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  @SnoopJ The construction has also been used by bigots to specifically imply that "they're not _actually_ their pronouns, but they're the ones they _prefer_" Like, it became a dog whistle for "trans people are crazy, don't ya know" and a lot of the anger is in response to that.

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  TIL duckduckgo's noai version doesn't share the block list with the normal version. What the fuck.

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  So money is. . . not good right now. I technically have a patreon but it is zero rewards and mostly aimed at funding ppb work. I'd much rather offer my skill set for folks who have more money than time for weird custom work. Various skill sets: * python generally * css editing/fixing * web design (see piper.thunstrom.dev and teahouse.cafe for previous work) * javascript/typescript (mostly with react) * tech writing * creative non-fiction (A girl can hope) * general editing of English wor...

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  Fuck, I need to do copyright screaming. Summary: * Copyright is an approximately good idea that was immediately captured by the worst kind of ghouls. * Creatives deserve the control and benefits of their works. * No one needs their entire lifetime + another entire lifetime. * Companies that enclose the commons for profit should be destroyed at the regulatory level.

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  Did you catch my #pycon2026 talk and want easy reference? https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1avi3bcWXrocIaofZhBGfR3q0BMw1eaSsQ4vJmAjw-MM/edit?usp=sharing Speed running 15 years of cool #css features and deep explanation of rulesets and the cascade.

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  Seriously, though, I'm learning a bunch by just, reading the specs, CSS is way cooler than I thought and I already liked the language.

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  https://news.gallup.com/opinion/methodology/709373/gallup-begins-research-synthetic-responses.aspx I'm not even sure how to express my feelings here. If you still think LLMs are a _net good_, you need to square with yourself fast. If you want to save any face, you need to start being very loud about the abuses of power and principle at the heart of this technology. And if you don't understand why Gallup deciding to use the bullshit machine to make up statistics is the beating...

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  My college degree was in information systems, and a couple of my cs courses talked about the previous iterations of the no code, no engineers, just business men with their ideas cycles, and let me tell you, living through the latest one, I get why my professors talked so poorly of the silver bullets. UML and expert systems were both taught as systems to make non-programmers effective at building information systems. In a course in 2011/2012 talked about how both failed to live up to their promi...

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  Has anyone been reaching a point where if you're reading something and a full screen modal pops up with a call to action you just. . . close the article as often as press through it? Because I'm noticing this behavior in myself. Goes up if it's a tab I opened to read "later" and when I check "later" all I see is a modal? Yeah, it's gone.

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  Today I learned about vb/vi units in CSS. They're the viewport percentage units (vh/vw) but combined with the logical directions block and inline. So if you're using a writing system that isn't left to right, top to bottom, the direction fit the writing system you're using. This is very neat. I might need to add a section to my PyCon talk that is "I just think it's neat" because there's so many features I do not have time to d...

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  Dykes "first pass" was making sure that exactly this works. Type hint your argument class with a Path and get the right behavior. My word counter's looks like this: ``` @dataclass class WordCounter: """ A simple markdown word counter. """ paths: Annotated[list[Path], "Paths to files to operate on."] debugging: Annotated[bool, "Show debugging output."] = False...

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  So I have started writing my CSS talk, and the first section I start drafting, I am double checking details and have to immediately change the prose because I learned something. Write tech talks. Learn even more about your technical special interest.

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  I have four different CSS specifications open right now.

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  Okay, because I want to say a thing in a talk, and I want to see if others agree before I say it: #IndieWeb types: Self hosting does not need to mean "hardware you own" and can include "hardware you rent". (EG Would a VPS count as self hosting?) Happy to hear reasoning for either side or both if you're landing in the middle. (To be clear: I will be saying this, but whether I say it without qualifiers will depend on if this is largely accepted.)

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  Did a few minutes of poking at my little markdown word counter, and the voice of @treyhunner came to me and got me to change the output print statement from: ``` print(f"Total: {sum(result.count for result in results)}\n\t{"\n\t".join(f"{fc.file}: {fc.count}" for fc in results)}") ``` to ``` print(f"Total: {sum(result.count for result in results)}", *(f"{fc.file}: {fc.count}" for fc in results), sep=&amp...

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  Okay, worst talk development problem: It's tight, it's missing some of the ancillary sections (intro, outro, a couple of interstitial jokes), but it's a full ten minutes short. Going to be adding detail. >.>

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  "Coders, we are not writers." Speak for yourself. I am, in fact, both, and I genuinely get the same professional and creative pride from both.

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  Advice for community managers: Use the Olivia Hill rule. It's surprisingly easy to enforce: Fascists get really upset and will talk to you about why the rule is bad. You then ban them. That's it, that's all the work it takes!

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  Honestly, at this point, my horror at the "The computers are totally thinking!" types is shifting. For a long time, I considered it mostly a mark of how gullible some folks are. But as the march of "progress" goes forward, I realize the horror is actually how small they imagine other people to be. To the sufficiently advanced booster, we're all just p-zombies.

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  Okay, never AI types, I've been a jetbrains user for a decade, but they've just made it abundantly clear that AI shit is their new focus. I need an IDE that is: * Bullet proof across a variety of OSes. * Supports Python as a first class citizen * Has no AI features at all (I'll accept "can be turned off" but prefer folks not catering to the same thing I'm leaving) * Not from an AI company. (VS Code is not going to fly.) Bonus points if it&amp...

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  Got good news: I'll be speaking on a main track at PyCon this year! The talk is: Fall in love with CSS It's a primer on the words we use to describe the language, the way the cascade works, and then showing off all my favorite modern features that make vanilla CSS my preference. If you're attending, see me there! If you're also a vanilla CSS weirdo like me, come chat here on fedi. Always happy to hear what features others find important.

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  Open to suggestions, but I'm looking to scratch a very particular itch. I like the basic gameplay loop of survival games and/or farming games. Collecting stuff, going home to build a base, leaving again with better gear, bigger bag, going further and further with time. I literally can not handle hunger mechanics and extremely dislike hard calendar and time management systems in these games. I stopped playing Minecraft with the update that made food go from healing to a management bar...