Mx. Aria Stewart

I write. Words, programs, poems.

Anti-totalitarian. Anti-individualist.
Talk to me about community, queerness & unschooling.

Under 18: interact freely, don't let anyone take your right to your world from you.

If you reply to me, I will probably have a conversation with you. Be warned.

See also https://better.boston/@aredridel (urbanism), https://wandering.shop/@aredridel (writing)

I run a large Women in Technology chat group. Ask me about it!

#IU570

searchable

Pronouns: they/them
I live in: Witch City, MA
Words: https://wandering.shop/@aredridel/
Stuff: https://dinhe.net/~aredridel/

Public Key

npub1lsa6jvsj25dfrrfen0edjghfmzffahhqdrp823nr5mavnmrm5e6qtxmpp0

NIP-05 Address

aredridel_at_kolektiva.social@momostr.pink

Profile Code

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relay.damus.io

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Last Notes

2026-05-10 20:57:23 UTC

Periodic reminder that “rate your pain on a scale from 1 to 10" is bullshit without reference points. People with chronic pain, tough guys, people with intense periods, and people who struggle with interoception all struggle when the endpoints are nebulous.
Let me introduce you to the DVPRS: https://www.va.gov/WHOLEHEALTHLIBRARY/docs/Defense-and-Veterans-Pain-Rating-Scale.pdf
It even works if you substitute pain for general impact. If you're asked to rate a symptom on a scale from 1 to 10, this works too.
0 = No pain
1 = Hardly notice pain
2 = Notice pain, does not interfere with activities
3 = Sometimes distracts me
4 = Distracts me, can do usual activities
5 = Interrupts some activities
6 = Hardto ignore, avoid usual activities
7 = Focus of attention, prevents doing daily activities
8 = Awful, hard to do anything
9 = Can’t bear the pain, unable to do anything
10 = As bad as it could be, nothing else matters
10 is still pretty subjective there, but "nothing else matters" is clear enough, and really 9 or 10 isn't really a big difference in how much it matters clinically. (It tells the clinician if an intervention helps though)

2026-04-07 16:40:44 UTC

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Now that's onto something! I'm thinking of some things like https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-ai-writing-witchhunt-is-pointless/ — people acting on information they fundamentally cannot know as true — is something that both groups do; the conspiratorial nature of a broken infosphere plays into both aspects.

2026-04-07 15:49:16 UTC

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Yeah you're not actually engaging with what I'm saying.
Why _can't_ those things be compared? Why can't one look at mechanisms? Is extremism itself bad or are you arguing that only one is? What are the effects of this?
There's no victim blaming going on here — and in fact "victim" is a weird rhetorical stance for some of this. It's a binaristic way to look at something that's a complex system, and where you draw that line is a rhetorical choice and not actually one that is inherent to the space.

2026-04-07 15:32:45 UTC

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You're sure responding to some arguments I wasn't making.
And in particular, the rhetorical styles of 2016-era MAGA do have some familiar tones being repeated. Understanding that and asking why is worth doing!

2026-04-07 14:43:35 UTC

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And like, we're probably more aligned than disaligned, but the conversational norms like this are so destructive, it really moves people away.

2026-04-07 14:41:08 UTC

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And there it is. Takes like this are part of the problem.
Artificial divide created, then defended. Setting the terms of the argument in tribal terms, rather than looking for systemic understanding and context.
Strawmen thrown in and soundly defeated, but the actual reality never engaged with. Just enough hints at truths to ring a bit.

2026-04-07 14:24:37 UTC

RE: https://mastodon.social/@dpp/116363401562033481
This has me wondering.
Honestly, flooding mastodon with horrible-level and vitriolic anti-AI takes would be a good way to drive people toward AI acceptance. It won't work on everyone, but it'll capture influential, thoughtful people.
#note1l7x…qruv

2026-04-06 13:28:56 UTC

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I cannot figure out Steve Yegge. He can't even figure out himself. He's said some interesting and useful things but also whoa nelly is there a bunch of weird in there too. Definitely not a source to cite without care and context.

2026-04-01 15:17:24 UTC

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Honestly I don't actually hate this.
It's a tool. The _user_ is responsible for what they're submitting. It's putting code generated by them in their name. I think this is actually good.

2026-02-12 18:53:35 UTC

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This arc forms a circle (or actually an upward or downward helix, depending on who you surround yourself with)

2026-01-15 23:56:50 UTC

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I see we've gone from "Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism" to "Totalitarian Authoritarian Space Communism”

2026-01-15 23:55:13 UTC

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Wait injustice in your justice system begets more injustices? Say it ain't so.

2026-01-15 23:53:49 UTC

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Mmm prisoner abuse. Another win for this utterly _stellar_ so-called Federation.

2026-01-15 23:52:57 UTC

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Yeah buddy don't trust the techno-fascist judge and jury.

2026-01-15 23:51:06 UTC

Not starting off strong with a justice system with no defense advocate causing secondary harms by applying justice.

2026-01-12 02:41:39 UTC

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That's the thing! I do think code should be free (ish ... I'm far from a GNU/Zealot); but making it specifically corporate-friendly is in fact a thing that came later in my career. That was the change — in fact it was the ‘open source' and 'open source definition' stuff that really kicked things that direction.
GNU is crusty but there was a point buried in it. I think we should excavate it and do it even better now.

2026-01-12 02:39:43 UTC

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Yeah I'm of real split mind on how good that monetization is. I don't actually think the trend has been healthy: it's not like the underrepresented people are particularly having luck with that, and it's undermined just how communal open source work has been in the past. But it has enabled some things.
I actually deeply disagree that it's at odds with human nature: I think it's deeply entwined with human nature, and trying to monetize it has moved it _away_ from that.
But “MIT-licensed off the shelf components for corporate systems” is not in fact the thing there. It's the GPL-inflected community projects like Slackware and Debian and early GNOME and GIMP and all the weirdo mesh networking stuff that's really the thing.

2026-01-11 20:56:00 UTC

RE: https://phpc.social/@syntaxseed/115855415960085751
I have such conflicted thoughts on this.
What happened? Gross. It's very much a harm as a systemic effect of "AI"
But also _open source industry_ is in fact a thing I think has been deeply destructive and somewhat replaced the collectivist work done before. We could go back to that. That was good stuff.
But TailwindCSS is super popular.
I also think it's a bad technology, meant to undermine the foundations and design of CSS, leading us to technically worse places.
Also the business? It is selling themes and components.
That's a really hard business to be in. The time to buy a license comes in a project's lifecycle too early, so people avoid it. It's a weird business. Not one I think people should plan to have work.
#note12yh…j84w

2025-10-21 14:37:11 UTC

Maybe the core point behind Kubernetes is "how can we get young men to yell at clouds too?"

2025-10-05 00:48:41 UTC

I keep realizing that one of my main differences in behavior is that I don't let fear of loss keep me from connecting with people nor existing comfortably in places.
It plays out in some specific ways. I'm usually the first to volunteer to lend something, and I'm willing to (and in fact most excited to) lend whatever it is to someone I don't know. I know I might not get it back. It’s _fine_.
I'm willing to leave my bike locked up in a part of the city where it might get stolen. It won’t, probably but it might. And that's fine. Annoying, but fine. It's cheap enough to replace. Expensive enough to suck but it's fine.
What I'm tilting at here though is that the constant vigilance to make sure things work out okay and the waiting for low-risk situations cuts us off from a lot of things. Better to have a bit of a "well fuck" budget. Go do the thing. It'll probably be fine. if not, well, it sucks, but ... it's fine.

2025-08-04 01:24:05 UTC

remember folks, when you read "microplastics" think "bits of tires in the air"

2025-07-22 00:52:12 UTC

Okay folks, what's your underrated movie that is one of your faves?
Mine's Fast Color (2018). https://letterboxd.com/film/fast-color/
Gorgeous, a little understated, but well paced. Not nearly enough people have seen it.

2025-05-29 15:20:08 UTC

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Yes! But I'm on team "fix the infrastructure to stop prompting that": they drive worst on wide roads, even more so with ambiguous lane markings. While people theoretically could do better, the road does in fact set the tone.

2025-05-29 14:25:55 UTC

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Yeah :/ and yet that means in practice all bikes are nerfed and you can’t use them safely in some circumstances. Capability isn’t behavior.

2025-05-29 13:12:51 UTC

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I have such mixed feelings (as a rider of a 750W peak bike, and as a massive person)
It makes it so much safer to interact with cars. You can go faster and in some contexts that’s great. It also lets you reach power that can hurt pedestrians a lot. You can climb hills effectively.

2025-05-02 17:56:39 UTC

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Let this be a lesson: my point about editing above goes deep. It's not just about writing words and editing words.
It's about decisions of any kind.
While deliberative paralysis is a thing, when you make "do" easier than "deliberate" (and increasingly tip the balance toward "do"), what happens is what's easy, not what's good. It is an accelerator for all kinds of things, a great many of them bad, and even more suboptimal.

2025-05-02 17:52:29 UTC

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On top of all of this there's a meta-effect: a certain class of their best engineers want no part of this and have left. The people with the peak insight that simplify things and unify products into cohesive, useful systems are leaving.

2025-05-02 17:51:42 UTC

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I'm absolutely certain they are reaping massive developer efficiencies with Copilot.
I do not believe they are building value with it.

2025-05-02 17:50:32 UTC

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I'm asserting now that Github has crossed the event horizon into Enterprise Software. Complex enough that any bug is your fault for not reading the right docs and flipping the right configuration flags. The experience will keep getting worse. People will use it because they have to not because they want to. It will become the MS Teams of scm-devops-hosting-stuff.

2025-05-02 17:49:15 UTC

Watch Github for what happens for companies that go all-in on AI.
Notice all the details that are wrong now. Notice the docs. Notice the confusion between different interfaces. Notice the UI jank in new places. This is what happens when engineering decisions are made by default instead of discussion and planning. This is what happens when writing (already easier than editing) becomes even easier without improving editing.

2025-04-18 03:59:44 UTC

I really miss the 90s TV where everyone had figured out that it was TV and not a play or movie, but everyone still had done stage acting, actors leaned on character and projection, and camera angles were still such that people faced the camera slightly rather than everything being tight shots, over the shoulder back and forth for conversations. It's so much less cloistered even on a shitty 90s sound stage. 

2025-02-06 03:48:01 UTC

Just relaxing by fixing up epub files to actually look nice as you do

2025-01-27 03:46:59 UTC

Oh my god y'all the Section 31 Star Trek movie is so bad. And I'm an unrepentant "will watch the odd numbered films" person.
It's so bad I can't even be mad at the corruption of the ideals of Star Trek that Section 31 represents.
This movie is absolutely a grab bag of success formulas for movies tossed in a blender. It is the pizza steak avocado and orange juice smoothie of movies.
It's like you take the Fifth Element, Ocean's 11, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (the movie), Guardians of the Galaxy, and the JJ Abrams Trek movies, toss 'em in a blender, and take out the good parts.
Michelle Yeoh is not enough to save this movie. Jamie Lee Curtis appearing as a cyborg is not enough to save this movie.
I can usually enjoy any movie even if I come away with notes.
I did not enjoy this movie. It wasn't suffering to watch because it was so bad it was easy to blot out the idea of it ever being considered canon, but it was in fact terrible. This movie is midichlorians bad.

2024-12-25 00:37:29 UTC

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Yeah. It's just so tedious to see everything and have to ask "is this vapor or real?". Like part of the point of marketing is to make things real :P

2024-12-25 00:24:25 UTC

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Yeah but if they say what it is I know whether to roll my eyes or look deeper. If "AI" wasn't such an empty term it might actually be useful.

2024-12-25 00:11:20 UTC

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The core search engine is very good and open source!
Really wish they hadn't bolted "AI" on so vaguely because the underlying bits are great.

2024-12-23 19:54:39 UTC

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So you go to pick out insurance for the next year. You need the certificate of coverage, the list of what they pay for and how much and when, so you can make an educated decision about your healthcare costs.
It's not on the web page. It's not available anywhere. you email HR. They get back to you the day before the enrollment period ends. They send you the summary document, not the detailed one. You wait on hold for an hour to get them to send you the detailed certificate. They don't have it, and don't know who to call.
It's now 6pm, and the insurance company is closing shortly. You just want the plan document. They offer to mail it to you. It’ll be 7-10 business days. Plus transit time. You escalate to a supervisor, and say you just want it emailed. They refuse at first. Then they finally take your email address. Then they hang up and say they'll send it. They don't.
You pick a plan somewhat at random and hope your needs are met. It is, after all, the last day to choose coverage.

2024-12-23 19:51:08 UTC

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Oh, and that doctor that you love that has finally, finally paid enough attention to your vague but omnipresent symptoms and actually gotten you some relief and taken you seriously and made things better.
Might be out of network with the next health plan. So you switch doctors. There's an 11 month waiting list for new patient appointments. There's a nurse who can see you next week. Oh, but she can't renew any of those prescriptions, a doctor will have to deal with that for you. Oh, there's an 11 month wait? Well we'll write you a prescription this one time so you can continue it while you wait. Oh, still can't see a doctor yet? Well get on the phone and wait a bit and we’ll maybe write you another prescription.
Oh, but you can't be on the phone at work, and you're there 9-5, and the doctor's office is only open from 9-5, so ... oh no. That day you get sick with the flu is the day you stay home from work and alternate sleeping and calling doctors and health insurance.

2024-12-23 19:47:17 UTC

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If you are working in the service industry, your insurance often changes with every job. If you change jobs mid year, you pay a second deductible. That's a surprise fee.
Oh, and the biggest employers? they can and do self-fund insurance plans, which can exclude a lot of things that state law otherwise requires. State law mostly can't touch self-funded plans.
You might only find this out when it's too late.

2024-12-23 19:45:10 UTC

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And if you're poor, Medicare is really really good. But your assets are on the line if you need a care home, and in kind of an opaque, vicious bureaucracy that sometimes fires up and takes everything. The rules are complex, and you'll spend a lot of effort arranging things so you (or your heirs) don't get screwed.

2024-12-23 19:44:07 UTC

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If you get seriously ill, and you have insurance, they'll probably pay for most or all of the care.
You will, however, be on the phone for yourself or a loved one for 20, 30, 40 hours, while trying to work, while being treated for a serious illness.
You'll be documenting leave and getting doctors to sign things. More time on the phone. You'll be appealing a denial, you'll be delayed a week in starting a treatment because someone was sorting out whether or not they'd pay.
And with insurance tied to employment, you'll be trying to stay working or maybe taking official leave. But some employers won't want to pay insurance, and everyone will screw something up. Any of which can break your coverage.

2024-12-23 19:02:00 UTC

It's not about healthcare _costs_ in the US (though sometimes those are ruinous.)
It's about the inhumanity and complexity of the system.

2024-12-08 18:54:10 UTC

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youtube-local ftw. Not perfect but it helps so much

2024-12-06 22:02:36 UTC

Mastodon affordances are _fascinating_ sometimes. If you post something that's semi-viral, asking a question or something, and then edit it, enough people get a notification that it actually makes edits an interesting way to communicate.

2024-11-21 21:33:59 UTC

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Aren't CGMs fascinating?!
I remain skeptical of the rings (I say, wearing a Colmi R02 right now), especially with the noise in PPGs, but ... intriguing! And in combination, super neat!

2024-11-09 23:11:28 UTC

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Just throw some partials filters or formants on there and run wild

2024-11-08 00:42:14 UTC

Well I guess now's the time: It's time for me to #getFediHired
I'm a software engineer with 29 years of experience. In more technologies than one person usually encounters. I've been working in Javascript and Typescript for a while, but don't let that fool you: I do rust for fun and I'm down in the guts of the runtime in C++ if I have to. I’m fixing include paths in C header files and managing deployments and doing system level tracing. I do embedded programming for fun, and I've picked at the system level APIs of everything from MacOS to Android. I can cleverly hack my way past problems, and isolate the resulting tech debt with a good explanation and the conditions under which it can be fixed.
I leave every codebase neater than I found it. I can manage awkward technology transitions, and I can bring a fair bit of open source know-how to bear on things.
I'm a team-oriented, consensus-focused person, but confident executing on my own and iterating from there. I will boldly start and show a prototype if that's what it takes. I'm not easily bored, so if it just needs a heavy lift, I'm here for that too.
I've worked in PHP, Python, Perl, Java, Javascript, Ruby, Lua, Rust, C, C++, Vala, Scheme, and a dozen more languages (and I'll learn any new one I need to) and have written truly unfortunate amounts of hardened, careful bash.
I've installed and built VoIP platforms with Asterisk integrations, I've built mail servers and custom authentication. I've built FUSE filesystems for fun, and I'm always after ways to make software simple, durable, and reliable.
Working remotely ideal, Boston/Cambridge is possible.
Got a team that could use me? Hit me up. aredridel@dinhe.net. Resume and letters of recommendation available on request (you really don't have to take my word for what I'm capable of.)

2024-11-06 18:47:01 UTC

Don't obey in advance. That includes hiding.

2024-11-04 04:46:24 UTC

clientsiderendering.jpg
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/113/422/865/601/631/234/original/988f1fae824d437d.png

2024-11-02 19:45:20 UTC

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pro-ana has been around a loooooong time. Like, from well before Twitter existed. It's got some deep, horrifying hooks into mostly young women and some really persistent memes to reinforce it.

2024-11-02 18:54:29 UTC

Don't make me tap the sign.
A sole proprietor with no employees, or who hires others for their expertise, and they have the realistic ability to refuse a bad deal, and who reap a fair share of the profits of the endeavor is not the evils of capitalism.
A person who rents out rooms in the house they own is not a landlord in any meaningful sense.
The evils of capitalism come from control of a marketplace: unfair terms of employment that can't be refused and give others the value we create, the monopolization of real property and extracting wealth from others via rents, and the monopolization of marketplaces so you have no option to choose a competitor meaningfully.
But to aim our hate at the working class who get a little ahead in this fucked up system rather than the systemic, manipulative and dominating powers that be is the eating our own we've been warned of.

2024-10-31 23:48:28 UTC

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I mean, it's a social construct built in opposition to an already extremely epistemologically shaky group construction.
We can't even identify the most obvious kinds of "neurodivergence" with any reliability, don't know what they are particularly, and the concept is so tied up in cultural notions of what's 'normal' that it's useless.

2024-10-31 14:05:35 UTC

Y'all know neurotypicals don't exist right?

2024-09-29 02:00:24 UTC

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Okay that is an amazing project and I want it but also wow what a monstrously large apparatus!

2024-09-28 15:32:31 UTC

Alright mastonerds: I want to get some Very Bright Lights for winter SAD season.
I'm also very CRI-sensitive. I can tell the difference between CRI 80 and CRI 90 for sure. I actually want to be able to read, paper, not always with amazing contrast, under this light.
Whatcha got? Who makes the least expensive way to get 100,000 lumens of CRI 90+ LED lighting? Bonus points if they actually state more than just the Ra CRI figure or there's actual spectral data available.
I've been looking at "corn" lamps with all the COB LED chips, but they usually have dismal "80+" CRI (that means 80 :P)

2024-09-17 16:12:26 UTC

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I've been trying to keep tabs on the link, and it's got only like 6 days left — but it's fine. I'd love a link to the post just so I can gauge who's interacting.

2024-09-11 18:09:28 UTC

For those that don't know, I help run a giant women in technology slack group (more than 10,000 members!)
It's not just open to software and computer folks, however much that's the main group.
If you're a woman in biotech, in industrial science, in manufacturing or engineering, any technical field or technical line of business, you're welcome to join. It's very big tent about 'tech' and 'woman' both.
HMU for an invite

2024-09-06 15:12:28 UTC

Dear Paypal: putting my "legal" name on a public fundraiser page is Not Cool.
(it's not even my legal name anymore, it's the one on my credit card which is a pain in the ass to change)

2024-09-03 23:47:47 UTC

Periodic reminder:
Pennecillin became available in 1942.
The first successful organ transplant in 1954.
The first antiviral drug became available in 1963.
Modern anesthesia became available in 1980.
Extreme poverty has declined to about 10% of the global population in 2015, from more than 30% in 1990.
Not everything in the modern era has been bad.
We have to figure out how to do this without wrecking the planet though.

2024-08-20 21:35:07 UTC

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I mean most of the people i know who studied writing in college did it to get good at it. (And the purpose of uni as job training is actually kind of a new idea. Maybe I’m old and liberally arts inclined but …)

2024-08-20 20:38:33 UTC

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I remain deeply skeptical of that. The lack of clear writing in journalism is a problem we already suffer from.

2024-08-20 12:08:44 UTC

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I'm so firmly against, because instructing something on what you want to see is not writing, particularly. It's not making the choices, it's not choosing an audience, nor communicating to them. It's so much more indirect. It's like high level editing, which is a whole different skill, and like most things generative, it blocks the path between 'bad at thing' and 'great at thing'.

2024-08-14 17:11:39 UTC

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Yeah, I figured. I just know that doing reader mode then a refresh to load the whole HTML bypasses a LOT of js-based paywalls.

2024-08-14 17:04:13 UTC

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Does reader mode then refresh work to get you pages like it does in Firefox?

2024-04-19 14:52:41 UTC

To everyone who's participated in Women Who Code: it's not a replacement, but I help run a giant Slack community for women in technology. We're 15,000 members strong.
Ping me for an invite.
https://witchat.github.io/ for more info.
(Yes, we are trans and nonbinary-friendly. If you think you should belong, you almost certainly do.)