From a personal perspective, I do share some of your misgivings about the appearance of sympathies with LE / authorities. It doesn't -feel- all that great to see. But at the end of the day to me it boils down to what another commenter said. If it's good enough for them, it is probably good enough for me. Someone has to pay the bills so the show can go on.
If the problem is that we're not trusting $LE_GOV_AGENCY to use the technology because it may hide abuses of authority, the root problem is that we can't trust $LE_GOV_AGENCY for reasons external to their choice of communication tooling. And that's not a problem I think we can solve with technology alone.
Plus, 'We can't allow X/Y/Z to use encrypted chat because they could do awful things' is a bit of a double-edged sword I personally don't feel comfortable wielding lest it be wielded against my own 'high-risk group'.
Disclaimer: SRE at Element, but I've been running a Matrix homeserver of my own since before I joined the company
I spent a long time as a Mac hater and Linux snob, but the M1 got me curious again just around time for me to get a new machine. X1 Carbon + Linux was so much trouble for years, at the end of the day I need some browsers and a nice terminal. Great battery life and performance obviously a plus.
M1 MBP Pro + iTerm2 has been fantastic, all my dotfiles ported over with minimal fuss, Homebrew has packages for almost all my userland needs. I do miss the aspects of customization around certain things, but I've found more often I just want to be able to do work and not have to worry about making sure my audio device sample rate is tuned properly for Zoom to work or whatever have you.
The things you are excited about are likely going to satisfy you - I can run on battery for around 8-12 hours of full activity (browsing, documents, light docker containers, vscode), the SSD tests so fast in `fio` it's ridiculous, and the thing is sturdy and travels well.
I haven't done a 1:1 Docker performance test but most of the things I'm doing in Docker are to test before shipping into a k8s cluster, so it's never usually that intensive. My experience has been satisfactory with Rancher Desktop - though it was a little rough a few months ago it's perfectly serviceable now and lets me run amd64/arm64 containers interchangeably as well as run microk8s.
TL;DR - I ate some humble pie and I now unironically enjoy using Apple hardware. The M1s are really nice and worth the money if gaming / VR aren't of major concern.
Hear, hear. I've also found cultivating love and care for my chosen family of friends to fill the space where I feel people seek maternal/paternal satisfaction. You don't need to have a blood relation / dependent relation with someone to invest yourself in their joys and successes and be there for the rest.
The added benefit is, some of these folks in my circle will likely have kids and being an unofficial aunt sounds like a good deal to me.
Really wanted to try this, and am still looking forward to at some point, but for some reason my password is invalid to the client and presents 'M_FORBIDDEN: Invalid password' despite it being a cryptographically secure random-gen password in my vault - presumably because it doesn't have a special character in it.
It would be cool if this limitation was a little more up front - While I can spin up a copy on my own and adjust the limitation myself, I don't think everyone's going to want to do that.
True, but a counterpoint: One may not like the topic but it may be best to be aware of what the conversation is should one find oneself someday blindsided by some political decision with negative consequences informed by these discussions.
Supporting evidence: I've gotta keep tabs on which places I shouldn't travel to in my own country where I was born and raised because people keep trying to make it illegal to use the bathroom safely [1] after getting scared by conversations such as the ones I've seen in this thread.
This is the goal and the ideal and what I myself choose to manifest, but it does bring me sadness to see a place I go to lurk on the tech and science grapevines and stay away from the 'discourse' start featuring threads articles debating how many rights I should have and in which ways should I be segregated from the people that need to be protected from me, particularly when honest attempts to reach out and foster understanding and sort out confusions get talked past.
I'm a trans individual. I celebrate this and all the healing and personal growth that's come from coming to terms with this fact and so does mostly everyone I've ever been close with, and I live far outside the 'liberal bubble' of SV/etc. I am comfortable with having discussions and educating, but merely existing and advocating for one's own safety and happiness seems to be enough to start debates, even here. I don't want to have a 'culture war' or participate in a 'gender agenda', but as an adult human who wishes (i'd argue that it's somewhat of an obligation) to have an active role in civil society I must also advocate for myself and people like me.
I urge people to listen more if they haven't been through it themselves. I know there's a lot of information out there about trans individuals that has inspired a lot of confusion and concern. It can be a confusing topic! Trans people tend to know a lot about it by necessity but seem to be listened to the least when the topic comes up. I personally think there's more intellectual curiosity to be had in the meta-conversation around why this discourse is the way it is given the fact that we have plenty of testimony, data and research to indicate the talking points being wheeled into the discussion are mostly facile and misconstrued to stoke fears, much like we did already over homosexuality?
Transitioning is centered around the needs of each individual - many choose not to or are outright unable to receive surgery or medical transitioning, yet that doesn't make them any less trans.
At the end of the day, it's their decision what to do with their body, not yours. All that is asked of you is to respect their decisions and treat them with the same amount of respect as you'd treat any other non-trans individual.
It's their decision what to do with their bodies, absolutely, but then why should everyone be forced to accept their view of themselves as an objective fact? I don't doubt that in the vast majority of cases their view is sincere and sound- but shouldn't this judgement be left to those who know them rather than being imposed?
It is an objective fact. Each individual is free to express themselves as they see fit. Nobody is responsible for proving that they're a -real trans- and we really shouldn't be in the business of gatekeeping that anyways, because we already did that decades ago and the APA and AMA now move in line with WPATH guidelines which are far more reasonable.
If we meet in public and you say "Hi, my name is Michael" I can only assume that that's objective fact. If I then say "You know, you don't really seem like a Michael. I think you're more of a Denise based on what I've seen." You would be right to take offense for disregarding your own right to self expression based on my own interpretation of your person from the limited information gathered in a first impression.
This is a very similar thing, except by the time someone is out as trans you can best believe they've spent years agonizing about whether it's even a good idea to do so knowing they'll face this kind of a conversation every time the topic comes up around people who they aren't close with / are not sympathetic.
An attribute that can change based on someone's feelings is definitely not objective. And all of the genders that are neither male nor female were invented in the last few decades, so membership in one can't be factual. Likewise, membership in a construct called "gender" which is divorced from biological sex was also invented within the last century, so that can't be said to be factual either.
Objective [1]:
1. Of or relating to a material object, actual existence or reality.
2. Not influenced by the emotions or prejudices.
3. Based on observed facts; without subjective assessment.
Non-binary gender identity and roles have been present in human societies dating as far back as 4500 years ago[1]. The only thing relatively new in the last 100 years is the moral panic about it.
Furthermore, from a scientific standpoint, there's not really any such thing as a clean binary division between male and female. Chromosomes get messy, and even absent issues with the X and Y chromosomes themselves [2] there's some fun stuff with the SRY gene [3] and hormonal receptors in utero that can affect gender identity and presentation [4].
Meh... what you're describing is rarely where the actual conflict is. What about situations where it does affect other people (and unfortunately those situations tend to be ones where merely articulating your concerns is enough to earn you all sorts of labels and hate)?
The bailey is in the othering of trans women as a separate class which opens opportunities for discrimination by separating them from women-at-large. And since we still have binary gender norms to contend heavily with in the US and beyond, this ends up playing out as bills banning trans women from playing in a league in accordance their gender, bathroom bills, etc. [1]
There's a fantastic book about this written by Julia Serrano called 'Whipping Girl' [2] that goes over these things and more and describes these phenomena as 'Transmisogyny' - trans individuals being subject to both misogyny and misandry depending on the situation, and sometimes both when it's convenient.
Why is speaking of "trans women" othering them into a separate class, but the same isn't true when speaking about "black women" - which is something that is celebrated in modern intersectionality theory? Don't trans women face unique challenges relating to their womanhood - just the same way that black women do?
If you're interested in an intersectional discussion, then sure. But too often this framing of 'trans women are trans women, not Women' is used in bad faith to open the dialog of "What should we do about them in women's spaces then, since they aren't?'
Isn't it bad faith to assume that someone who says something like "I have and will continue to stand up for the rights of transgender people" is actually arguing against the rights of transgender people without any evidence otherwise?
Saying that you support the rights of transgender people is great, but it's possible to say that and still get it fundamentally wrong so much as to actively harm people. So if someone says that but then says "But I have concerns about women's safety" now you see how quickly trans women become removed from the conversation.
Chimamanda, as far as I can tell, never argued about women's safety, or really anything like that. What I do know she said that got pushback was that transgender and cisgendered people have different histories and experiences. That doesn't seem particularly controversial, but then again I am not a twitter justice warrior.
To be clear, Adichie has said she finds J.K. Rowling's opinions on trans people reasonable, so it's not just an assumption. There's evidence backing it.
She said that Rowling's article was "a perfectly reasonable piece", relative to "all the noise" it was generating online. Are we talking about Rowling's actual words, or what they were morphed into on twitter?
Have you ever characterized something which you don't necessarily agree with, but appears genuine and well argued, as "reasonable"?
> Are we talking about Rowling's actual words, or what they were morphed into on twitter?
Her words. I read it. In the essay Rowling says explicitly that she doesn't think trans women should be allowed to use women's bathrooms or women's shelters, dismisses concerns about suicide rates in the trans community, and lumps in advocates for trans rights with Donald Trump and incels as part of a new wave of anti-feminist sentiment sweeping the liberal west.
I didn't find it well argued or reasonable, it's a rehashing of tired arguments that transphobic people have been making on Mumsnet and Fox News in the US for years.
If the problem is that we're not trusting $LE_GOV_AGENCY to use the technology because it may hide abuses of authority, the root problem is that we can't trust $LE_GOV_AGENCY for reasons external to their choice of communication tooling. And that's not a problem I think we can solve with technology alone.
Plus, 'We can't allow X/Y/Z to use encrypted chat because they could do awful things' is a bit of a double-edged sword I personally don't feel comfortable wielding lest it be wielded against my own 'high-risk group'.
Disclaimer: SRE at Element, but I've been running a Matrix homeserver of my own since before I joined the company