Stream of random thoughts and ideas I guess
A while ago I had a conversation with a psychiatrist which went something like: Psychiatrist: Sometimes, people with ASD 1 (like you) will interpret a question differently to how it was intended, usually more literally, and then when someone points it out, say “I wasn’t wrong, the question was wrong.” But how can the question be wrong, when 99/100 people understood what it meant? Let me give you…
To me, the 6th of May will always be a day of conflicting emotions. On the 6th of May 1933, the Nazis raided and destroyed the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin, a home of pioneering queer and trans research, medicine, art, and culture. Four days later, they burned its entire collection — including countless irreplacable items and over a decade of research into the same gender affirming…
Beyond the chains of mortal flesh There is a shining light And in that light a figure weeps Surrounded by the night Beyond the chains of brittle flesh There is so soft a gaze Crying out in silent pain Against the fiery blaze Beyond the chains of gendered flesh That bind her soul from you There is a figure shining bright Unbroken, old yet new Beyond the chains of nature’s flesh Another world might…
← Part 4 Almost three years ago, I decided to write a manifesto detailing how I did — and didn’t — want to use technology. Thus began a series of blog posts; by Part 3 a rosy picture was being painted of how well I was doing. Part 4 , the most recent, detailed the biggest remaining pain point as I perceived it (interoperability of messaging systems), and how I had decided to resolve it. That was…
This post is part of a collective action started by Julia Serano. The tides really are turning against us queer people, huh? Across the world, the far-right is gaining power. Even here in the UK, one of the only countries to supposedly shift left recently, it hardly matters — the new Labour government continues to uphold attacks on trans rights and pander to transphobes. And now the Democrats in…
At the Paris 2024 Olympics, women’s sports once again became a political football. Not only is the scientific and public consciousness finally starting to realise that the so-called sex binary isn’t so binary, but the far-right moral panic about trans people has reached such dizzyingly illogical heights that they have started harassing cisgender women because they are too good at sports, or…
Whether writing on science, philosophy, or culture, society demands of us “citationism”. Our works must be referential, placing themselves alongside old ideas, justifying their existence through contrast with or superiority over those ideas. But while citationism is certainly commendable in its quest to avoid repeated thought, in practice it often runs in danger of either suppressing thought…
The gay liberation movement that started in the 60s and the subsequent legal recognition of the rights of minority sexual orientations largely (but not entirely) hinged on the assertion that sexual orientation is not a choice, but innate. Now, this seems to be true for most people, but it’s clear that this was chosen as the narrative not for reasons of science, but for reasons of rhetoric — if…
A little while ago I registered the domain transgirl.fr 1 , mostly for fun but also because I wanted a separate domain to host some public services on, in the vein of catgirl.cloud , private.coffee , projectsegfau.lt and many others. A sizable fraction of web content filtering systems have classified transgirl.fr as porn and blocked it. Oops, my bad, I forgot, us trans women can’t have nice…
Ok so my “I should write a blog post about this” list is getting far too long and I keep ADHDing on actually writing the damn things. I figure I should start a (hopefully regular) series where I write just a little about a few things that could have been a longer post. That way I get some closure and you get some content. Here we go! 1. I built a keyboard Back in 2020/2021 my COVID and/or…
A month or two ago a friend of mine ran a silly little event with a bunch of people where we each drank about six or seven shots of alcohol, and then tried to deliver a presentation using slides we had never seen before, which one of the other attendees had made beforehand. At the time I had just been dealing with a major outage of my main server, which contained a lot of quite important data that…
Wow, it’s been over a year since I last posted here! Anyway, this is my coming-out post 🏳️⚧️. I now use she/her and go by Eleanor, or Ellie, or Ell, or really whatever you like that’s derived from my real name and not my deadname ^w^ More posts coming soon! (A big part of the whole “not posting” thing was that I didn’t want to post under my deadname but wasn’t ready to come out yet, so, yeah)
… but that release when another deadline somehow passes successfully is oh so sweet. This is the daily life of a Cambridge undergrad. No I will not elaborate. “What we leave behind” is why I posted this.
I think my feelings on analytics collected by companies about their users have been made clear — they are usually misused by automated systems to maximise the time those users spend within their walled garden. But this post isn’t about that. It’s about the analytics that might be collected by someone like me, who posts content online and hopes for people to enjoy and interact with it. Analytics…
I wrote and produced my first original song! Well, the first that is going to see the light of day, anyway. Have a listen: "Autumn Wind" I won’t be making a blog post for every new piece of music, so if you want to keep getting musical updates, the best way is to subscribe to this RSS feed or just keep an eye on https://ellie.clifford.lol/music . Producing music is harder than I thought Trying to…
Let me introduce you to a little game I like to call Entropy Bingo. Choose an action that you might take with expectations of anonymity, and try to figure out whether a determined attacker can figure out who you are, by counting up the bits of Shannon entropy they can determine. If it reaches 33 bits (corresponding to the >8 billion people on the planet), you lose, and you have been deanonymised.…
← Part 3 Part 5 → 2025-08-12: I’m not quite as rigid on this as I was in 2022. Read on for more. There are (approximately) two types of people who will read this post: my regular readers (hi!) and people who I’ve sent this link to, presumably after refusing to continue messaging them on their favourite messaging system. This is on grounds of privacy, security, and freedom. Usually, I would…
← Part 2 Part 4 → PS: this blog is now also accessible over RSS here . From my manifesto : 2.0) I will not depend on any proprietary software. 2.1) Proprietary software must be run in an [untrusted sandbox]. Clearly, continuing to use a proprietary Samsung device with a proprietary software additions to Android (as well as some unremovable proprietary apps) is unacceptable. I could have perhaps…
One day, we will all die. What can we hope for as consolation? Where is our meaning in the face of our inevitable doom? Our lives are fleeting, and, in a way, that makes them ever more beautiful. But our finiteness is heart-wrenching too. I hope that some piece of me, of my soul, can live on. Whether it’s in a mediocre blog post, a dusty and almost forgotten book, or an obscure scientific paper, I…
Today’s post is about something completely different from the usual (if there even is a usual). I’ve decided to start recording and publishing the music I’m working on! I’m not trying to become an influencer or a professional musician or anything, I just want my music-making to feel more purposeful than when I’m playing to myself :] If you’re interested, check out my first upload !
← Part 1 Part 3 → Currently in my manifesto it says: 4.2) When transferring data to a person who does not comply with this manifesto or a similar one, I will assume it is public and compromised. This is a bit extreme, and at the moment basically means I would have to consider every message I send to absolutely anyone public. Does that make the whole thing futile? Is it even fair when messaging…
Part 2 → Like many young people, I’ve been around technology my entire life. But until very recently, I’d never really taken the time to take a step back and consider its effects, both on my own life and on society at large. What I’m coming to realise is that historically I’ve placed an enormous amount of trust in very untrustworthy entities: the likes of Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc (and by…
Preface, 2022-10-22 In retrospect, this blog post is perhaps a little too inflammatory, though not incorrect as far as I know. Such were my feelings at the time. I won’t censor myself by editing or removing it (see also “What we leave behind” ), but be warned. If you’d like to see a more carefully considered article around this topic, see Ross Anderson’s paper “Chat Control or Child Protection?”…
Hah! Who says proprietary programs can’t be themed?? SolidWorks never stood a chance. I even edited a DLL with vim. Dracula for SolidWorks You can find the theme with full install instructions here . Why? Despite my comments in this blog post , there are a few proprietary programs which I am tied to, with no hope of escape. One of these is SolidWorks, a 3D Computer Aided Design program used…
Free and Open Source Software is about more than ideology. There are several practical reasons why FOSS software is much better than proprietary alternatives. Here are the reasons that are the most important to me. Note that free refers to freedom, not price 1: Guarantee of future availability The biggest practical problem with any proprietary software is that there is no guarantee that you will…