Lady @Lady@cat.family

@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

@for target in $$($(MAKE) -s -f '$<' listout QUIET=1 $(SHUSHEOPTS)); do if test '-d' "$(BUILDDIR)/public/$$target" && test '!' -d "$(DESTDIR)/$$target"; then mkdir -p "$(DESTDIR)/$$target"; fi; for file in $$(find "$(BUILDDIR)/public/$$target" -not '(' -name '.*' -or -type d ')'); do printf '%s\n' "$$file" | sed 's:$(BUILDDIR)/public/:/:;s:/_\(.*\)_\(\..*\)$$:/[\1]\2:g;s/¦/:/g;' | xargs printf 'Copying <%s>…\n' >&2; printf '%s\n' "$$file" | sed 's:$(BUILDDIR)/public/:$(DESTDIR)/:;s:/_\(.*\)_\(\..*\)$$:/[\1]\2:g;s/¦/:/g' | xargs cp "$$file"; done; done

if there are so many trans women in programming why haven’t they written any programming languages

and then the blockchain fuckers came along

i think it’s really cool how the semantic web people did a bunch of work and wrote a bunch of theory about how we can teach computers to reason, and then within a few years mostly agreed that having computers reason is a waste of time, but kept the formal specifications and vocabulary because it actually made things easier for humans to explain things to each other

it’s not Inconsistent to say that ontologies are a kind of object, it’s just Wrong

this is fine for what i’m doing so far but i’m still waiting for that Moment when a specification inevitably tries to use an Ontology Itself as the subject or object of an object property, thus implying that owl:Ontology is an owl:Class not merely an rdfs:Class (these are not the same)

anyway the actually interesting insight wasn’t in that specification but in the specification mapping R·D·F to Direct Semantics which states, with no fanfare, that all owl:OntologyProperty’s (note: this term is not documented) are silently transformed into owl:AnnotationProperty’s (interesting for the insight that properties of ontologies are functionally annotations in their implications)