During much of the magnificent Nina Simone's "Mississippi Goddamn" there are people chanting "too slow" in the background. I think of that whenever I am having these sorts of arguments with myself.
All the people suffering in the background because I'm too afraid of upsetting the status quo and inconveniencing those in power.
Am I working to protect the powerless against the powerful, or the opposite?
One, maybe obvious, lesson the last few years has shown me is that there is a strong correlation between immigration and xenophobia.
There is a certain rate of change that society is willing to tolerate before there is significant backlash.
Maybe those of us who are, generally, in favor of migration should try to determine that threshold rate of change and take steps to ensure we don't surpass it.
me writing programming tools: we need to make it easier to code! liberate the code! make it accessible to all!
me debugging someone else's code: you should need to train for 10 years before you can even touch a text editor, and we need a central guild body that randomly audits members, and if your code quality is bad enough you are immediately executed
one time i wanted to mess around with a dataset that had been released under a really weird non-license, like "you can look at the spreadsheets but if you touch them you better get permission!!", so i contacted the research team to ask if i could include the data in an open-source project. the lead researcher replied, deeply skeptical of """open""" """source""", convinced i was the agent of some rival academic despite the dataset being publicly readable already.
academia is weird.
Have been playing around with smart contracts lately and I had the thought that in a world where major life decisions and purchases are mediated through smart contracts and consensus networks, we'll need something more substantial than a button press.
Signing documents has a certain amount of emotional weight and ceremony to it that clicking a button does not.
People are much less likely to sign away their property than they are to mistakenly click it away.
I have trouble relating when people describe themselves as not a 'computer person', or otherwise treat computing as some sort of black box magic.
It seems obvious to me that computers and programming knowledge can extend human cognition and agency just as much as reading and math.
I'm sure both those domains were thought of as an academic field unnecessary to the commoner for a long time. I think thats were computing is today.
Sorry for yesterday's outage everyone. Previously when I was making a change to the cron file I had mistakenly changed the cronjob that renews the ssl certificate so that it didn't run often enough. An expired ssl certificate is what caused the outage.
I enjoy the idea of running something that people rely on to communicate and I am equally ashamed when I disrupt that communication because of a small, silly mistake.
the virgin airplane:
- have to show up hours early
- crammed in seats like sardines
- energy inefficient
- flies through the air in a terrifying defiance of the will of God
the chad train:
- roll up to the station 15 minutes before departure like a boss
- can move around freely and stretch your legs any time you want
- low stress
- easy to enjoy the scenery as you travel
- moves along the ground as the LORD intended