Zach Faddis @zacharius@refactorcamp.org

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?

The opposing argument is that maybe these times of upheaval are necessary for drastic change. And that we should be reaching for drastic change instead of doing just as much as society is currently willing to bare.

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.

Something I haven't been doing enough that could help is boosting posts by outside accounts, to introduce quality global accounts to my local friends!

Also I'm sorry I haven't been very active here lately.

In my defense I haven't been using much social media at all lately, so it's not like I'm choosing someplace else over you guys.

Going through my timeline it seems like there isn't much interaction between the local instance and the global fediverse. This is somewhat concerning.

what's your ratio of global to local interactions?

R.I.P John "Jack" Bogle

This man pioneered passively managed, low cost index funds and created the first investment company, Vanguard, that is run as a cooperative. Meaning that it is owned by the investors. No man has done more to make investing accessible and lucrative for average American.

Test Driven Development is to software engineering what double entry is to accounting. They seem unnecessarily tedious at first, but eventually you'll realize it's the only way to not have bugs everywhere

Github requires you to spell out a repos name before deleting it, this makes mistakenly deleting repos rather unlikely.

What other methods are currently employed to give digital actions more pomp and circumstance?

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.

The story of Santa coming down the chimney was originally propagated by orphanages and work houses in the mid-18th century to help make children more comfortable and excited climbing into and cleaning chimneys.

At the time many family less children were employed as chimney sweeps, with the wages given to the orphanages. Whether this was an economic necessity or child exploitation is hotly debated to this day, with the likely reality being somewhere in the middle.

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.