No Tools for You: A Century of Men Policing Women’s Tools
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@adafruit Mastodon: famous for our love of CEOs and male founders
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@paulywill Know much about the Luddites? What they fought for?
You think Luddites were against technology
That seems to be the story the capitalist bros want to sell you.
Could do well with a bit reeducation. They were not against technology. They were against technology being used to oppress labor.
Being critical of big tech's grip on us is not a bad thing. Not falling for a "tool" based on theft and absurd resource usage, that doesn't even have a functioning business model because it is too dang expensive to maintain, is not equal to learning to use a hammer.
We could all learn a thing or two from the Luddites.
And claiming that being skeptical to using AI is "anti-woman" is an insult to all the woman in tech that battle real sexism every day.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-the-luddites-really-fought-against-264412/
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No Tools for You: A Century of Men Policing Women’s Tools
In 1925 a doctor said vacuum cleaners will make women lazy. In 2026 mastodon dudes said the same thing (and worse) about a woman engineer using a tool to make a CAD part.
https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/02/16/no-tools-for-you-a-century-of-men-policing-womens-tools/
@adafruit@fosstodon.org You think that we don't know that you have used AI for your blog and doxxed someone's location on Bluesky.
You deserve the hate -
@adafruit i have been an adafruit fan for many many years and regularly recommend adafruit boards to students and colleagues. but this post (which honestly reads like something you'd find on the heritage foundation's web page), combined with the knowledge that adafruit is now regularly using unreliable technical tools for their boards and firmware(!!), has finally flipped my mental switch from "these are good folks" to "don't order from them"
@aparrish I've been watching her recent LLM work, along with the Teensy debacle, with a lot of sadness and frustration. But to be honest, the media lab (where I first knew of her work and met her while I was a student) does a terrible job of preparing people for a critical approach to technology. I got basically blacklisted for wanting to read critical and feminist STS while a student. So many of the problems of the lab can be traced to not learning these histories and theories.
I can't understand how many people still think it's okay to use Claude, even if trained on your own data, given the relationships between Anthropic and the military, not to mention its theft of dozens of my friends' writing. It's so frustrating.
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@aparrish I've been watching her recent LLM work, along with the Teensy debacle, with a lot of sadness and frustration. But to be honest, the media lab (where I first knew of her work and met her while I was a student) does a terrible job of preparing people for a critical approach to technology. I got basically blacklisted for wanting to read critical and feminist STS while a student. So many of the problems of the lab can be traced to not learning these histories and theories.
I can't understand how many people still think it's okay to use Claude, even if trained on your own data, given the relationships between Anthropic and the military, not to mention its theft of dozens of my friends' writing. It's so frustrating.
@aparrish plus, I still don't know how people have resolved for themselves the open source licensing issue with LLMs. If the model is trained, in part, on (A)GPL code, shouldn't the generated code itself be licensed similarly? It would be just so appropriate if the outcome of all of this was everything being generated by LLMs is deemed to be (A)GPL licensed.
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Not every tool is good
One of my heatguns was recalled for fire risk
I sent it in
It was a bad tool
LLMs, Gemini included, are also bad toolsIf I had to double check my cake mix for poison every single time I used it I wouldn't use that cake mix
Or eat a cake made from itYou're failing to recognize WHY people are rejecting LLMs and things made with it
They're bad tools
If a robot vacuum cleaner does a good job but has a 1% chance of eating my cat it's not allowed in my house
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No Tools for You: A Century of Men Policing Women’s Tools
In 1925 a doctor said vacuum cleaners will make women lazy. In 2026 mastodon dudes said the same thing (and worse) about a woman engineer using a tool to make a CAD part.
https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/02/16/no-tools-for-you-a-century-of-men-policing-womens-tools/
@adafruit hey quick question if you asked limor to vacuum and she said she didn’t want to, would you tell her she’s being misogynistic against herself and better get the fuck to it or would you use some other bullshit manipulation play to make her think and do what you want her to
or do you just reserve that kind of crap for us?
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@aparrish plus, I still don't know how people have resolved for themselves the open source licensing issue with LLMs. If the model is trained, in part, on (A)GPL code, shouldn't the generated code itself be licensed similarly? It would be just so appropriate if the outcome of all of this was everything being generated by LLMs is deemed to be (A)GPL licensed.
@zeitkunst if nothing else, the prevalence of LLMs has been useful in how it reveals whose commitments are paper-thin when it comes to the idea of open culture and the commons as a way of enriching everyone (and not just the already wealthy)
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@aparrish plus, I still don't know how people have resolved for themselves the open source licensing issue with LLMs. If the model is trained, in part, on (A)GPL code, shouldn't the generated code itself be licensed similarly? It would be just so appropriate if the outcome of all of this was everything being generated by LLMs is deemed to be (A)GPL licensed.
@zeitkunst @aparrish even funnier, at the moment anything produced with an llm is public domain.
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No Tools for You: A Century of Men Policing Women’s Tools
In 1925 a doctor said vacuum cleaners will make women lazy. In 2026 mastodon dudes said the same thing (and worse) about a woman engineer using a tool to make a CAD part.
https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/02/16/no-tools-for-you-a-century-of-men-policing-womens-tools/
@adafruit ok, this blog post is embarassinng. a person being called bad for being a captain planet villain is wild. -
No Tools for You: A Century of Men Policing Women’s Tools
In 1925 a doctor said vacuum cleaners will make women lazy. In 2026 mastodon dudes said the same thing (and worse) about a woman engineer using a tool to make a CAD part.
https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/02/16/no-tools-for-you-a-century-of-men-policing-womens-tools/
@adafruit I can't speak for others, but to me the problem wasn't with the gender of whoever did the slop. Don't make this about something it isn't about.
People are royally fed up with the "AI EVERYWHERE" stance, no matter who does it.
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No Tools for You: A Century of Men Policing Women’s Tools
In 1925 a doctor said vacuum cleaners will make women lazy. In 2026 mastodon dudes said the same thing (and worse) about a woman engineer using a tool to make a CAD part.
https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/02/16/no-tools-for-you-a-century-of-men-policing-womens-tools/
@adafruit "When a man uses an LLM to generate boilerplate code, he’s a savvy early adopter, a start up founder, a guy ahead of the curve."
No, he's a plagiarizing piece of shit. -
@adafruit@fosstodon.org as a woman I am offended that you'd compare the actual bullshit our foremothers faced under sexism to people pushing back against AI, a "service" that's buggy, harmful, ecologically damaging, and being used as a tool in class warfare to push people out of their jobs, something that disproportionately happens to women and minorities first.
You should be ashamed of yourself.@deathkitten Check @adafruit blog, there are a lot of articles about using #LLM in electronics "design". If they are going to adopt LLMs, then there are no surprise that they are trying to whitewash it as much as possible
, using all available methods.When I was learning electronics at university, drawing such simple electronic schemas and footprints was a key to be able to do much more complex things with EDA. Outsourcing this mental work to Plagiarized Information Synthesis System is a literally: "you will learn nothing and be happy"
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No Tools for You: A Century of Men Policing Women’s Tools
In 1925 a doctor said vacuum cleaners will make women lazy. In 2026 mastodon dudes said the same thing (and worse) about a woman engineer using a tool to make a CAD part.
https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/02/16/no-tools-for-you-a-century-of-men-policing-womens-tools/
@adafruit 😬 yikes
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Look for recertified or reconditioned drives 🙂
@simonzerafa @magic_smoke Their prices will rise up too. I monitor used hardware prices and saw how used DDR5 memory prices in my region already became higher. The same will happen with HDDs too, I think.
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No Tools for You: A Century of Men Policing Women’s Tools
In 1925 a doctor said vacuum cleaners will make women lazy. In 2026 mastodon dudes said the same thing (and worse) about a woman engineer using a tool to make a CAD part.
https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/02/16/no-tools-for-you-a-century-of-men-policing-womens-tools/
@adafruit I will never, ever, buy a product of yours ever again.
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@magic_smoke @adafruit I am sitting next to 12x 22TB drives that have been running for 3 years now, all official refurbs from Amazon, not a single bad sector
Out of probably the ~30 drives I've purchased refurbished over the last 10 years I can only remember one that arrived in poor condition (click of death) and it was immediately replaced
Just don't buy them from shady sellers on eBay would be my recommendation.@feld @magic_smoke @adafruit none of this makes the status quo acceptable
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@feld @magic_smoke @adafruit none of this makes the status quo acceptable
@Linza @magic_smoke @adafruit what do you propose the solution is, some kind of "government controls the entire market for fairness"? That doesn't scale, has never worked in the history of mankind. It's just supply and demand. The market will balance this out in time, price discovery is working as it's supposed to. -
@Linza @magic_smoke @adafruit what do you propose the solution is, some kind of "government controls the entire market for fairness"? That doesn't scale, has never worked in the history of mankind. It's just supply and demand. The market will balance this out in time, price discovery is working as it's supposed to.
@feld @magic_smoke @adafruit nice straw man you got there, did you need me for this conversation?
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@feld @magic_smoke @adafruit nice straw man you got there, did you need me for this conversation?
@feld @magic_smoke @adafruit Have fun collapsing the biosphere with your neoliberal shit I guess lol
Gli ultimi otto messaggi ricevuti dalla Federazione
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@sio mi sa che anche l'umano verrebbe bocciato
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@muffa pensa alle povere tartarughe che vivono in pianura.
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@muffa La minaccia mannaggia
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Nadine Navigates a Gullywasher
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Telecamere di RaiNews24 al Centro Ricerche ENEA di Frascati. È in arrivo una puntata di #FUTURO24 dedicata alla fusione nucleare
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Awkward... I think there's a regression in the NodeBB codebase that broke NodeBB-NodeBB federation.
..... :sweat:
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@vanacksabbadium Siamo due fissati di Dune, io e Federico. :D
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Yes, it also disappoints me at times, because I see lots of effort over trying to figure out how to engage AP developers better — with minimal results, and meanwhile the Bluesky people are just seemingly having a ball over there riding on inertia.
In addition to work I'm doing trying to improve interop between threadiverse apps, I do try to help by providing DevOps style support for those looking to integrate AP.
Perhaps there's more I can do, I just don't know what it is.
