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Certain hobbies set off warning bells
(slrpnk.net)
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this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2025
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Does programming count as a hobby? I waste my free time on it... There's this funny stereotype, of a queer programmer with long, quirky socks, and maybe even a fursona. Despite being a small percentage, such types are often overrepresented online. It used to bother me a little.
Nowadays I'm so, so glad when someone I'm talking to is part of that group. It usually means I don't need to worry about them being weirdly sexist, like women don't suffer enough in STEM already, or insisting that we need to keep politics out of tech (i.e. they want their politics to rule, unquestioned).
(Need something more tangible? Look no further than uncle bob (skip to the bottom). I've seen his books in classrooms, in the office, and let's not speak of online mentions. Imagine how many respect him, yet have no idea how screwed up he is.)
Silly feelings on my part? Perhaps. One less thing to worry about, though.
The old meme was to "hide your power level". Meaning don't reveal the extent of your right wing beliefs. That has reversed in the past 10 years.
You don't even have to question how it used to be. People were out in the open before too. Another popular meme was that women belong in the kitchen. The "make me a sammich" meme was a common joke. Programming was only possible to be learned by white men. Never mind that women pioneered the field in the early days. Also anyone of Asian descent in the field were merely cheaters or just proficient at copying.
They all drank this weird koolaid about how leftist they were (they still do). It's strange. I think because many guys never left their podunk town. So being exposed to the slightest bit of different things through the internet made them very different from everyone else their christian conservative home town. They supported rather milquetoast things like legalization of pot and carried an affinity for anime. So that meant they were very progressive relative to the god fearing cross burning klan shit happening all around them in real life.
It's such a shame. I feel like programmers were way more left only a decade or so ago.
I wonder how true that is. Maybe they were considered left in their time, but something we see differently today, then. I really should hit the books on this one.
It's a bit of a tangent(!), but Parrish gave a talk I think is relevant here. In Programming is Forgetting (transcript, watching optional), she analyzes a book about hackers from the eighties and dissects the ethics of hacker culture—a very loose definition, mind you.
This is all beside the point, because while interesting throughout what I'd really like to point to is the section on the rewiring of the PDP-1. Agree or disagree with any other, that part made me rethink how I saw older generations of programmers. I consider the dignity of all people an important tenet of my leftist values today, and women then were second-class, even in computing. Even when excelling.
So I feel like things have actually improved overall, but it's difficult to say how much. That really is a shame, it ought to be a lot clearer.
Ah such a sad anecdote. I'm a fan of Hamilton.
I've had to stop watching/reading a load of programming stuff because numerous times I've found out the creator was just horrifically racist, sexist, misogynistic, homophobic or transphobic. It got too tiring having to investigate every author (not that it was difficult, they're usually VERY open about being bigots).
It's wild how on the orange website I can read entirely sensible discussions about tricky Bash semantics or whatever, while people in a parallel thread are seriously arguing the Trump admin's repressions are dwarfed by... whatever "repressions" they think happened during Covid. And I don't even click on the threads about disabilities (especially autism) anymore because it's so predictably sad.
The comment sections are frequently just exhausting. People who read PG blog posts and then make comments pretending to be serious. Lunatics.