Hatch of random thoughts and opinions.

You may also read {rants} for shorter and hoter takes.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

• Color Encoding is Ableism
• keyboard layout is a human-computer ABI
• Eurocentric Table Etiquette - keep it to yourself please.
• You browse the web, that makes you a google user? hell no!
• politics in open source projects
• Streaming and gifting culture (UNFINISHED)
• small-instance fedi pipedream

RELOCATED POST(s):

• on generative (art) AI is merged into the post reflections on generative AIs

# Color Encoding is Ableism

Important note: “normal people” in this context refers to people with functional eyesight and color vision, i.e. the “majority of people”. This does NOT imply that the opposite group of people are “abnormal” to the slightest.

Or let’s take it further: any format of presentation is ableism, if it can’t be translated into another without self-reference. Color encoding is such a format that only serves people with functional color vision.

Some argue: “hey, I can describe the colors for you if you can’t see them, there is a red circle on the left and a yellow triangle on the right!”.

For a color-blind or born-blind person, “the sky is blue” is useless context because it’s empirical – a person who has never seen colors has no concept of “color” and any descriptive text of color is self-reference.

Being color-blind myself, I’m not saying color encoding is a bad presentation. But the problem is, it’s often used in the wrong (spelt: “ableist”) way. For example

The following, however is a bad one:

Other painful things to work with (practically forgivable, but still painful)

• Color encoded twisted-pair-cable (e.g. + RJ45). The 25-pair color code is …. such an evil…
• Electronic color code (e.g. color-encoded resistors)
• Any instructional text that ask you to interact with xyz of certain colors.

Ok, I admit that color among other visual hints is important in certain fields and some certain tasks are unfit for visually-impaired people to perform. Maybe they (I) should not operate a chemistry lab. But I urge you not to generalize this limitation. If disabled people can’t understand your presentation, please try better accessibility techniques where applicable, instead of just blaming them for not understanding something that is obvious to you.

# keyboard layout is a human-computer ABI

What’t the role of a keyboard and its layout? Instead of speaking of Computer-Human Interface – or in a narrower sense, User Interface (UI) – I would borrow the term Application Binary Interface (ABI).

I’ve been wanting to switch to one of those “ergonomic” keyboard layout¹, because qwerty really sucks. It’s painful to use my pinky and ringfinger to those frequent letters and I often unconsciously shift my hand and use my stronger fingers (i.e. middle and index) for those letters, resulting in inefficiency. I tried Colemak² for a while. It’s really nice, but I have to give up the thought of switching a keyboard layout. Here are the reasons:

First the base assumption: 1) proficiency in one keyboard layout trades off mastery in another, if not fucking up both.

Typing on a keyboard is an essential part of my life and for work (i.e. writing code) I’ve developed a keyboard-centered and mouseless workflow. Spoken, it’s unacceptable to lose my skills in either typing or interacting with computers.

Portability - likewise for ABIs, portability is a big deal for keyboard layout. It’s not a good idea for people who frequently hop among devices (that are not always theirs) to use a non-qerty keyboard layout.

• you may need dedicated physical keyboard layout and inlays.
• otherwise you need virtual layout mapping.

And imagine having to use someone else’s computer for a while…. alas, it’s already extremely painful for me to use a system that doesn’t swap CAPSLOCK and ESC…

btw. Some quirky software read raw keyboard inputs instead of keys presented by libinput…

keyboard workflow and bindings
It’s not only about typing blocks of text, but also for control. One obvious problem is that switching keyboard layouts will break the many key mappings. Key mapping is a subtle blend of semantic flow and muscle memory.

This is especially true for vim. The reason why I love vim keys is the same reason I’m reluctant to switch a keyboard layout. For example to delete content of a parenthesis I use <ESC>di(: <ESC> goes to the Normal Mode, and delete inside “()”. On a Colemak keyboard these physical keys are mapped to su.

Now there are two solutions:

1. change the software setting (vim has such plugins to re-map the keybindings per keyboard layout). This means I’m still typing the same physical keys thus not breaking my muscle memory. The software sees a different input and map it back the old QWERTy one. While my muscle memory stays the same, this no longer make sense. I’m thinking about “I need to delete what’s inside of this ()” while I’m typing something totally unrelated! There, I’m typing in Colemak but still thinking in QWERTY. Also this require extra setups for virtually every single application that uses the keybindings. IMHO this is just hiding your head under the sands. Over time this will only adds up to the overheads, both mental and software.
2. Another solution is to actually use the new physical key position of di but this will break all of my muscle memory and this will be VERY painful. I’m still unwilling to make the leap of faith.

When you add another language - likewise for programming languages vs. OS ABIs!

I can’t even manage to type efficiently hopping between QERTY and QEWRTZ (german) layouts. I still make tons of mistakes when typing the umlaut öäü, not to mention the symbols. The need of switching between languages exponentially increase the difficulty!

If you have some ideas against above points I’m eager to know.

# Eurocentric Table Etiquette - keep it to yourself please.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdyyin_9izI
this is not a commentary on the quoted video; It’s simply to make clear what I’m talking about.

When talking about Etiquette in this context, please prefix it with “eurocentric”.

“you are a guest to our culture, you need to learn our ways”
If you were a guest to east Asia, are you willing to pick up a pair of chopsticks or are you gonna ask the waiter(-ess) for a set of cuttery? If not the former then you can properly shut your mouth.

there goes the saying:

Don not do unto others what you would not like others to do unto yourself.

# You browse the web, that makes you a google user? hell no!

Is it okay to call every single web user a google user? Then what about calling the whole ActivityPub-federated social network “Mastodon”?

“so what, I’m not offending you, I made factual yet purely technical mistake that hurts no one!”

Although dangerously similar, I’m not gonna strawman this misconception into the same offensive bigotry such as misgendering. Well I can’t argue that this is a ethical issue at all – it’s just about the software you use…. right? Why would someone take it so seriously as offense simply because people assume their choice of software?

For countless times I felt the urge to correct people who abuse the term “Mastodon” or whatever mastodonism such as “toot”. For those who still don’t know, ActivityPub is the protocol we communicate and federate our servers, like email; and Mastodon is one of the (and most dominant) implementations, such as gmail. It’s absurd to assume that every email user uses gmail, so is it to talk mastodonism with someone you don’t know on the Fediverse.

Yet I’m inclined to correct them because of the same argument: how can I take this kind of ignorance offsensive? Would I take offense if someone assume that I use thunderbird? Or that I use VSCode? Or Chrome? Do I really care about letting people know what software I use? (I use arch, btw.)

“Well, I just don’t know, every tells me this is mastodon….”

So here is the other side of the story: if I don’t correct your misconception, this mastodonism will become de-facto: Eugen will technically control the ecosystem, and as history shows that they often have their own ideas³.

If google decides to drop xyz W3C specs from or add whatever bullshits to their chromium or V8 engine, every web dev has to follow; If google search decides to unlist some results for their own interest, small business will die; If gmail decides to blacklist your email server, you’d better switch to a new one; If mastodon use bad specs (which they do) then all other implementations⁴ has to follow or they risk defederating with majority of the network. they are the fucking standards because 99% of the people use it;

So, it’s not about you hurting my feeling by calling me a “mastodon user” – I don’t really care to let you know what software I really use – it is that you are inadvertently empowering their monopoly⁵ and marginalizing other software, developers and communities.

Remove mastodonism from your fediverse posts, please.

# politics in open source projects

"I'm Finnish."

-- Linus Torvalds

In case you don’t know what happened, read {this lkml thread}. If the conversation is too convoluted for you, read {this blog by Peter Cai}. If you want to hear some more radical opinions on Sanctions, read {this blog by tusooa}

I hope we can at least agree that Linus calling out other community member as "Russian Trolls / Paid Actors" and using "I'm Finnish" to highlight his stance on Russia is ugly. Don’t get me wrong, on the ethical side I condemn Russian aggression and on the technical side I understand you have to comply with state laws.

I'm Finnish
Even with the community consensus that Russian invasion of Ukraine is to comdemn, this statement is still harmful. Vendatta should never be quoted to justify anything. If Japan were under sanction what about "I'm Chinese, so fuck the japs"?

Being a past victim may contribute to your stance, but doesn’t automatically set you on the moral highground. If we are to have a history lesson, what about Finnland {allying with the nazis}? What about your {Sweden heritage}? What about {Vietnam}, what about {Iraq}, what about {Nanjing} … and the fact that the community is already giving history lessons to each other in the mailing list. Do you really not see where this is going? If we are going to the bottom everyone will have a reason to hate someone else. This doesn’t help to build the present world a better place.

Does apoliticism help?

Very unluckily some communities hide their nasty deeds behind the "let's just write programms, we don't give a fuck about politics" flag ⁶. Bigotry is very political. If you have an apolitical claim then you should keep those bullshit to yourself in the first place.

"Okay, we are strictly apolitical, no one is allowed to say or do anything harmful, do only the code". And I’m afraid this won’t help either. We are already in an social establishment that unluckily discriminates certain people, such as women and LGBTQ groups. And unluckily the hating actors lurk in the community.

My pessimistic opinion is that being strictly apolitical doesn’t guarantee freedom.

1. projects like tor, shadowsocks, riseup, etc, are political in their nature, and they are necessary.
2. apoliticism doesn’t prevent bigotry and discrimination. For example a maintainer could deliberately ignore contributions or issues from a group they dislike in a passive aggressive way. And when such concern or allegation arises, this very “apolitical” claim can be used to defend the injustice: " <insert sarcastic tone> hey you are being political here, what do you mean we discriminate gay people? we don't care!"
3. who gets to define what’s political and what’s not?

Does CoC help?

Let’s be realistic, if there was such a thing as a well-established and well-observed CoC in the kernel community, Linus would have already banned from the project.

I do think a community reviewed and shepherded CoC would be the remedy for the shitty world we live in, that’s a utopia to dream of. There ARE many many peaceful communities where CoC is sacred, but I doubt whether this peace scales. Would linux project work out without a dictating tech lead like Linus? Would CoC still be sacred when tens of thousands people are involved? The Free Desktop org may have a good one, at least that’s my impression when they banned Hyprland.

But hey, who am I to care? I’m not even an active contributor in the open source world, let alone leading one; maybe I will be one in the future, but I’ll just stop writing here.

[update] since I talked about it privately with a friend, I have a few lines to add here. An everyone-observing-the-laws society is by no means an utopian. What laws enforce is not the goal, but a safe net when morality fails. CoCs may not be comparable to laws, but I would say this: We should go beyond the CoCs.

CoC doesn’t describe nor enforce what we dream of, a {welcoming, tolerant, respecting, friendly and diversified} community. As said it’s very possible that some actors excludes others in a CoC-conform manner, let alone that CoCs are never perfect. CoC and laws are on a “don’t do this (bad things)” basis, not a “please do this (good things)” basis. Alas, even a “don’t do evil things” rule is broken all the time!

And again, I can’t (fucking) imagine a community that protests a CoC. Shame on you, hyprland⁶. If you see CoC as political, you are not being apolitical, you just a <insert curse word> that don’t want to bear the consequence of your own harmful behaviour.

# Streaming and gifting culture (UNFINISHED)

This is my take on online streaming (aka. twitching); Before I start I need to make clear what I’m talking about.

• this is very specific to a certain type of audience where I belong (see below), and this is by all means a niche.
• this is very specific to the chatting category
• this is kinda specific to the VTubing category
• this is about streamers who do it for a living (spelt: for money), not those who do it for fun or as a hobby

what shows I like
In most cases I have one of those streams in the background while I work. For me it’s a mild background noise that somehow helps with my productivity. I don’t really care about what they do or say in the stream because I can’t focus on it anyways. I prefer those streamers with a natural, quite and calm voice, and (kinda importantly) a good taste in music.

my take on gifting
There were a several occasions I gifted (small) streamers, and got a ton of appreciations from the them; I don’t speak for all audience but I don’t like being so heavily thanked, and I definitely don’t want the host to take a intimate tone – I feel kinda triggered.

IMO the whole thing for me is not about me(the audience) being pronounced in that virtual reality, it’s a fair trade that I receive entertainment and you get paid. Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not saying the streamer shouldn’t appreciate the gifts. There is an importance difference between the two audience mindsets:

I gift the streamer because I enjoyed what I watch

and

I gift the streamers in exchange of affirmations and sense of involvement.

I’m willing to spend some money on paid content, and willing to tipp the artist when I enjoy. But I don’t like the idea of tipping as a peacockery; (Okay maybe the real reason is I’m not rich enough to do that, but if I was that rich, why do I even need affirmations from random people online?). Anyways I do not have any negative opinion on people who have some extra money to spend.

the “problem” of gifting-oriented interaction
actually it’s not a “problem” but a “property”. When the streamer makes a living on receiving gifts, they spend a great portion of the streaming time asking for and thanking the gifts and chatting with the audience so they relate more and are more willing to pay – there is a very high involvement of the audience because that’s how gifting works for the small streamers. The streamer HAS TO connect with the potential patreons in one way or another.

That said, that were several times I clicked into a random show and, while I have no idea what the show is about, the streamer (and the audience) are talking about gifts 90% of the time; Okay maybe your old & loyal audience and patreons will keep your show hyped and your bills paid, but for a new audience, where is you content?

BiliBili’s introduction of “PK⁷” has certainly boosted the scene.

the content
it’s a false claim that a chatting show has no such thing as “content”. It’s more like a freestyle podcast or standup comedy, where you certainly need to prepare for the content. The show is yours and you can’t just react to the audience.

/// TODO

and there comes the mental overhead
there is often the critic that streamers are just cyber beggars: this is not true, but not too preposterous a claim. If I were the streamer: there are two different moods: the first is to produce high quality shows and sells it, the second is to cater for the audience and provide what they want in exchange of gifts.

And I tell you this, if you make a living off your hobby under a capitalistic model, you are very luckily gonna hate it. What sells is very unlikely to be what you enjoy producing.

the cost of high-quality streaming
producing a good show is expensive. TODO

what business model I would prefer
TODO

and … the shady art

# small-instance fedi pipedream

It’s often brought up that you should avoid mega instances such as mastodon.social and you should use small instances operated by people you trust, or, if possible, single-user instance.

While I do agree with that, how does this small-instance utopian scale?

1. your home server needs to “broadcast” your statuses to all the servers that host your followers. If each of your N followers is on their own server then the request is multiplied by N.

2. your home server needs to store copies of all the incoming statuses in the database and technically they are treated the in the same way as local ones. Operating small instance is growlingly gatekept as the network grows. For reference my 3-year-old instance of 100-ish users (among which only ~10 are active) now uses 34G data for database.

3. as for media, you need to store them (at least local uploads) as well. There is a tradeoff in remote content though: if you turn it on you have increasing storage usage and bears the responsibility of data privacy. But if everyone turns it off then we are DDoSing each other because the remote content is fetched whenever it’s viewed.

4. the fediverse network works perfectly now but that’s when fediverse is still a niche. It’s a ever growing space and more people are joining it. The scalability of fediverse will be soon tested.

5. it’s exponentially harder to erase data off the fediverse: if you, for whatever reason, need to delete something you posted, good luck with that because any federated instance may have a copy of that data and they don’t necessarily care about your deletion request. The more instances there are, the harder it becomes.

6. if everyone lives on their own instances the concept of “moderation” will no longer exist: “Moderation” means some selected actors filter contents for the other users, since you are the only user it’s simply a “mute list”

7. accessibility: let’s face the fact, only a minority of fedi users have the skill, time, resources and will to operate an instance. Even something as 傻瓜式 as a hosted service (such as commercial wordpress hosting) sets many people back because it’s not intuitive for non-techies to understand the basic concepts. Even if you give everyone an managed instance with via a single-click button, those lacking basic knowledge can’t really protect their data and identities from all sorts of pitfalls.

8. And I may argue that a managed instance is not your own instance. There are still people who have the privilege to see your data ⁸.

9. whitelisting is a thing, but that’s not what we really want. “wanna have whitelisted fedi network for a laugh? We had a tool for that since the USENET, it’s called a BBS”

on shared instances:

bigtechs track you and sell your data yes, but why would you trust individuals you never met instead? An instance admin could easily see all your private posts (even DMs); they could reset your password and impersonate you; they can as well sell your data and it’s even harder to sue them because small instances rarely has any legal entities and the are hosted all around the world where different digital laws apply. And this paranoia again leads to single-user instances, which makes other point more relevant.

on mega instances:

it’s out-of-scope for this post to talk about that. I’m only refraining this: mega instances are bad.

okay, now what?

1. TL;DR, I don’t know. If you know better I do want to hear.

2. Trust issue is not only with fediverse. Actually it’s a dead end if you dig.

3. Relays could reduce overheads in a small-instance network. But as a fediverse (pleroma) instance operator I still don’t believe in relays. Maybe my opinion will change in the future but for now moderation is such a pain when the “relayed” servers have different rule sets.

4. While I do hope for a world every one can be a cyber landlord, such fantasy is as far-fetched as communism.