Lady, EVOLVED @Lady@cat.family

this is basically just a genericizing of the makefile rules that i use to build vocab.ladys.computer (here: <https://git.ladys.computer/Vocab/blob/7020828282e41281d76e7a578f97d123e00d7b05:/GNUmakefile>), because i’ve decided that that pattern is likely actually useful in a lot of places

😬 https://git.ladys.computer/Shushe/commitdiff/06b2ae9f95a0505031127bfe954451fa399cea5d

forgot to set the MODE

hm

does your baldurs gate character wear underwear

@aschmitz i think oftentimes in these sorts of conversations the cart gets placed before the horse, tho

i think it’s fine to increase utility and make something compelling *for a set of already defined stakeholders*. if you have stakeholders, and they don’t want to use the thing, it’s ok to find out why, and try to change it so that they will want to use it

but i think you get into real problems when you say “these people aren’t currently stakeholders, but if we convince them with THIS feature, maybe they will be.” no. they aren’t your stakeholders. wait until they have a stake in your project before you go and invoke them

@unspeakablehorror by “privileging” i mean, kind of, both: you are, for example, treating the computer affordance of copying and pasting as distinctive, but not stating, for example (to my knowledge), that text carved into stone or written on a whiteboard is not text, because you cannot cut it out and paste it onto a piece of paper (the way you can a newspaper clipping). nor do you merit things as text which a human can manually trace in a paint program, even tho that is a form of copying.

and certainly, you privelege assistive technologies being able to read a thing over humans being able to read it in your definition, because you find the former to be distinctive, and the latter not to be. you assign weight to computer processes which you do not consider significant as human processes. that is what i mean by “privileging”.

@unspeakablehorror there are websites which swap out letters for other letters and use special fonts as a form of DRM to prevent people from copy‐pasting from them. there are websites which don’t let people select text at all. there are PDFs whose underlying text that you can select and copy is OCR’d and buggy. there are PDFs with no underlying text at all.

i don’t have any problem classifying all of these things as text documents, because my definition of “text” doesn’t require any particular technological affordance or computer interface. it doesn’t require that a thing be on a computer, or off a computer. but you are defining “text”, in a computer context, based on what computers are able to do with a thing. this is a definite privileging of computers, and technological affordances, as the basis of your ontology. and it is the reason why you need to then come up with other definitions for other contexts where those technological affordances do not apply.

@unspeakablehorror but “on computer” vs “off computer” is a significant part of your definition of context. how is that not privileging “computer” as a category?

@aschmitz it’s obviously not black and white, but i would distinguish between “people who want to use it but can’t, because it is too difficult” and “people who don’t want to use it”. i think making things easier for the first category is definitely a good thing. but i think what actually happens a lot of the time is making things easier for the second category, so they can be more easily compelled into using it anyway

it sure won’t be found in developing a third, shittier [networked technology] that you think people will find “easier to use”

my [networked technology] take has always been that the only people who have to use [networked technology] should be the people who want to use [networked technology] and are willing to learn how to use [networked technology]

we have a problem right now where lots of people have to use [networked technology] who don’t want to, but the solution to that problem won’t be found in [networked technology] improvements

“fundamentally the problem with computers is that if you want to have control over your experience then you have to learn how to use a computer”

@unspeakablehorror (also, for the record, an iphone can select and copy text from a printed document (or a JPEG (or a rendering of a JPEG on a screen)), so i question your context delineation. people aren’t without computers just because they are dealing with physical entities. we live in an age of cyborgs)

@unspeakablehorror sure, but it seems like a lot of privileging of “computer” to me. what makes computers so special?

@unspeakablehorror but is not(computer‐text) not still not(computer)‐text? or do you think there is something fundamentally different between printing to an e‐ink screen and printing to paper?

@unspeakablehorror wouldn’t the fact that you can’t copy-paste text on paper imply that it isn’t text, not that it is, if that is part of your definition of “text”?