Iris Meredith

It is once again time for me to reintroduce myself, I think. I'm Iris: I write a blog at deadsimpletech.com/blog about the impacts of the tech industry on culture and humanity in general. I also work as a technical consultant and coach/mentor in the data, infrastructure and web spaces.

I'd usually say that this was ideological or an attempt to discipline workers, but at this point I think it's just "no thoughts: head empty".

You know, it occurs to me that if a trans organisation just sent Kash Patel a case of whiskey, it might actually have a positive effect.

On one level, yes, this is very, very bad. On the other, it's Kash Patel who'll have to implement the bulk of this, and well...

"I do not know what weapons Victory Day 2026 will be celebrated with, but Victory Day 2027 will be celebrated with sticks and stones" -Albert Einstein

Just finished watching the Victory Day livestream. Holy Shit. Even though everything in the anglosphere is falling apart and I'm trying to make some kind of life for myself in the wreckage, I still feel happy seeing Russia reduced to... this

If we want people to behave morally, we *badly* need to find some way to help people actually survive while doing so.

Some people on here could really benefit from saying nothing when they have nothing worth saying.

I'm not entirely clear what there *is* to say about the latest round of gerrymandering in Tennessee? We need to pack the court more and arrest more people? I don't know, anything that isn't "the people responsible need to spend the rest of their lives in prison" feels like a waste of breath

Look, I took this advice and now I have an audience of analytic philosophers. Which is great and all: you're all lovely people. It's just not a particularly practically useful audience to have.

You know, I'm not entirely against the dominant ideology of the latter half of the 21st century being transgender Islam with socialist characteristics. Now, what school of Fiqh should we be adopting? I'm mostly sold on the Maliki school myself...

I think this website really needs to stop being so fucking tedious about politics all the time. We seem to occupy a good part of our time figuring out how to make already very bad things seem even worse than they actually are.

Honestly, yeah, probably. As shit as LLM-generated code is, I think I'd still trust Claude over Accenture

Folks, is a country suddenly losing over 6% of its population something that's likely to be good for said country's economy?

If you're at all into this kind of fiction, you should definitely go support Sunsette/Cynthia. She is extremely capable and is dead serious about doing the best writing work she possibly can.

Chesterton stands triumphant again. The fuckers really *will* believe in anything

I am both a ) Polish and b) drink more than is strictly healthy. Which is to say, I am far from a puritan and I've seen some really serious drinking problems in my time. I... holy shit, this is bad.

Can we get Mamdani to make some more mock-ups? They seem to work.

It’s @bretdevereaux.bsky.social who has made this point better than I could but there’s something lost when people don’t aspire to be better educated, informed, etc than they are at any given moment. (it’s not the amount of knowledge, it’s the striving, and the aspiration towards it as a good thing)

There is a reason why I write and maintain a Patreon and the whole "make money from content" infrastructure. Even when you're a well-educated, well-adjusted trans woman who can pass for neurotypical at least some of the time, it's brutal for us.

What makes it particularly frustrating for a lot of us is that, as I've discussed in my last article, the tech just doesn't get the outcomes that it claims. It writes the kind of code that kills people down the line, and nobody seems to care.

Never take anything seriously Never challenge the views of "good blokes" For the love of all things holy, don't claim to know anything

I think the least favourite part of my life at the moment is the gap between sending out invoices and them being paid. Just a truly wretched, stressful period of time

One ring to mog them all, One ring to maxx them...

I would appreciate if the USA does Woke 2 soon so that we can emigrate there, because right now New Zealand seems to be going the way of discount Trump and unlike the USA, I don't see a path back to a good society here

Is it just me, or is Catholicism increasingly taking on aspects of an ethnoreligion?

I have to admit, I often wonder how much medical shit I've dodged simply because I did a couple of courses in biomedical engineering back in the day (EngSci and Biomed lived in the same department for whatever reason) and that means that I can speak doctor well enough to get taken seriously

The paranoid mode of politics in the world is getting to me. Nothing can ever be what it is; it *has* to be secretly and maliciously concealing something else.

Woke 2 is queer Ukrainians using Lockmart-derived missiles to kinetically protest Russian oil production.