one thing I've been thinking about in conjunction with AI—when i feel disheartened lately, i start to feel like everything is in conjunction with AI1—is how efficiency is a terrible sole metric. it's probably as bad as money, which is a famously bad thing to optimize for2.
now, i love it when things go faster, at least when they're boring or an obstacle to something more important. while there are merits to slowing stuff down, at least some of the time, i'm not going to talk about those. instead, i'm mostly going to talk about the disadvantages besides that, ones that may exist even if you want stuff to go faster.
caveat two is that i also love energy efficiency. it's exempt from the things i'm talking about here. (i'm going to get to the reason why i think that' so in a bit.)
so what's so bad about efficiency? to me, it's that it has become the thing to improve. i feel like if something makes some process faster, i'm immediately on the back foot. if there's an argument about efficiency, the people with the most efficient solution have a gun and your arguments based on accessibility or environmental sustainability or even customer happiness feel like knives.3
to bring it back to ai, in a workplace setting, i feel like admitting that ai makes a task more efficient is equivalent to conceding it should be done for that task.
we see this in other ways. of course, they're going to make you wait for customer service representatives to be available because having enough capacity to minimize waits is inefficient. of course, amazon is going to cut breaks down to the fucking bone because taking marginally longer breaks is inefficient. of course they're going to make doctor's appointments shorter and shorter because that's more efficient.
shitty customer service phone trees are yet another example of this, but instead of saving time by making support questions be answered more efficiently, they're saving time by reducing the number of questions that make it through the gauntlet. it's efficient for their bottom line. in theory they save time when you do make it to a living person because the information is gathered already. who knows if that actually pans out.
you might have noticed i set some parameters. this is related to why i think energy efficiency tends to be great—it's often engineering, all about the consideration of tradeoffs. it's not perfect, but it works pretty well, and i feel like many of the examples of energy efficiency upgrades being bad are rumored or speculative or fictional 4. like there are CFLs and LEDs that can't dim or have unpleasant color temperatures but i feel like it was only a brief time that these were the only CFLs you could get. and when LEDs, which are even more efficient, came out in lightbulb sizes 5 you could always fall back on CFLs if you couldn't find one in the ideal configuration.
okay, i have one example. i have encountered automatic faucets that don't stay on long enough. i'm not sure whether these are actually due to people overfocusing on saving water or if it's just due to people not doing a good job of setting them up right. a much bigger problem with automatic fixtures in bathrooms is them not activating reliably.
it feels a bit lazy to say this, but part of the answer is just balance. feel free to delete form fields that you don't need the information for. that saves employees time and the time of your customers/patrons/clients. but don't try to pair that with some sort of manic countdown that stipulates how long employees can take on the form.
the other lazy-but-true answer is to end capitalism. optimizing for money and economic growth is no way for a society to live.
i feel like i may have lifted this phrase from somewhere, although i think it was talking about COVID, not AI.↩
even many capitalists will acknowledge that optimizing for just money is no way for a natural person to live, even if they think legal persons should live that way. the extent to which making everything subservient to capital forces people to optimize for money is seemingly lost on them.↩
in the best case we want to be in a collaborative setting and you're not trying to win. sometimes workplaces are like that, but not always.↩
e.g., I watched a King of the Hill episode a few months ago about low flow toilets that were so bad they resulted in more water used. Maybe there were some genuinely bad low flow toilets around the time this episode was produced, but i think when i've encountered toilets that don't use enough water to properly flush, they're broken. during the episode we learn the committee responsible for resource-related rules (or ordinances? unclear) is corrupt and only recommending low-flow toilets because a member sells all of the ones available in town, so i could see the argument that this episode was more about corruption than low-flow toilets.↩
i think this was mostly a light spectrum thing, not the size itself being a problem to manufacture. and checking wikipedia, i seem to be correct.↩
I accidentally published a post, The Washington Editorial Board's Mask Slipped. Well, I think it was accidentally. It was basically a complete post, just a short one. However, since it didn't have a date, it ended up way in the back of the posts.
I didn't want to date it now because it it isn't really new, so I dated it close to when I (accidentally?) published it. But I did want to say something in case people who missed it want to read it now.
To be clear, this isn't one of those thoroughly rotten takes that makes me think less of the writer, like the stuff Sam Altman says approximately once every six news cycles, or Thomas H. Ptacek's weirdly hostile post about his friends who don't like LLMs.
That being said...I have a lot of doubts.
Part of my reason for skepticism is that AI is relentlessly pitched as a way to go faster. Formal verification, for all its benefits, generally makes you go slower. Kleppman's logic seems to be that Speed(Formal verification + LLMs) >= Speed(regular coding). I'm not sure that's true, but even if it is, I'm not sure companies will want to give up much of the (perceived) speed benefit, even if they're still somewhat faster on net.
The other thing is that formal verification seems like the kind of thing that would take a long time to pay off, and, with the exception of people planning multi-year data center construction projects, AI has not been a situation where people are exercising patience.
I also strongly suspect AI is appealing because it allows for spending less on employees. Having them learn formal verification would make them cost more, both initially as your current developers have to take time to learn it, and over time as your less-senior developers have a longer learning curve.
Now, these observations are for the industry as a whole, given that Kleppman was saying it would go "mainstream." But perhaps LLMs will still make them mainstream among more quality-conscious developers, the sort of people who test pretty aggressively but haven't added formal verification yet. As critical as I was of the start, maybe someone like Thomas Ptacek would do it at a place like Fastly. Ptacek seems like a genuinely capable guy, hostility in that area aside. That's more likely to me, and I would be genuinely interested in seeing their results, even if what I really want is for developers to demand more and higher ethical standards for what they produce and the tools they use.
Beyond industry and societal issues, the more technical reason I'm skeptical is that AI coding assistants sometimes will just delete stuff leading to errors rather than meaningfully fix them. It seems like an AI might just loosen specifications, add exceptions, or even delete them. Perhaps it's clear enough when they do that for it not to be a problem or there are other features of formal verification that make that harder. However, given the average developer doesn't have much experience, I'm not very confident they will build that experience. And even if they catch the assistant cheating, they might not know enough to prod it in the right direction or fix it themselves.
If I'd have to guess, Martin Kleppman has a lot more familiarity with formal verification than I do, so perhaps he's thought of this issue. Of course, a PhD doesn't prevent you from talking out of your ass. (For some people, it merely enables them to do it with greater authority in front of larger audiences.) Still, my money's on Kleppman knowing more than I do.
The other technical reason is that there's not as much formal verification code to learn from, and I don't think formal verification is quite similar enough to other languages.
Interestingly, formal verification has been seeing more attention on Google. It does get less than other testing methodologies. Looking at the data behind GitHub's "innovation graph" shows that some of the most common theorem provers and formal verification languages are varying and seem to have peaked as a group in 2023, although 2025 is incomplete and if scaled up (doubled because we have just the first half of the year), it would be in the ballpark of 2023. This depicts the number of people who've pushed code in that language. (GitHub chose the...interesting...name "pushers" as shorthand.)
language
'20H1
'20H2
'21H1
'21H2
'22H1
'22H2
'23H1
'23H2
'24H1
'24H2
'25H1
Agda
244
429
259
271
306
283
982
1011
274
267
347
Alloy
156
287
1013
1015
318
259
311
Coq
5387
4315
3060
2671
3220
1805
1782
1736
2038
2566
2294
Frege
115
Idris
104
405
103
212
104
110
790
720
118
109
Lean
112
232
254
391
348
464
475
821
1141
1636
2219
TLA
390
394
430
464
483
612
697
1234
916
715
933
Total Result
6237
5890
4106
4009
4617
3561
5739
6537
4687
5561
6213
The total row probably counts people twice.
Of course, the prediction is that formal verification will go mainstream, not that it already has. So the fact it there isn't clear growth is mostly absence of evidence, especially since the first half of 2025 was pretty strong and the Google Trends data suggest that either it got started very early following the first releases of GitHub copilot or there's some other trend increasing people's interest.
I'd love to be wrong about Kleppman's prediction. Formal verification has always seemed like an underutilized tool and one I've been meaning to learn some day myself. And of course, as a software user I'd love if software were more correct and reliable. The best case is that formal verification ends up being less scary once they've seen LLMs produce it, developers actually learn what it is about, and software gets genuinely better. The worst case is probably that developer unfamiliarity prevents the vast majority of verification from actually verifying much of anything, and it becomes a reflexive defense against critics, a rhetorical counter-move for when people bring up hallucinations.
Since I made this table aggregated by year already, here it is
It's been a while since the prior (and inaugural) media of interest post, so here's another!
MythBusters. I recently discovered that MythBusters has posted full-length episodes on YouTube. I enjoyed it growing up, and it holds up, although it definitely is a product of its time (mostly in harmless ways). It is a bit inconvenient to find the full-length episodes because it seems like they've taken a lot of them down.1 It's probably less informative, strictly speaking, than the average documentary, but it is a lot of fun. I think the spirit of thinking through problems and figuring out how to test them safely really shines through. It honestly has some parallels to software and data analysis projects I've worked on2, which I think is less to do with software development specifically and more to do with the overall structure of problem solving.
Queens at Heart UCLA made this documentary about transfeminine people (not using that term) back in the 1960s. Most of the people profiled seem like they'd use the term "trans women" today. I would love if someone caught up with any one who's still surviving.
Doppelganger by Naomi Klein is a fascinating book that I am on the verge of finishing. It manages to be both a great analysis of our current era and the initial stages of the pandemic. Its discussion of antisemitism is also very relevant now with both the rising tide of actual antisemitism and disingenuous use to deflect criticism of Israel. There's the occasional thing that perhaps is irrelevant or didn't quite hold up, but that's the risk about writing about very recent events, IMO.
I would be remiss if I didn't mention Grant Imahara, who died in 2020, and was a cast member of MythBusters, or Miss Major, who wasn't featured in any of these media but did survive that era of Queens at Heart and died recently. We're poorer without them.
I don't know if the idea is to have a rotation or they're uploading higher-definition versions or if there's some internal push and pull about how much to make available for free versus how much to withhold for a streaming service.↩
E.g., for some data projects, I've done a "scale model" before pulling down huge amounts of data.↩
A new era of class warfare has emerged in New York, and no one is more excited to misrepresent the players involved than the Washington Post Editorial board. Witness the latest editorial about Zohran Mamdani's victory.
Billionaire owner Jeff Bezos indicated he wanted the opinion pages to focus on promoting "free markets." While charitable (or naive) readers might expect good-faith arguments in favor of less regulation and capitalism generally, they periodically have seen the signs of bad faith for ages. This editorial is a new low, and that interpretation is no longer possible.
Across 645 words laced with weird details, including giving Mamdani the epithet "Generalissimo Zohran Mamdani" and describing his victory speech as "seething with resentment," the paper abandoned any pretense to civil disagreement and instead battled a straw man of Mamdani they hastily stuffed.
The paper caricature Mamdani when they say "People’s lives, in Mamdani’s world, can be improved only by government." In fact, his support of loosening obstacles to building housing and criticism of Trump's use of the federal agencies like ICE make it clear he holds no such illusions.
Such crass flattery of their readers as part of the "thinking" people in contrast to Mamdani's supporters "the crowd" might get support from their remaining subscribers, who apparently agree with an increasingly partisan editorial board or overlook it in favor of other sections. But it is a faulty contrast, given the speech deftly evoked Mario Cuomo, Eugene Debs, and Jawaharlal Nehru.
Before and after his victory, Mamdani's opponents favorite term for him has been "socialist." While technically accurate, they use the term not to elucidate their policy differences but to smear him as extreme or authoritarian. In this case, the editorial, noting his limited power in setting taxes or affecting transportation. Again, this is technically accurate, but deliberately ignores that Mamdani's experience in state government means he is not only aware of how power is divided, but has worked within those constraints, including a free bus pilot.
The New York Times ran an interesting piece. Interesting to me, at least, because in the past the paper has published some pieces that suggest significant bias against him by the editors (or maybe the publisher).
I suspect the reporter was aware that people labeling Zohran Mamdani a socialist are not really doing so in good faith. I further suspect he didn't feel he could say that outside of the opinion pages, resulting in a slightly weird piece. It basically says that Mamdani is not a socialist without saying so explicitly. Even ignoring how it dances around, this take is weird. I mean, Mamdani calls himself a "democratic socialist," rather than sticking to "social democrat" or a "progressive." Progressive is a pretty common term for relatively left-wing politicians and avoids the word "socialist" altogether. He doesn't stick to those words, so I think we should take him at his word.
Besides being wrong, it lets other publications run bad-faith counter pieces, like this one from Pirate Wires that mock this wishy-washiness and point out instances where he's fine with the label socialist, no qualifier.
The New York Times piece even includes an example of that bad faith argumentation. Cuomo's spokesman says Mamdani holds "radical extremist positions against basic democratic values." As a capitalist, it's obviously fair for Cuomo to attack Mamdani's socialism, as with any disagreement he has with Mamdani, but this claim is incendiary and false. If I were the editor on this piece, I would probably suggest it be rewritten around that claim.
Similar to the Cuomo campaign, the Pirate Wires piece includes this sarcastic bit:
See, democratic socialists don’t force your business to hand over its assets to the state at gunpoint — the people vote for your business to hand over its assets to the state. Isn’t that sweet.
While there are socialists who support nationalization (or municipalization as I suppose it would be called), Mamdani doesn't include that in his platform, as far as I know. The piece certainly doesn't support with any examples. Even when the public sector acquires formerly private property, it also needn't be handed over for free or be mandated1. The government could gain ownership purely by buying shares on the open market, for example, or by offering cash in exchange for equity, similar to the venture capitalists who fund that publication. There are many other things I could add here, but I'll stop. Suffice it to say, Pirate Wires is less interested in correcting the record and more interested in spreading misinformation about what socialism means.
When it comes to median Democrats, the socialism label is basically just an insult. When it comes to someone like Zohran Mamdani, however, it's more of an equivocation. Rival politicians or billionaire-funded outlets may accurately point out an association with socialism but they want you to think of extreme takeovers and authoritarianism, rather than the actual beliefs they have that caused them to adopt the label "socialist," many of which are popular.
The merits of all these different ways would be a long discussion and vary based on the circumstance. I personally think there's a better case for nationalizing industries without compensation if the business' assets were directly obtained by colonialism or outright theft, for example, rather than just the widespread exploitation that is a feature of capitalism.↩
while procrastinating on packing for my tripconscientously browsing the internet to stay informed, i saw that a Trump official claimed that solar was a nonstarter because we'd need more solar panels than there is total land area on the planet.
this is a silly thing to say in the first place. i mean, no one's suggesting we rip up all the other forms of renewable energy. also, many environmentalists are pretty okay with nuclear even if renewables should be what we focus on (more or less the correct opinion imo). i guess maybe he's hoping you'll think all forms of renewable electricity are equally space (in)efficient?
it's also wrong. people pointed out this was wrong because all electricity use could be met by solar panels taking up the land area of Portugal, but the original comment is belligerently but explicitly talking about all energy.
fortunately, a very approximate estimate for all energy is easy to calculate. multiply total energy use by the land use per energy unit1 and you get your answer.
for the record, this is just under the area of Texas and 628,310.5023 in km². this doesn't account for infrastructure or the fact some solar panels are older or in not-very-favorable areas. it also doesn't account for putting solar panels on roofs or above parking structures or augmenting solar with forms of renewable or carbon-neutral energy that are more space-efficient, like offshore wind or nuclear.
by comparison, about 41 percent of the U.S. is already dedicated to meat, dairy, and egg production, more than 5 Texas' worth. i'm hitting my limit for research for an Alys+ post, but producing the animal products to meet the world's meat, dairy, and egg needs almost certainly requires more land than exists in the entire country.
another way you can see this is obviously wrong is that currently 13 percent of world energy comes from renewables. even if we ignore nuclear (a further 7 percent), that means it would take between a 7 and 8 fold increase to cover all our energy needs. since renewable energy takes up relatively little land right now, it's pretty silly to imagine scaling it up 8 times would literally not fit, particularly when you consider all the land we use for other forms of energy generation. presumably at least some of it could be repurposed.
one much more formal study than me copying and pasting numbers from Wikipedia and random sites into a calculator, showed that within the margin of error, solar uses basically the same amount of land as coal. meanwhile, solar on roofs, gas, and nuclear all use a lot less. the graphic puts wind in its own category, presumably because it depends on how much of the area below the turbine is considered to be "used" by it, but offshore wind is pretty safely in the same range as roof-based solar, gas, and nuclear.
of course, virtually all energy on earth comes from the sun, so any fossil fuels are (very indirectly) solar power. with solar panels, we're getting the solar energy radiated2 every day. with fossil fuels, we're burning solar energy radiated and then trapped in a living organism and then buried a long time ago. this doesn't actually disprove his argument (like he could still be right if solar panels were way less efficient), but it is a bit ironic.
I got the total energy of the planet from this Wikipedia article and the energy per square meter from this post. i did a quick check by comparing it to another blogger's solar numbers (3,800 kWh a year for 26 m^2 of panels), and this is probably geared toward sunnier areas.↩
I was reading some German Pascal books from the 80s on Internet Archive, as one does, and i found one that has very crude but very charming images.
For example, there's some code in the book to draw a sign forbidding entry of pests ("Kein Zutritt für Ungeziefer") and one warning of spiders ("Achtung Spinne!")
And here's an image with just a fuckton of ants
The little icons for different callouts seem to be produced in a similar style, if not literally using Turbo Pascal on Windows:
Labels read source code and description, usage example, additional notes, and variation suggestions. They also have the labels: "How will this be cooked?", "How will this be served?", "Warning!", and "How would this be seasoned?"
The cover is also great, albeit not one produced with the techniques inside the book:
"Title reading 100 Grpahics Recipes for Turbo Pascal on Windows" with "Programmer tips with extras for beginners and the experienced" as a message in the corner.
one of the things I don't understand about redistricting is: Okay, so the right "rigs" districts. But why don't you just try to persuade the voters in those districts to vote for you? If Democrats had a winning message no amount of gerrymandering could stop them.
I'm trying to keep this short because I don't want to write too many posts about bad (even slightly bad) takes. While Robinson's probably right that Democrats give up too easily and there are some popular things they could champion, it seems pretty silly to imagine that merely having the right message could inevitably overcome strong headwinds in a bunch of different areas of the country.
I don't want to say that anyone is inherently or permanently conservative, or for that matter, inherently or permanently bigoted in ways that makes right-wing policies appealing. Still, it seems fair to say quite a few people are beyond the point where a few strong campaigns will win them over. I've seen people estimate roughly 35 to 40 percent of the population, or at least the voting population, is extremely devoted to Trump1. I think it would be hard for even Democrats who have a great message and back it up with action to consistently get the 60 percent nationally. Figuring out the actual margin of success needed would probably take a ton of math and simulation, so I may be overestimating it. It probably is going to be in that neighborhood, because when you see people talk about extremely gerrymandered maps, they give advantages of like 10 percent or more.
People also intentionally split their ballot or vote against the party in power largely due to wanting change for nebulous reasons and these factors make it hard to consistently overcome a worst-case scenario gerrymander even with a great message.
So while I think it's totally reasonable to demand Democrats adopt better messages and not to just concede gerrymandered area2, I think it is an unreasonable expectation for Democrats to just overcome such strong headwinds, especially when you consider other headwinds they face, like the closure of polling places near minorities. These things are also inherently unfair, so it also just seems bad and not keeping with Robinson's usual perspective to gloss over that? I think the actual good strategy is to make ending gerrymandering part of your winning message so you don't need to hit a home run every time.
I've also seen people throw around various estimates for how much of the population are either fascists or very susceptible to fascism. It's probably lower than the Trump number because Trump seems to be more popular than the median fascist. It's probably some number like 10, 20, or 30 percent (although hopefully close to 10). I don't think it's like 1, 2, or 3 percent. Obviously there's still enough people to win a commanding margin even once you take out the fascists and crypto-fascists, but there's less extreme people who also are very unlikely to vote for you and that starts cutting into the group of people you can persuade. Bernie Sanders, whom Robinson generally likes, with the notable exception of how Sanders doesn't call the genocide in Gaza a genocide, barely breaks 50 percent approval in his best polls.↩
especially since Democrats aren't actually facing a worst-case scenario. There's a couple of places where things are gerrymandered in their favor and plenty↩
The most visible parts of our community are now shaped by people who were never socialized by women, who don’t know how to relate like women, who were never taught emotional regulation, softness, or interdependence. Instead, they learned their identity through memes, porn, and Twitter pile-ons.
The result is that much of trans culture today is fundamentally male-coded, even when it claims the language of feminism. It is competitive, hierarchical, entitlement-driven, and obsessed with controlling others instead of understanding them.
While there are doubtless transfeminine-only group chats and hangouts or parts of social media that are heavily tilted that way, I'm pretty doubtful there are many parts of the community who were "never socialized by woman."
First, there's the smell test. Do you think in the year of our lord 2025, as trans people are more visible and trans people are coming out at younger ages, and young people remain generally very supportive of trans people, that the average newly out trans woman has less experience around other women than her peers did ten or twenty years ago?
Obviously, there isn't hyperspecific data on this, but we can pull in related figures. Pew actually asked LGBT adults how many of their friends are LGBTQ, and 21 percent of trans people said all of them. That might be a bit higher than I'd guess, but having exclusively LGBTQ friends does not mean they're all T friends, let alone trans women. More trans people also say they are connected to the community as a whole than other groups and they have more in common with other groups.. The most friendly plausible interpretation for Wu is that trans women are befriending relatively few straight cis women, but it seems pretty unlikely they aren't socializing with queer cis women.
We can get a sense of trans people's other connections. The 2022 US Trans Survey shows about 67 percent of adults have supportive family members, up from 60 percent in 2015. So it's at least within the realm of plausibility that these people are spending time with their female relatives, who are probably mostly cis. Also, this possibility has grown over time. I wish I had more comparison numbers, but the 2022 US Trans Survey has unfortunately come out slowly and I don't think those numbers are out yet.
I guess I can't definitively rule out that trans high school girls today are joining homogeneous cliques of other newly out trans girls and not socializing with anyone else. However, this seems pretty out of step with how queer people socialize in my experience2 and impractical at most high schools. Even if a good three percent of a high school is trans, at a (pretty large) 1000-person high school, there would only be 30 trans people, and a bunch of those would be a different gender (e.g., trans boys) or in a different year. (In fact, since Wu is presumably only thinking about who she counts as transsexuals, they're probably even fewer in number.) There's also the fact that there are cis teen girls who socialize exclusively with other teen girls and this usually isn't presented as a problem.
That in fact, is the biggest issue. Why is it bad for trans women to mainly socialize with other trans women but not cis women to mainly socialize with other cis women? I daresay we can probably all conjure up imaginary scenarios where a trans woman—or a group of trans women—have sexualized and caricatured images of womanhood they are aiming for. While these groups have existed, I suspect the ease of imagining that scenario has more to do with transmisogyny than reality.
Look, in a vacuum, is it good for trans women to have cis women friends? Yes! I think everyone is served by having diverse social circles and breaking down the barriers that would separate them. But the idea that trans women need cis women specifically to shave off our rough edges is silly to me.
The rest of this tweet is just transmisogynistic garbage, attributing masculine traits to transfeminine people writ large. Wu might argue that she's saying they were merely socialized male, rather than these being inherently male traits that trans women have due to being biologically male. (She actually does believe trans women, including herself, are biologically male, so who knows.) That interpretation makes it less overtly transmisogynistic I suppose, but is still wrong. People don't respond to socialization, male or otherwise, in a uniform way. I also don't think people "grow out of" past socialization in a uniform way.
It's also just silly and simplistic to act like trans women should definitely want to be resocialized in a "female" way. Outside of attitudes like toxic masculinity, which we could chalk up to harmful socialization, there's nothing wrong with a trans woman deciding to retain the speaking style, nonverbal communication, social role, personality traits, interests, etc. that are male coded and that she picked up from male peers3. For a variety of reasons, wanting to change zero of these during transition is probably not all that common. If she makes that choice, both transmisogyny and good ol' classic misogyny mean a trans woman will be penalized for those traits.
One explanation of this take is that the trans women most visible to Briana Wu do in fact behave in the ways she describes, even if her transmisogynistic explanation is bullshit. This could be because she seeks them out to cringe at or because she spends significant time on Twitter. My suspicion is that relatively few trans people remain on Twitter, and it's conceivable many of those that are left interact in a way that's aggressive and irony-poisoned4. For example, I could imagine some crypto-fascist trans people who spent too much time on 4chan and haven't shaken off their reactionary beliefs might be inclined to stay on a site owned by a fascist. To be clear, these are a tiny minority of trans people, generally, but they might be a noticeable subset of trans people on Twitter.
Relatedly, it's common for people to single out individual posts, selfies, photos, etc. from trans women and misinterpret them. I don't want to do the same to Wu, but when she complains about people learning their identity through "memes," one wonders how much she's jumping to conclusions based on a small number of posts.
One thing Wu is right about is that support for trans rights seems to have receded. Worrying as it is, we don't have a lot of data points, so there's still some ambiguity about how much of a steady trend this is. I'm planning to do some substantial work on this elsewhere. Suffice it to say, her male socialization explanation is probably the least convincing contributing factor and one of the most odious.
Given that I first drafted this post in early June and mostly forgot about it, I have been doing better!↩
Maybe I get invited to the wrong parties, but when I find myself in a social group with other trans women, there are usually also queer people of other genders and sexualities.↩
of course, they may have picked them up from non-male peers or a mixture.↩
Some trans people who seem overall cool and have thoughtful politics still post on Twitter, but I have a sneaking suspicion they may be the minority now.↩
hey friends, gonna start this one off with a request: i’m currently without stable housing and without employment, and i’m in extremely dire financial straits. as of this writing my account is overdrafted and i have very limited options for fixing that. i…
"Title reading 100 Grpahics Recipes for Turbo Pascal on Windows" with "Programmer tips with extras for beginners and the experienced" as a message in the corner.