Lady, EVOLVED @Lady@cat.family

if you're wondering what this means it mostly means painter jeans and button flys

dykes were hot in the 90s ok

yeah i’m the kind of age where i want to bring 90s fashion back

actually, W3C, i prefer to receive my updates through RFC 4287 Atom feeds

feeling cuddly but my gf is asleep :(

@aschmitz @alyssa @gaditb i thought about cwebber but also as i understand most of her work has been in the Racket or Guile ecosystems, which is more the problem i’m diagnosing than the solution (lots of trans work has gone into Rust, but in the end, Rust largely profited off the work while betraying the community) [i realize the line between package and language is fuzzier in a Lisp]

this isn’t to discredit or diminish the effort, but to the extent that package authors are writing Guile packages that work with Goblins rather than Goblins packages for Goblins exclusively, it’s not really what i’m looking for

@alyssa @gaditb to be clear i think a lot of the actual trans women who might fill this role are probably libertarian racists and i’m not sure i would love supporting them either, because that’s how these things seem to go, but i also know many in the community are not as selective as me, so it still seems viable, and a trans libertarian racist is probably still better than a not-trans libertarian racist (maybe; open for debate)

@alyssa @gaditb what’s bothering me, and this is a more general Bother with tech, is that there doesn’t seem to be a space for trans women to develop their own products in their own community without it needing to go thru the gauntlet of universal approval or criticism. i look at projects like Zig, or Servo (not a programming language, but probably the complexity of one), and they are not large teams. there is the knowledge and numbers to do a project of that size and have a little community around it. but it feels as tho unless it will also be as welknown and used as Zig or Servo, which is unlikely because of all the reasons you mentioned, people are not willing to consider it. or there is a networking problem, where people are willing to consider it but not willing to work together to make it happen

tl;dr here is i don’t want something successful, i want something i can write small libraries for which are good and useful without ultimately supporting Apple, or the Rust Foundation, or some random cis male BDFL, which is what most of the options feel like to me. there are things like C or JS which are more neutral (as committee-driven standards), but conversely have no real community to speak of (at least not good ones), which feels alienating to labour under

a project doesn’t need to be very successful to fill that niche. it’s just depressing and demotivating working in a field where everything you produce is enhancing the product of someone else, and most of those someone elses aren’t people you would otherwise want to prop up. i don’t think i’m the only one who feels this way, but if the sentiment is shared, it doesn’t feel like anyone is actually capable of acting on it

it is funny because i think @aescling and i have very similar jobs but also, from what i can tell, very different ones

i think this is a good thing, to be clear

i was a metadata nerd before i worked in a library but now i have the social scripts to narrativize it

keep dreaming about work adjacent topics. i spend all day thinking about these topics so it makes sense, but also, how about not

all we have is their weird software detritus that we’ve picked up and repurposed for our own uses

obviously there WAS a community of weirdos who were willing to put the time in over decades to write specifications and build software just to talk to each other, but like, WHAT kind of a community? how? why?

can’t sleep so i’m thinking about defunct social web specifications

@gaditb JavaScript was written by Brendan Eich; PHP was written by Rasmus Ledorf; Python was written by Guido van Rossum; Perl was written by Larry Wall; Zig was written by Andrew Kelley. These are massive oversimplifications, but the question remains

I know for a fact there are lots of talented trans women right now working on other people’s programming languages. that’s what makes me wonder why they don’t have one of their own

@gaditb i don’t mean contributing, i mean controlling, tho