Brian Beach @bwbeach@social.cleverlibre.org

Basically every skill involves you going through a toddler stage where you're not actually good at it but need to insist on doing it yourself.

I think one of #rust #rustlang 's greatest contributions to the field isn't the borrow checker--it's that marginalized folks openly participate, front-and-center, and are celebrated as they do the work. We are visible, appreciated, and often in leadership positions, and this is all facilitated by the community and the community standards that were set up from the get-go.

Compare to how most of our field works, where so many of the women or PoC we appreciate only get appreciated many years later, when someone digs up an actual story of their contribution that had been buried by, frankly, cis white dudes that sucked the air out of the room for so long.

Meanwhile, you throw a rock and you'll hit half-a-dozen absolutely-essential-and-foundational Rust developers and leaders and everyone knows about them already.

How’s that quote go? When you’ve always been the majority, equality feels like discrimination?

“In a growing nationwide trend, the median household incomes of people of color, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, now exceed those of White people in nearly 200 of the 1,500 Republican-trifecta counties—those in which the party controls the governor’s office and both legislative chambers of state government (see Figure 1). This is a visible factor that has fueled Trump voters’ complaints alleging White people’s diminished status.”

https://www.yesmagazine.org/economy/2022/03/21/republican-conservative-america-angry

Oh god I redid the math on re-entries:

Each Starlink v2 sat weighs 1250kg. They plan to have 42,000 of them in orbit.

Each satellite has a planned lifetime of 5 years. That means they'll be de-orbiting and replacing ALL of them every 5 years.

That comes to 23 sats per day, which is 29 TONS OF SATELLITE every day.

It doesn't go away, it gets added to the upper atmosphere. Most of the mass is aluminum. What the hell is that going to do?

WHY THE FUCK IS THIS OK?!

I'm giving my first colloquium talk on satellite pollution since November tomorrow (online for St Mary's University in Halifax) and I am SO tired of giving this super depressing talk.

So I'm going to to restructure it from "Satellites are ruining the night sky" to "Here are guidelines for sat companies to not destroy the sky, the atmosphere, and orbit." I started this process last time I gave this talk and it definitely felt a lot more positive.

Still pretty depressing though.

Time-wasting on #birdsite meant struggling with anger management issues.

Time-wasting on #mastodon means being drawn into an algorithm-free stream of fascinating human beings and what they photograph, write, sing, film, imagine, draw, paint - or whatever they do.

I've long argued that, if you're looking to comparing programming to anything, then writing laws and contracts is closer than most. I really like how Bruce Schneier frames vulnerabilities in tax regulations

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/02/hacking-the-tax-code.html

Waking up every morning and seemingly finding more bad news on #climatechange impacts doesn't bring an uplifting start to the day but this news must be shared to continue to warn of the irreversible damage we are doing day-in day-out to earth's fragile ecosysytems.

This story from the Guardian highlights a new low in sea ice cover around #Antarctica

What this means is less reflectance of heat from the sun and more heat accumulation in the waters surrounding the frozen continent and therefore more melting of icesheets adjoining the ocean and so the cycle continues.

This is the reality of the current 1.1 degrees C temperature increases - this only gets worse and worse and worse as temperatures increase.

I was asked yesterday what can we do as individuals - I'd suggest our most tractable action is to share the news and research on the ever worsening #ClimateCrisis (painful as it is) and to put pressure at every single opportunity on our governments and opposition parties and especially when new #fossilfuel activities are being enabled, as is so widespread across the world today.

Equally we need to share the progress on #renewables but contextualise this to explain that the latest wind farm and big battery announced is only a fraction of what is needed and that we need so much more during this current vital decade.

None of this is easy and progress to bring change seems (ironically) glacial but the fight to combat #ClimateChange must go on.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/15/antarctic-sea-ice-hits-record-low-climate-crisis

Happy #BlackHistoryMonth !

Still working through white US history.

Q: Why are so many Black folk early adopters of tech like Uber and Amazon? Sometimes this willingness to try new tech early backfires on y'all, like the whole crypto scam. Tech companies don't always love you back. So... why so eager? Is it because of Deltron 3030 and André 3000? 🤔You're... you're going to say racism aren't you?

A: Yep! Racism. And go ahead and add Sears to that list of "technology" companies.

#BlackMastodon

Doubtless you've heard that "we all get the same 24 hours in the day." Of course it's not true: rich people and poor people experience very different demands on their time. The richer you are, the more your time is your own - not only are many systems arranged with your convenience in mind, but you also command the social power to do something about systems that abuse your time.

1/

You should be able to exercise your #GDPR #DataRights directly in the chat prompt. “I want to access all the personal data you have on me after your verify my identity” “ok thanks, now delete it from your model, and untrain yourself on it” #SyntheticMedia #ChatGPT
https://theconversation.com/chatgpt-is-a-data-privacy-nightmare-if-youve-ever-posted-online-you-ought-to-be-concerned-199283

And now NBC News has an excellent article out on the homophobic smear campaign targeting #gigisohn

Still crickets from the White House and Senate Democrats...

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/fcc-gigi-sohn-nomination-turns-ugly-rcna68224

We are all stardust.

That oxygen you breath? That comes from dying massive stars, ending their light in a supernova.

The iron in your blood? Some massive stars dying, but mainly white dwarfs, the leftovers of dwarf stars like our own Sun, exploding.

The gold ring on your finger? Mostly merging neutron stars, leftovers from supernovae.

#astrodon #scicomm #astronomy

Perhaps some of the readers of this fine thread (https://mastodon.social/@Sheril/109729242613811062) will be interested in a diversion into statistics? It turns out that while you can easily calculate the average of a population’s various dimensions (age, region, etc.), it turns out that the number of people who are “close” to the average in more than a few dimensions becomes vanishingly small. This strange feature of high-dimensional vector spaces surprised people when they looked for the “average woman” most resembling Norma, a sculpture of a woman with average features (none were found who were close to average in all ten anatomical measurements), as well as the US Air Force when they found that 3-sizes-fits-most approach to designing airplane cockpits didn’t fit anyone but caused crashes (https://www.newscientist.com/article/2076608-the-end-of-average-tells-us-why-we-should-discard-a-mean-idea/ has the Norma story, https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/ed/15/08/beyond-average is a nice recap of the pilot story, and here’s the popular podcast you might have heard this from https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/on-average/).

In this case, because so many of these variables are correlated, you can definitely imagine at least a few Chinese-speaking Christian adults living in urban Asia who are literate but didn’t graduate college, and who don’t have Internet but do have shelter and safe drinking water. But even though you can visualize such a sub-population and know it’s size is non-zero, I think it is notable how thin a sliver of the whole it is. The average person in all these dimensions is quite unusual and interesting!

(Math nerds will also enjoy revisiting the fact about higher dimensional spaces where, as the dimension increases, all but the most infinitesimal part of the volume of a spheroid is along its shell. I and many others discovered this through Richard Hamming’s book “Art of Doing Science” but here’s a YouTube lecture of him delivering the same discussion! https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uU_Q2a0S0zI) #Hamming #statistics

Oh hey, I just realized that with so many new people I'm connecting with many of you may not be aware of the be my eyes app. If you find yourself with extra time and just want to give visual assistance to someone over video, it's a free app that connects blind people like myself with sighted volunteers. I've used it for all kinds of things over the last few years.

“Give Cyclists Space”

I just got successfully phished for the first time in 31 years of internet use. I'm mortified, but also fascinated by the unique combination of factors that contributed to my successful hoodwinkery. #LiveAndLearn

“True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.” (#MLK Beyond Vietnam, 1967)

https://sacobserver.com/2023/01/some-lesser-known-yet-still-powerful-mlk-quotes/