To the best of my knowledge, the convention is based on history. In previous decades, neo-pronouns like xe were proposed to serve as gender-neutral alternatives to he and she, and since they were new coinages, they didn't have commonly known objective and possessive forms, so all three forms where listed.

The pattern was so established that it carried over to he, she and they even though their declined forms are commonly known.

I don't find automatic reposts ideal when I subscribe to communities, especially since there's an RSS feed so people can rely on that to receive updates.

I find it more worthwhile if another user shares a post intentionally, because they believe that particular post is relevant.

Why was there this law in the first place?

In Europe at least, it was often explained as "same-sex marriage and parenthood are not allowed, and a legal gender change cannot be a loophole to that". But it appears to be a post-hoc rationalisation since the forced sterilisation programmes have many more targets in the past until it was progressively abandoned for more and more groups. It was also becoming untenable since more and more countries were legalising same-sex parenthood.

So, if we are being more honest, it's eugenics.

Let's not overstate Duolingo's effectiveness for language learning.

The technological challenge to adopting a self-taught language learning method into an app is rather small. You just need the content. Either you develop the course under a Free Culture license, or you purchase the rights for an existing method and you port it. Plus maybe some volunteers to handle user-interaction.

A good example is the VHS Lernportal which implements three levels of German class in a way that actually has some pedagogical merit. It's killer-feature is nothing technological, but that they have some teachers in the backoffice that will read your occasional text-production exercises and offer corrections (no, language tool wouldn't be able to replace humans in that case, because language tool doesn't know what you are trying to say and therefore gives you multiple guesses but no way to know which one you actually need).

It's quite shitty that despite all the heart-warming stories and potential to make folks feel less alone, my first thought was how this self-disclosure on a map can endanger said people.

EDIT: I already found a pin in the city near where I grew up that I'm pretty confident I know who wrote.

EDIT2: If I was creating this website, I would try to think of ways to use coarser locations or maybe display local stories in a way that is disconnected from the dropped pins.

Homophobia was so widespread in the ambient environment for my entire life, so it's not easy to say. The earliest incident that I specifically remember which fits the textbook definition was during a high-school Physics class, were a teacher known to go on about her personal views on anything all the time once, and one day homophobia was on the menu.

The reason it didn't stink as much as other incidents was that a group of kids that recently found out I was gay immediately started challenging her (with very naive arguments, but their heart was in the right place).

This will sound very pessimistic, but I think what you are witnessing is a more accentuated version of reality.

It's more intense for a number of reasons (it takes less dedication to spread hate online, these communities are small so moderation isn't as effective, the userbase is small so a few users make a bigger splash, communities of this technical nature have a historical lineage that selects for a certain strain of uncritical laissez-faire individualism, etc), but they are nothing that is totally alien to the rest of a given society.

Reality won't let us catch a break, we are forced to actively maintain the good stuff at any given moment.

I'm inclined to agree with you. For me personally, at-home delivery is a new thing completely, let alone same-day. Where I came from, that's still not the norm, we would just go to the post-office to pick up our items.

After some initial interest in at-home delivery when I moved to Europe, I realised that I now find it much more comfortable to redirect my parcels to a Packstation and pick them up on my own schedule.

Thunderbird's Calendar supports local, off-line calendars and tasks.

It's the best FOSS calendar I have used, even if it has its rough edges.

https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/68004.html

Garrett's post makes a great point in only a handful of lines. Strongly recommended reading for anyone who organises a community of any kind.

What I have to give to XMPP is that it's one of the easiest federated services to self-host. Running Prosody is super simple.

Did I miss the line in the linked article where it says that one or more of the affected families actually previously supported the extreme-right government, or is your meme simply totally misplaced?

My question is this. What could your manager do to better support you at work?

This one is something that my manager thankfully understands and is very supportive of: many of us, because our sexuality and/or gender identity were not accepted growing up, became adults who need to come to terms with stuff through regular therapy sessions.

This means: flexible options to take time off and attend such appointments, even on a weekly basis. Ideally, you understand that what is more valuable to the company is me doing my job (rather than clocking a certain number of hours) and for that my good mental health is a productivity boost and so you don't even ask me to make up the time.

Second best is that you allow me to flexibly make up for that time later during the week.

Another thing that would be nice, especially in the context of tech, is that any queer group in the company is not just there either for networking (which is fine) or for being used for promotional material exploitation (which isn't fine), but you also make us part of product design when relevant.

I have been very disappointed that Fedora stopped making changelogs accessible for years. It used to be that you could easily toggle them on in Yum, but with DNF it's always "no info found".

Okay, that sounds like it hits the spot. I'll read up on them. Happy to hear testimonials for existing users.

Although I never used it, I am aware that Calibre can serve books in your local network. I imagine that this offers some position and annotation sync.

Also, a bit off-topic for this sub, but… how do you read? E-readers? Tablets? Software choices?

Unfortunately, there was never great ebook hardware. I use a tablet with Android. KOReader for ePub, constantly trying new Android PDF readers but finding nothing decent.

While not intentionally, running Syncthing between all my computers means that my PDF annotations get synced across devices. ePub ones do not; afaik KOReader uses its own metadata format that it stores as a standalone file.

Before, when I was still in university, I used Zotero also for annotation management. Feels like an overkill nowadays since I only read for leisure.

Very much on point, and this is where the age-old tension between "a duty to come out" versus "a right to choose if and when" remains still relevant.

I do not want to take the position that there is such a duty, but I have to admit that I'm uneasy that our 2010s-present queer media does not even acknowledge the tension.

Are they asking for money

The text ends with an appeal to donate to KDE's fund-raiser, so they are asking for money.

Whether that makes it an advertisement and/or whether all advertisements are undesirable on a link-sharing board are independent questions. Personally, even if this is an advertisement by some reasonable definition, I did find it helpful enough and KDE got one conversion out of me because I downloaded one of their apps.

Please note that the question is not whether delivery vans can be replaced by cargo bikes. In most situations, the answer is clearly yes, no doubt.

It's about whether cargo bike-based delivery can guarantee the same level of service that customers expect now from delivery vans, or that, indeed as the Dutch politician warns, people will have to accept that same-day delivery can no longer be promised.

The article reads so generically, as if it's soul it isn't there and it's only forced to talk about this issue but it rather it didn't.

But the issue is existentially important. Seems like I'm not ready to write in which ways, but definitely it's not so clinical and buzzword-heavy like the article presents it.

Truly an xkcd #1172 situation.

income-proportional fee structure for government services?

This is income tax.

It might not be a solution for everyone, but you can self host a git repository on your static site!

I like the concept and the aesthetics, but I guess you still need to run a git server?

I dunno, I'm still not comfortable with with linking human queerness with biologism and the natural argument. Other animals also regularly do unsavoury things and those urges might still exist in our biological programming but we have reasoned our way of them them.

I don't want to accidentally make strange bedfellows with other groups who point at animal behaviours to justify their problematic shit. Such studies on animal sexuality should stay a matter of science, the queer movement should not take them on as political arguments.

undefined> It feels like guilt by association. The actual cause is the behaviour of specific, individual users but the repercussions are equally felt by other users from the same instance.

That's why I always thought that the ideal scenario for federated web is to have instances that are either single-user or are down to friends-of-friends level of members (say, under 100 users per instance), so that there can be social accountability and if you have a bad actor on your instance, then it's easy to kick them out and preserve your reputation. Bad actors will concentrate on their own instances and they can be defederated without collateral damage.

So, if Beehaw's registration model is invite-only (that's what I gather from this thread), then I think they probably have the right approach to federation; they are vouching for their users and they are responsible for making sure that they won't be damaging communities across the federation.

Incidentally, an argument you hear in Cyprus (which has a similar urban planning and car-dependency issues as the US but an extremely smaller scale) is that Cyprus is too small to be designed in an urbanist way.

Now, full disclosure, I kinda agree with that in a very specific way: there's a strategy, when talking about public transport in Cyprus, to pretend like the problem is the specific mode of transport. When Cyprus got buses, people boycotted them because "the bus-stops have no shade, no wifi, and anyway trams would be better". Maybe sensible on the face of it, but then when a tram feasibility study found weak support for tram and the bus infrastructure including the bus stops began tangibly improving, the tune changed: "trams are too slow, we need a subway in the major cities". They keep moving to goal post further and further into unnecessary infrastructure (some going even as fast as saying that Cyprus needs high-speed rail, which is ludicrous) so that they justify keeping the place car-exclusive.

In that specific way, I do agree that a country can be too small for some modes of transport. I don't think Cyprus needs more than buses and a few tram lines. Anything else is excuses to avoid doing anything at all.

Now, the USA is clearly big enough for high-speed rail and it has many cities that can support a subway system.

At the face of it, it seems plausible to me that cargo bikes do not offer the capacity needed to guarantee same-day delivery to all of those who currently use such services.

I'm going to take "favourite" at face value, i.e. that I actually like, not just that I am forced to use because the alternative doesn't exist (e.g. my bank's app or the post-office's app) or isn't viable (PDF editors on Android).

Libby, the lending library app. I could avoid it and stick to physical media and piracy, but it's a well-designed app with a decent catalogue and given that it's a library and not me purchasing DRMed files, I found the ethical proposition there tolerable.

I can give it a shot, certainly. One of the main contributors behind it is in my RSS reader so there's some name recognition there. Future pricing is not final though, so I can't budget for it before committing.

I basically take the position "you need a different, non-confusing term". Open Code is not such a term.

My view is shaped from the cultural realm more so than the software side, but I think the concern at the centre of it is transferable: it becomes extremely messy to capture the desired acceptable uses in the legal wording of an enforceable license. The outcome is that every use will have to be individually authorised.

I was helping run and occasionally held the editor role of a leftist magazine which we decided to make Free Culture under CC-BY-SA. Content using the Non Commercial clause gave us such headache, while even though we did not charge for the magazine nor we ran adverts, we accepted and strongly encouraged donations from our readers. That money went to pay off the printing costs (the NC clause already has a problem with that, but we assumed that would still be defensible), but the rest was also invested in other endeavours like public events, or eventually helping fund a community centre.

At that point, it didn't matter if creators with NC works released them under a supposedly free license. Our -in our opinion- non-for-profit use was still so tainted with money changing hands, that we still needed to seek their consent and get a written permission on top of the original license. At the end of the day, it was the same as working with All Rights Reserved works, where we get a special license from a sympathetic creator. The NC clause solved nothing for us.

That part is, I believe, the same with software licenses. We will end up having to get 1:1 license agreements for so many things because the new anti-commercial licenses will not be able to predict all the scenarios which are "false positives" for the anti-capitalist software developer (as in, some desirable re-uses will be blocked by the license, and individual licensing agreements will be needed often).

My focus would be to fix the loopholes that go counter to the copyleft spirit in AGPL, if such loopholes are identified, and perhaps get a more reliable organisation handle the AGPL definition in the future.

Why would Cyprus need a high-speed metro, when over-ground light rail and electric buses can offer all the benefits (the distances are tiny) for a fraction of the cost and other regulatory hurdles (one of the biggest ones being the archaeological sites protections law that has enormously delayed countless underground projects before).

Do you really want to have less rail than Mallorca.

I want things that are fit for purpose, even if they are not flashy.

The KDE Itinerary's platform layout maps are a good sell. I'll try it next to DB Navigator on my next trip. KDE Apps on Android are a bit unstable, at least on my phone, but at least now they load. Last time I tried I could barely get them to even do that.

Greenshot (GPLv3) is a powerful screenshot tool with its own basic image editor.

I gave Jami a very extensive go with family, and sadly it didn't deliver a usable experience if your device is a mobile one or the network is not a fixed, high-speed connection.

There’s no requirement for metros to be above ground, or for that matter not use overhead lines.

If we are talking an above-ground metro with overhead lines, that's what I know as tram/light-rail. So, we are talking about the same thing with different words. My objection is to anything either underground or highspeed as frivolous requirements that serve to stop the project altogether (anything over 120 km/h, let's say).

Inside the cities it’s probably a good idea to bury them

This will be how the project dies. The societal majority that you will have to build to approve of such an investment in public transport is also the societal majority that would be against choosing to bore through antiquities (if you respect the antiquities protection law as it stands, you will be stalled for multiple decades). The cost is also unbearable to begin with - the EU is not willing to fund any ambitious projects in Cyprus until bus usage cements itself.

It's far more realistic to convert existing bus lanes into dedicated tramways intra-city, take over some car lanes for exclusive use in other roads, and share the road where needed. Should you wish to connect cities by rail rather than bus, you can expropriate land along highways for inter-city service and go for the tram-train model.

Making perfect the enemy of good in public transportation planning in Cyprus made one thing certain: the number of car trips as a percentage of all trips has not decreased in any noticeable amount.

You seem to he framing it as, “scientists went to nature to find out how humans should act,” and in my view you are missing quite a lot. I could be wrong, open to hearing more.

What is important, imho, is what I wrote in my top-level comment: I don't want to find myself in the same camp as other groups who make "nature" arguments (like "evolutionary psychologists"). If I accept their premise, I will have to accept their conclusions too -otherwise I'd have to be cherry-picking naturalist arguments only when they are politically expedient for me.

So to me, this argument is a retort against lazy, commonly used, longstanding, nonsense arguments.

I believe that this argument is best countered by saying that "regardless of what you think is natural or not, a person has the right to do what they want to do so long as their actions do not violate the freedoms and integrity of others". That's a moral value you can reason yourself into and you can be consistent about.

Oh! Good point. That's the case for my local libraries too - I took it for granted but I shouldn't have.

Why not just hop on twitter and search #seattlepride ? There’s probably (maybe?) tons of businesses who partook in that circus and hashtagged all about it…

I didn't have any reason to think that that city's pride month is particularly relevant to my question to go search it in advance.

Besides making people feel recognized and accepted, what do you think corporations should be spending their money on that would make potential customers feel better about themselves?

Before I asked my question, I was thinking if two things:

1. Companies, where relevant, can let us know what policies they enacted that make them stand out. E.g. maybe they are an employer that will give parental leave even to families not recognised by the law in that jurisdiction, or that they just finished an internal project that saw or their internal and external documents to stop collecting gender information where it's not justified and where it is justified, that they do it in an inclusive way.

2. They do something to mitigate anti-queer hatred in their area of operations that has an action plan backing it up. For example, where I live, there's this Emergency Entrance programme where companies can enrol and display a sticker identifying them as refuges for people targeted by right-wing extremists. It looks like just marketing too, but it actually comes with an action plan that those participating are supposed to implement which adds a more tangible layer to the display of symbols to show support. (EDIT: The idea is, if you are being harassed or attacked, participating venues will offer you shelter, they will jump in to de-escalate, and contact emergency services and the right-wing violence registry to handle the incident)

I live in Berlin, and the 10 Euro I pay yearly for my membership to the Association of Berlin Public Libraries (around a hundred bigger and smaller municipal libraries participate) is the absolute best value for money ever in my life.

I am a huge fan of the community centre approach they have adapted, as well as their branching out to other kinds of media beyond the printed book. Academic/research libraries also have their place, but for the local community, the modern community-oriented library is such a benefit multiplier.

Over last winter, especially under the expectation that heating would have been a bigger concern due to the invasion, they were also preparing to ask as cold shelters too, with expanded opening hours and café-like events for people looking for a heated space to spend their day in (we were lucky to have an extremely mild winter in the end). Now that the opening hours are back to the usual though, you do feel their limits, there's not enough staff to keep them open way beyond typical office hours.

For me, the dense network of libraries in my city is also often my floating workspace. If I need to carry out an errand in the other end of the city during my lunch break, I don't have to spend double the time to also commute back (and commutes inside Berlin can easily reach 1 hour each way). Go sit at the nearest public library, work from there.

Oh, that's a great idea. The whole concept of immutable OSes passed me by - I've read the terms before at some point, but I have no idea how they work and which problems they solve. Definitely ideal candidates for my experiment.