has happened because we assumed that a person's biological sex was not particularly important to anyone but them? What is the downside of society having done all those things that we imagined them doing in the first paragraph?

Nothing. No bad thing will have happened.

Which means it shouldn't be necessary to convince people that biological sex is not a binary (which, to be clear, is a true fact.) It should be necessary for people to have to defend the position that it must be treated like one.

You can tell if someone's actually pro intersex liberation by seeing their reaction to the phrase "abolish the sex binary" Yes I said sex. Like biological sex. It's not binary.

[rosstmcd]

That's where federation comes in. On Mastodon (and other services based on Activitypub), you can easily leave one server and go to another, and everyone you follow and everyone who follows you will move over to the new server.

The problem with this, though -- unless things have changed since the last time I was on a Mastodon server -- your account moves and your following/followers move but your content doesn't.

If you've been there a while and posted a lot of essays or art or whatever, and that content is what has drawn a lot of people to follow you, there is a substantial cost to moving to another server. Yes, you can download your own private archive of all that data, which is great for you, but it doesn't do your followers any good when they're looking for that great art piece you posted last month.

I have other issues with Mastodon/the Fediverse, but the fact that people keep touting the ease of moving your account while glossing over this crucial fact seems to verge on lying to potential users.

Bluesky and enshittification

NEXT WEEKEND (November 8-10), I'll be in TUCSON, AZ: I'm the GUEST OF HONOR at the TUSCON SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION.

I would like to use Bluesky. They've done a bunch of seriously interesting technical work on moderation and ranking that I truly admire, and I've got lots of friends there who really enjoy it.

But I'm not on Bluesky and I don't have any plans to join it anytime soon. I wrote about this in 2023: I will never again devote my energies to building up an audience on a platform whose management can sever my relationship to that audience at will:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/06/fool-me-twice-we-dont-get-fooled-again/

When a platform can hold the people you care about or rely upon hostage – when it can credibly threaten you with disconnection and exile – that platform can abuse you in lots of ways without losing your business. In other words, they can enshittify their service:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/#how-about-a-nice-game-of-chess

I appreciate that the CEO of Bluesky, Jay Graber, has evinced her sincere intention never to enshittify Bluesky and I believe she is totally sincere:

https://www.wired.com/story/bluesky-ceo-jay-graber-wont-enshittify-ads/

But here's the thing: all those other platforms, the ones where I unwisely allowed myself to get locked in, where today I find myself trapped by the professional, personal and political costs of leaving them, they were all started by people who swore they'd never sell out. I know those people, the old blogger mafia who started the CMSes, social media services, and publishing platforms where I find myself trapped. I considered they friends (I still consider most of them friends), and I knew them well enough to believe that they really cared about their users.

They did care about their users. They just cared about other stuff, too, and, when push came to shove, they chose the worsening of their services as the lesser of two evils.

Like: when your service is on the brink of being shut down by its investors, who demand that you compromise on privacy, or integrity, or quality, in some relatively small way, are you really going to stand on principle? What about all the users who won't be harmed by the compromise, but will have their communities and online lives shattered if you shut down the company? What about all the workers who trusted you, whose family finances will be critically imperilled if you don't compromise, just a little. What about the "ecosystem" partners who've bet on your service, building plug-ins, add-ons and services that make your product better? What about their employees and their employees' families?

Maybe you tell yourself, "If I do this, I'll live to fight another day. I can only make the service better for its users if the service still exists." Of course you tell yourself that.

I have watched virtually every service I relied on, gave my time and attention to, and trusted, go through this process. It happened with services run by people I knew well and thought highly of.

Enshittification can be thought of as the result of a lack of consequences. Whether you are tempted by greed or pressured by people who have lower ethics than you, the more it costs to compromise, the fewer compromises you'll make.

In other words, to resist enshittification, you have to impose switching costs on yourself.

That's where federation comes in. On Mastodon (and other services based on Activitypub), you can easily leave one server and go to another, and everyone you follow and everyone who follows you will move over to the new server. If the person who runs your server turns out to be imperfect in a way that you can't endure, you can find another server, spend five minutes moving your account over, and you're back up and running on the new server:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/04/pick-all-three/#agonism

Any system where users can leave without pain is a system whose owners have high switching costs and whose users have none. An owner who makes a bad call – like removing the block function say, or opting every user into AI training – will lose a lot of users. Not just those users who price these downgrades highly enough that they outweigh the costs of leaving the service. If leaving the service is free, then tormenting your users in this way will visit in swift and devastating pain upon you.

That not only helps you steer clear of rationalizing your way into a bad compromise: it also stops your investors and other people with leverage over you from pressuring you into taking actions that harm your users. These devils only sit on your shoulder, whispering temptations and threats, because they think that you can make things worse without spoiling their investment. They're not cruel, they're greedy. They will only insist on enshittification that they believe they can profit from. If they understand that forcing you to enshittify the service will send all your users packing and leave them with nothing, they will very likely not force you to wreck your service.

And of course, if they are so greedy that they force your hand anyway, then your users will be able to escape. Your service will be wrecked and you'll be broke, which sucks for you, but you're just one person and your pain is vastly outweighed by the relief for the millions of people who escape your service when it goes sour.

There's a name for this dynamic, from the world of behavioral economics. It's called a "Ulysses Pact." It's named for the ancient hacker Ulysses, who ignored the normal protocol for sailing through the sirens' sea. While normie sailors resisted the sirens' song by filling their ears with wax, Ulysses instead had himself lashed to the mast, so that he could hear the sirens' song, but could not be tempted into leaping into the sea, to be drowned by the sirens.

Whenever you take a measure during a moment of strength that guards against your own future self's weakness, you enter into a Ulysses Pact – think throwing away the Oreos when you start your diet.

There is no such thing as a person who is immune to rationalization or pressure. I'm certainly not. Anyone who believes that they will never be tempted is a danger to themselves and the people who rely on them. A belief you can never be tempted or coerced is like a belief that you can never be conned – it makes you more of a mark, not less.

Bluesky has many federated features that I find technically admirable. I only know the CEO there slightly, but I have nothing but good opinions of her. At least one of the board members there, Mike Masnick, is one of my oldest friends and comrades in the fights for user rights. We don't agree on everything, but I trust him implicitly and would happily give him the keys to my house if he needed a place to stay or even the password for my computer before I had major surgery.

But even the best boards can make bad calls. It was just a couple years ago that we had to picket to stop the board of ISOC – where I had several dear old friends and comrades – from selling control of every .ORG domain to a shadowy hedge-fund run by mustache-twirling evil billionaires:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/how-we-saved-org-2020-review

Bluesky lacks the one federated feature that is absolutely necessary for me to trust it: the ability to leave Bluesky and go to another host and continue to talk to the people I've entered into community with there. While there are many independently maintained servers that provide services to Bluesky and its users, there is only one Bluesky server. A federation of multiple servers, each a peer to the other, has been on Bluesky's roadmap for as long as I've been following it, but they haven't (yet) delivered it.

That was worrying when Bluesky was a scrappy, bootstrapped startup with a few million users. Now it has grown to over 13 million users, and it has taken on a large tranche of outside capital:

https://fediversereport.com/on-bluesky-and-enshittification/

Plenty of people have commented that now that a VC is holding Bluesky's purse-strings, enshittification will surely follow (doubly so because the VC is called "Blockchain Capital," which, at this point, might as well be "Grifty Scam Caveat Emptor Capital"). But I don't agree with this at all. It's not outside capital that leads to enshittification, it's leverage that enshittifies a service.

A VC that understands that they can force you to wreck your users' lives is always in danger of doing so. A VC who understands that doing this will make your service into an empty – and thus worthless – server is far less likely to do so (and if they do, at least your users can escape).

My publishing process is a lot of work and adding another service to it represents a huge amount of future labor:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/13/two-decades/#hfbd

But I would leap into Bluesky and gladly taken on all that extra work, every day – if I knew that I couldn't get trapped there.

I don't know why Bluesky hasn't added the federation systems that would enable freedom of exit to its service. Perhaps there are excellent technical reasons to prioritize rolling out the other systems they've created so far. Frankly, it doesn't matter. So long as Bluesky can be a trap, I won't let myself be tempted. My rule – I don't join a service that I can't leave without switching costs – is my Ulysses Pact, and it's keeping me safe from danger I've sailed into too many times before.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pacts/#tie-yourself-to-a-federated-mast

[rosstmcd]

When you are a classical musician and the public asks you to play Queen …

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My mom told me she remembered an episode of the original What's My Line show from the 50s - where panelists had to guess someone's job - where they were all completely stumped. The guy turned out to work as a chicken sexer.

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I'm just remembering the title of a blog post I saw once: "Your Bean Stew is Delicious, But You Can't Call it Chili."

this is currently a hot topic at my work so

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My mom had a cat that treated the house like a hunting preserve; she would bring mice and other small critters into the house and release them so that later, if it happened to be rainy or cold outside, she could still enjoy herself inside.

My mom found it somewhat less enjoyable.

Diesel brought a fucking bird into my house and LET IT GO IN THE KITCHEN

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"Oh," they would think, "with a name like Bubblegum Crisis I bet it's a lighthearted funny feel-good kind of story. Sounds like fun, I should check it out when I need something warm and fuzzy to lift my spirits."

While reorganising my media library I did a quick survey of word frequency in tabletop RPG titles (because I'm the sort of dweeb who thinks "hey, I should do word frequency analysis for no reason"), and while the results were largely unremarkable, it turns out I have like four different games whose titles contain the word "bubblegum".

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Is... is it possible they thought "Otter" meant "Other"?

Working on a dataset of roadkill reports. state agency personnel CANNOT spell

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I was once at a meeting where a rules change was being proposed that would require something to happen a fortnight after something else. (Context: USA.) This triggered a very long discussion about whether the word "fortnight" was archaic or not, and whether a reasonable average person could be expected to know what it meant.

Cleaning hairbrushes is so annoying. They have so many prongs on them. :(

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Jo Walton calls this "incluing," which is the process by which an author fills in the reader on the characters and background of the story. Pretty much every story has to do this to some extent -- if for nothing else than "Who are all these people?" -- but science fiction and fantasy stories often have to do a lot more of it.

And there are different ways of approaching it. One is the infodump, where the author pauses the story to explain what each new thing is. (Infodumps get a bad rap, but like most things they can be done well.) Another way is to include a character who is as ignorant as the reader, so the other characters can explain things to them. (A.k.a. why Doctor Who always has a companion.) A clumsier variation on this is what a group I used to be in called "As you know, Bob..." which is where one character lectures another on something that they would already know.

But a different approach -- and one I personally really enjoy when it's done well -- is when the explanations happen slowly and indirectly and organically as the story unfolds. This puts a lot of work on the reader, because you have to hold the setting in your head with a bunch of blank spaces and question marks while simultaneously following the plot and every time you get a little piece of background you have to fit it into its place. Do this wrong and it produces an opaque and confusing story; do it well and the reader gets a steady stream of little, "Oh, THAT'S what that meant" moments.

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I remember reading a post where someone said that their quirk was that it threw them out of the story if it wasn't theoretically possible that the narrative they were reading existed in-universe.

Like, the story didn't have to ever assert that it did exist, like the Red Book of Westmarch or something, it just had to be possible that it could. But if there was for instance a passage where the story described the thoughts of someone who then died alone, and nobody in-universe could possibly ever know what that character was thinking in those final moments, then that was right out.

The person did admit that this was just a personal thing of theirs, they didn't think it was a Rule For Good Literature or something. But it did limit the books they could enjoy somewhat.

wait do people read first person stories and think they're the ones in the story???

Saw people talking about not liking first person, which is fair, but their reasoning was like "I would not do that" and I don't understand that mindset.

First person stories are still about a character. A character making their own decisions. First person isn't about you???? At least I thought it wasn't. What am I missing? I've always seen first person as just a more in-depth look into a character's mind and stricter POV. Not as a reader stand-in.

[rosstmcd]

In pop culture vampires are usually created by being bitten by a vampire (and sometimes fed their blood), but in the old folklore the reasons were much more varied!

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The thing is, they must have gone for that deliberately because if they just shifted their reference location 3 meters in any direction they'd get a different set of words but would still be just as locatable.

Like, here are other options they had:

///visits.kicked.scarecrow

///overtime.drags.whimpered

///surveyors.grasp.laces

///snitch.rabble.intrigues

///recipient.parsnips.orbit

///incurs.indicated.supported

///toward.situates.proposals

///chaos.bravo.lyricism

Personally I would probably have gone for snitch-rabble-intrigues or chaos-bravo-lyricism, but there are plenty of good options there.

Just stayed somewhere whose what3words were a little awkward

[rosstmcd]

Experience from a large software company I used to work at: fitting text into available space is also an issue for UI elements. The challenge is that the developers work on the UI long before any of the translated strings are available -- that usually happens towards the end of the development cycle, after product managers have mostly stopped revising the wording on everything.

From a UI perspective, the main challenges are the amount of space the text will take up -- as Gallus notes, German is usually the long pole -- and also whether "special" characters (meaning any character that doesn't appear in English) will display correctly.

So the solution was that one build a week was "pseudo-localized." The build team had a bit of code that would run through every localizable string and add extra characters to make it about 20% longer and turn several characters into versions with diacritics and randomly insert some kanji or other characters. The result was still readable, sort of, if you squinted, to an English reader, but it would in fact highlight a number of UI bugs.

The fun part is that every time a new QA person joined the team, like clockwork, the first time they fired up a pseudo-loc build they would file a bug about all the text being mangled.

[rosstmcd]

I saw somebody be wrong on the internet and I didn’t respond (don’t want to get involved) and I’m being SO brave about it

[rosstmcd]

"Roll any number of dice, of any size, and concatenate the results together. Now compute the SHA256 hash of that string, and this lookup table will direct you to a unique atom in the universe. Your result is embedded in the nucleus of that atom.

"Errata: atom 4fb64ac623d5ad6714acc1cb4e60d8dc97b245f9da81010a996d8b4276a406e6 should read 'the duplicitous costermonger may encapsulate your portmanteau' rather than 'will.'"

For me there's no disappointment quite like cracking open a new indie tabletop RPG that claims to have lots of random lookup tables, and discovering that each individual table only has like six entries. Like, that's great if we're doing a one-time one-shot and only ever need to roll on any given table once, but where's the replay value?

[rosstmcd]

Once upon a time, a few years ago, I came to a stretch of road that was covered with water. I know that road, and I was like 95% sure it was only an inch or two deep.

And, ngl, the temptation was strong. But I thought about it for a couple of minutes, and then I backed up and went around the long way because I did not wish to be someone else's salutory instructional incident.

british summer is here.