Sasha [They/Them]

Fuck law abiding activism, stonewall was a riot and the law will not make us silent.

I’m no hacktivist but I’m a pretty experienced back end dev/sre and an activist. I won’t tell your secrets if you wanted to run your idea past someone or need advice.

Lancaster Pennsylvania, lots of folk punk stuff going on over there and LNL is throwing another folk punk flea market in late June.

I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. I’ve been trying to learn to write lyrics for the last year or so, and the one thing I know for sure about creativity is that it’s not a switch.

Ideas come to me walking down the street and I have to jot them down for later. If I want to come up with something new on the spot, I just start singing without thinking about it and usually something good eventually falls out of my mouth.

Zack Freedman has a great video on training yourself to be creative: https://youtu.be/6r8-o2WpoCA

I’m just another shitty guitarist with bigger dreams than sense, but it’s very fun. Thanks for the encouragement!

Get good enough to play a show, honestly it would be equally as satisfying just to play my songs for friends in a park or something.

My accoustic guitar, I desperately hope, I love it way too much to ever be without it.

I’m probably not exactly what you’re looking for, but I went from considering suicide after I was diagnosed with an incurable disability that turned my life into an existence of pain, with next to no medical support or advice beyond “do yoga about it” to doing suprisingly well in life. I was also depressed before all of that, a shitty person and still trying to escape a really awful person in my life.

I turned it around gradually, but the two biggest things were getting the right meds (and being absurdly lucky to be one of the rare few who respond to it at all) and starting with a psychologist. Years of dealing with trauma and learning to accept and change the bad parts of myself eventually led to reading leftist theory, becoming an anarchist and meeting some incredible people. At some point in that journey I got on HRT and that did wonders for the worst of my depression too.

I’m at a point where I don’t think I resemble the person I was two or three years ago one bit. I used to deal with all the bad shit going on in the world by just trying to ignore it and only caring about myself and those close to me, but actively trying to improve the world is infinitely better.

Aww, and you’ve made mine

Or install koreader?

I recently tried to return something, within warranty it’s a fix/replacement. Within 6 months it’s a full refund, but I’ve got no idea how much of that is law and how much was store policy

If you steal them, avocados are free… or so I’m told

No I sent a message directly to the ceo on our internal version of Facebook (it’s called workplace and it’s somehow worse than facebook) in a thread about the report.

He replied to me basically ignoring everything I said and pretending like they were innocent and nice people, despite the report going into detail about why they specifically had known about and profited from a lot of illegal activity. Every other employee then proceed to kiss his ass and pretend like he was the greatest man to have ever lived.

Oh, and a side point. When all the awful shit I mentioned at the top came out in a national probe, I publically told the CEO what a piece of shit he and the board were for knowing about it and doing nothing.

Time theft is the easiest form of protest lmao

You’d be surprised, I’ve written a long comment about it but I’ve been trying to get another job for around two years now and it’s been completely impossible. Part of it is because I don’t have any formal education in the field (despite years of experience), but a lot of it is that the developer job market went to absolute shit after COVID and all that’s left now is nothing but evil companies.

My options for applications are basically AI startups, crypto start ups, banks and tech companies that are too competitive to ever give me an interview even if they’re somehow ethical.

I’ll throw in my two cents because you’re literally describing me.

I’m a software developer working for a bank that has, among other things, stolen from the deceased, profited from environmental destruction and charged fees specifically to not provide a service to customers. On top of all of this I consider usury wholly immoral, so I’ll never consider any bank any less than evil.

Am I evil or guilty?

To some extent perhaps, I’ve certainly helped write code that makes what I view as theft more efficient and “accessible.” In order to mitigate this, I’ve moved into a different position that lets me get away with not working more often. I’m able to use a lot of the money I get to do a lot of good for people in my area. I’m no saint, but I’m trying my hardest to make things better.

Not so long ago, I told a friend of mine how awful I felt about what I do, and about how much worse it makes me feel that I’ve failed to get out from it. He explained to me that since the day I was born, the capitalist state has been force feeding the propaganda down my throat. I was trained to not see the problems with the world and to accept what I was given, I’ve only broken free from this relatively recently. Blaming myself for being brainwashed and integrated into a system without my consent is victim blaming.

I think you’ll find workers generally aren’t evil, they just haven’t been kicked into a better framework that reveals the way the world really is.

Why do I still work there?

Because I can’t fucking leave, I’ve been trying constantly for years now and I can’t get an ethical job. Every single day I want to quit, but doing so means a lot of very bad things happen to me, this is the power that capitalists wield over us.

I’ve finally given up on finding a new job as a software dev and have decided to pursue an old dream instead, which will involve me going to uni again for a long time, and then I’ll spend the rest of my life making a material difference in people’s lives every single day. I’m quite fortunate to be able to pursue this, and the fact I can makes me feel it’s something of a duty.

HAH NONE

It used to be a couple dozen, but I cleaned it up a couple of months back and somehow haven’t had any get stuck since

I briefly worked in this area of physics, it’s complicated and depends on your definition of a particle and which quantum gravity model you’re talking about.

To simplify things you can just ask the same thing about non-quantum gravity. Why does gravity escape the black hole? The painfully mundane answer is that the black hole is gravity, it’s not escaping itself. Gravitational waves can’t be emitted from inside the black hole but that’s because those are a form of radiation and not the structure of spacetime.

This is specifically important because even quantum gravity (the kind with gravitons) still has this distinction. Particles belong to a field and are excitations of it, the gravitational field itself is not made of those particles. The force associated with that field is mediated by gravitons, but what that really means is complicated and honestly possibly just the result of a cool mathematical trick. It also comes with a bunch of crazy behaviour where you have particles that can break the laws of physics by just kinda doing it so quickly that nature blinks and misses it.

The point is, the quantum gravitational field is enough for the black hole to do its job when objects come by, gravitons don’t actually need to escape, though they are involved in complicated ways.