Toots for cemerick@mastodon.social account

Written by Chas Emerick on 2025-01-24 at 19:14

I've heard liberal cowards talk about being "colorblind" all my life, as if nullifying peoples' heritage and culture was somehow better than explicitly hating them for it

Being anti-racist — at a minimum — means accepting, appreciating, reveling in what makes identities and cultures different. Our heritages were scrubbed "clean" until they lost their meaning and significance (i.e. made white). Doing the same to others doesn't make you enlightened.

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Written by Chas Emerick on 2025-01-21 at 06:01

"friends"

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Written by Chas Emerick on 2025-01-21 at 02:32

"From the river to the sea" gets people blocked, banned, and sometimes fired or blackballed, but Herr Musk gets interpreted as giving (multiple) "awkward gestures" by none other than the ADL.

the Cool Zone keeps truckin', at least 25 years strong now

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Written by Chas Emerick on 2025-01-20 at 21:09

Everything about this jingoistic exercise is laced, nay, 💦dripping💦 with fear. These people aren't tinged with righteous enthusiasm about moving policy their way, they're terrified, 🕱petrified🕱 of the present and future that is slipping away from them.

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Written by Chas Emerick on 2025-01-19 at 00:54

Watching so many people become amateur data archivists overnight is pretty amazing

There are a lot of lessons being learned the hard way by a lot of people all at once. There's a lot of opportunity coming for distributed/federated/offline-first/etc applications/media

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Written by Chas Emerick on 2025-01-17 at 22:30

Funny story, this Suzanne Nossel person's career appears to be built around getting paid at high-profile, good-sounding nonprofits (including anti-censorship orgs!!!), and then using those positions to advance...special interests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzanne_Nossel#Controversies

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Written by Chas Emerick on 2025-01-17 at 22:13

Imagine how absurd it'd be for the Boston Globe to publish an op-ed from someone on the "Meta Oversight Board" celebrating the censoring of #tiktok with an absurd strawman.

That'd be so crazy, right? https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/01/14/opinion/tiktok-ban-teens-mental-health-privacy/

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Written by Chas Emerick on 2025-01-17 at 14:53

This feels way, way worse than any previous orphaned content experience. Categorically different than the collapse of any prior online community I've witnessed. And I've only ever lurked! Can't imagine the dislocation of people that materially depend on #tiktok. 😡

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Written by Chas Emerick on 2025-01-17 at 14:53

Because I live in a free country that has freedom of expression at its roots, I can methodically download all of the content I care about from the soon-to-be-banned social media website #tiktok

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Written by Chas Emerick on 2025-01-16 at 20:43

really nice to see early reviews coming in re: @pdfminute

I'm hoping to provide a balanced portrayal of PDF over time (thus the "terrifying" part of the site's tagline), and maybe a 50/30/20% mix of technical/historical/societal content.

Expect a +10 on production values, too

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Written by Chas Emerick on 2025-01-16 at 19:24

It's all freedom-this and freedom-that in America, until real power turns its lidless gaze upon you and says "sit down".

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Written by Chas Emerick on 2025-01-16 at 19:22

Fuck these people. All of them, their advisors and staffs and peanut galleries, for endlessly fucking with all of us. #tiktok

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Written by Chas Emerick on 2025-01-16 at 19:22

And a special fuck you to all the "allies" (especially Senator Warren) that crow on and on about "foreign ownership" of media, as if a sizable chunk of the US' power and influence isn't due to US-owned media being freely consumed worldwide.

Rubbing two brain cells together should conjure some awareness of what the blowback is/will be of protectionist policy when we're the biggest exporter.

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Written by Chas Emerick on 2025-01-15 at 18:49

This is bad. I did a little poking around, and a js_of_ocaml-style approach to an OCaml-for-java looks "easy" enough I might start picking at it in my ample free time.

Help.

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Written by Chas Emerick on 2025-01-15 at 15:56

Few things aggravate me more than seeing tutorials and marketing pieces extracting data from PDF by 😡💀RASTERIZING PAGES💀😡 and then running mostly-bad OCR and computer vision models over the results.

Outside of scanned and intentionally obfuscated documents, ✨PDFs have a data model✨. Use it!

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Written by Chas Emerick on 2025-01-14 at 20:52

Oy, I'm podcasting (again). Come learn some stuff about why PDF is (still? always was?) interesting and cool

https://mastodon.social/@pdfminute/113828677759504649

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Written by Chas Emerick on 2025-01-14 at 13:27

This has to be egregiously egotistic, but I am legit distressed every time I am able to do things so much better than others that are more trained, funded, staffed, paid, recognized, and loved than I am. Inferiority complex tells me I'm no one special, so that must make these other donks absolute peanut butter-brained simpletons. wtf, srsly

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Written by Chas Emerick on 2025-01-14 at 04:31

Do you remember just how much sneering occurred in both mass and social media back when China (effectively) banned Google? We all (rightly!) called it what it was, fascist censorship.

And yet, here we are, with every branch of bipartisan government hiding behind "foreign adversary" language to shut a vital public square. #tiktok

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8582233.stm

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Written by Chas Emerick on 2025-01-13 at 22:59

Non-Profit Computing Standards Body Sells Sponsorships of Integers #ComputingOnion #headlines

(tweet: https://x.com/FakeUnicode/status/725731520539820032)

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Written by Chas Emerick on 2025-01-13 at 21:22

Maybe there's hope for Mastodon (or some other web-native conduit that is more censorship-resistant) to come through and show the next path, but I don't see it having the raw materials to support the same kind of virality and mobile-first prerequisites that mainstream users expect.

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