J.C. Denton

Do you have a single fact to back that up?

[J.C. Denton @w00d]

@cherrysinceri @culturedgrug69 WHITE WHALE

HOLY GRAIL

[J.C. Denton @w00d]

@AuronMacintyre GM

[J.C. Denton @w00d]

@stonetoss Did we really need science to confirm this?

[J.C. Denton @w00d]

@SigBisley @AuronMacintyre Tremendous band.

[J.C. Denton @w00d]

@AuronMacintyre GM

[J.C. Denton @w00d]

@disclosetv So a metal detector then? Hell yeah 🤘

[J.C. Denton @w00d]

@AuronMacintyre GM

[J.C. Denton @w00d]

@AuronMacintyre GM

[J.C. Denton @w00d]

@AuronMacintyre GM

[J.C. Denton @w00d]

@AuronMacintyre GM

[J.C. Denton @w00d]

@AuronMacintyre GM

[Helen Andrews @herandrews]

My sister was born with profound disabilities, a lot more severe than Down’s. She was non-verbal all her life. I don’t think she could even recognize our mother when she walked into a room.

Growing up around the special ed system, I was taught the standard line on children with disabilities: we should cherish their special qualities, the purity of their happiness and the innocence of their love. There is nothing wrong with them, they’re just different.

I repeated this line for years, but eventually I started to wonder if I believed any of it.

When my sister died at age 26, I figured it was time to look back over her life in full. Did she make anyone’s life better? To be blunt, I could not think of any way that she did. How could she, when she didn’t have the capacity to act in any meaningful sense.

On the other side of the ledger, she made a lot of people’s lives worse. Another member of our family was in and out of institutions for years later in life, and part of me thinks the strain of caring for my sister was too much for this person and drove them mad.

Of course people loved my sister. My parents did. But people can project love onto lots of things, the way pet owners project love onto their cats or a stalker projects love onto a celebrity. If the object of your love doesn’t know you exist and never will, is it even real? Try to answer honestly even though it’s a difficult thing to ask about a member of your own family.

I’m not trying to make a case for selective abortion. Once a life exists, we have duties toward it that can’t be shrugged off for utilitarian reasons. I just wanted to counterbalance the rosy picture being put out there.

My sister was an extreme case. Other disabled people can talk, recognize faces, and form relationships, which I assume makes things different for their families.

My only message is: It’s hard. It’s really hard. The best thing my sister did in her life was give the people around her the opportunity to show their best selves. But the reason she was able to do that was because it’s really hard.

[J.C. Denton @w00d]

@AuronMacintyre GM

[J.C. Denton @w00d]

@AuronMacintyre GM

[J.C. Denton @w00d]

@AuronMacintyre GM

[Eric S. Raymond @esrtweet]

Recent algorithm changes on X may be unfairly hammering Brave users. And there's a larger issue here about bad interactions between robots and privacy measures.

@nikitabier @brave

My friend Jay Maynard, who some of you may know as Tron Guy, just got permabanned off X for "inauthentic behavior". His appeal was swiftly denied.

Jay is not a spammer, scammer or engagement farmer; he is, in fact, exactly the kind of good citizen X says it wants. Jay asked Gemini for analysis, and now thinks he knows what happened.

Brave, as a privacy measure, randomly changes the identity presented to sites in order to avoid tracking by the ad vampires. Gemini suggested that some code at X interpreted this as spammy behavior using multiple browsers. If so - and this does seem plausible - everybody trying to protect their privacy with Brave is at risk.

This is a general problem, not just an X glitch or a Brave issue. Social media sites are increasingly relying for security on forms of heuristic AI that are prone to unacceptably high false-positive rates.

More specifically, platforms are increasingly treating a user's refusal to be tracked, fingerprinted, and categorized as a hostile act. When a site makes it impossible to connect via a privacy-focused user agent without getting flagged as a malicious bot, it stops being "security" and effectively becomes a retaliatory lockout for protecting oneself.

Worse yet, such system architecture provides no circuit breaker - humans are only rarely and exceptionally asked review for errors. Jay's appeal denial came back so fast that it was obvious no meat-brain ever saw it. He has filed complaints within the Minnesota Attorney General and the Better Business Bureau, because what else can he do? The robots have locked him out.

Badly designed robots and zeal to squeeze human oversight out of the system forces regular citizens to rely on state law enforcement or consumer protection bureaus.

Allow me to gently suggest to the people running X that unless you want politicians poking their noses into your business and imposing constraints on you that you are not going to like, you need to fix your security and appeal processes so running to the law isn't necessary.

[J.C. Denton @w00d]

@AuronMacintyre GM

[J.C. Denton @w00d]

@CassandraRules Public humiliation fetish.

[J.C. Denton @w00d]

@AuronMacintyre GM

[J.C. Denton @w00d]

@JVMonte2 Anything sung by Brann Dailor of Mastodon, but particularly this one.