Rowley @Rowley@qoto.org
Vocation: Oceanographer developing numerical modeling/data assimilation/coupled ensemble forecast systems on #HPC platforms mostly using FORTRAN/ksh/python.
Avocation: Mentor/coach for grade 7-12 FIRST #FRCrobotics and #FTCrobotics competition teams, so jack of all trades in/adjacent to closed-loop control and navigation, computer vision, digital graphics, CAD/CAM, 3Dprinter/laser cutter/CNC router and other shop fab. #omgrobots
Joined Oct 2022
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More evidence of my naïveté: I honestly thought political media would care far more about women and girls dying due to lack of access to abortion care than they would over a U.S. Senator wearing a hoodie to work. Serves me right.
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just got told off by a repeater owner for saying "CQ" instead of "monitoring"
boomers really want to kill #HamRadio don't they
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Basically, I disable (or don't enable) pretty much every generative AI "feature" that anybody throws at me, because I care about human creativity, accuracy of information, and have no desire to participate in what at this point is an utterly exploitative, garbage ecosystem. #Google #Microsoft #AI
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Due to global warming, Vivaldi's Four Seasons have been reworked so that the Summer movement is 30% longer and played fortissimo, winter is 10% shorter and played pianissimo, with some random bars played sforzando, to account for the slowing of the North Atlantic Current, and both Spring and Autumn are now played very quickly and with abrupt changes in key, indicating their chaotic nature.
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To be honest with you, I'm actually very tired of talking about racism on fedi. I am! Believe it or not, I am.
You know, I have other things I could talk about. I could talk about education or mental health, which is actually my field of expertise. Or I could talk about BG3 or Wheel of Time like all the other fantasy nerds. I do have interests, I'm not just some fucking discourse machine here!
That's actually, like, what I came on this space to do, you know? Have fun hanging out and talking to people who share some of my interests or relate to me???
But my attempted fun time keeps being interrupted by bullshit all the way from microaggressions to stalking (some of you, by the way, are very... shall we say, unwell? yeah) and ANYWAY.
It's very frustrating because I can't hardly turn around on here without some asshole reciting talking points you could have found in Derailing for Dummies over 10 years ago.
Our Anti-White Grievance of the Day today is (get your white supremacist bingo cards ready, folks)........APPROPRIATION!
And just in case you're going to pretend you don't believe me, I'll give you a previous example and the current example. For the ones that need their hands held.
Our previous example is the word "woke". Woke originated with AAVE some time ago and more recently, in the past several years, has been distorted into almost unrecognizability as an anti-black dogwhistle. How did this happen, you may ask? Why, it's not complicated at all: the covert racists found out a word Black people were using and copied it! Now, similarly to how these instances of racist telephone typically go, they took the word but lost some of the nuance from the term. This led to them frequently misusing it publicly. And once that had started happening, why there was nothing for it but for the overt racists to go ahead and coopt it from the covert racists (who they are obsessed with, by the way) so they could have their dogwhistle term du jour (politically correct was starting to wear out). This dogwhistle, mind you, has very little to do with its original usage, but of course they can't tell the difference so they don't care. And so we can see how this was an example of appropriation.
Our more recent example of this phenomenon is none other than the nasty little number lots of you are tossing about right now, fedi HOA. I'm not the first person to point this out of course, but since when have white people bothered listening the first time? For 10 ally points, can anyone in the class tell me the history of homeowner's associations, housing, and white supremacy? Anyone? Well, in case you don't know, feel free to look it up. Throw in redlining, the wealth gap, and the GI bill while you're at it. Those who do so or are already aware, you can understand why a lot of Black folks who tried fedi have spoken about the feeling of HOA-style treatment they received. Some of you were even the ones doing it! And now, in EXACTLY THE SAME WAY AS THE PREVIOUS EXAMPLE, several of you white fedizens started to use the term fedi HOA. Only it's not quite the same thing when you all use it. Lost a bit of nuance, hasn't it? You're not actually talking about a historical comparison of systematic racial discrimination in physical space to systematic racial discrimination in digital space, are you? No, you're using it to mean that Black people and people of color are creating and enforcing boundaries that you don't like.
So, you can understand why that's not the same thing, right? Some of the nuance got lost in the shuffle? Now, can someone tell me (for 50 ally points this time!) why that's bad? Can anyone identify how appropriation enabled antiblack discrimination in both cases? Anyone at all? How about how abusive it is to get this aggressive over someone else's boundaries? No? Yes?
Great. Well, at least you learned something.
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The nice thing about this Presidential administration is that as a voter, when the President's son fucks up, I don't actually have to care deeply because the President didn't hand him political power by appointing him a special advisor to anything.
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⚠️”Earth’s life support systems so damaged that planet is “well outside of safe operating space for humanity”, scientists warned.
Their assessment found that 6 out of 9 “planetary boundaries” broken bc of human-caused pollution & destruction of natural world. The planetary boundaries are limits at which key global systems, such as climate, water, wildlife diversity, beyond which these systems’ ability to maintain a healthy planet is in serious peril” #ClimateCrisis
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/sep/13/earth-well-outside-safe-operating-space-for-humanity-scientists-find?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
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New at The Watch:
A sappy, self-indulgent, cliched, and absolutely necessary tribute to my recently deceased pup
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Here's the Guardian's take on our paper, published today: "Earth ‘well outside safe operating space for humanity’, scientists find"
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Piñata Economics, I like it, I will now dedicate my life and entire personality to it
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My four-year-old was reading Isaacson’s Einstein: His Life and Universe when he turned to me and asked gravely, “Daddy, why doesn’t the media trust Musk’s prudent Starlink restraint?” And when I told him “Because Jews turn the masses against true geniuses,” he started to cry.
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Texas' government just spent $31.7M in the middle of a heat wave and energy shortage.
No, not to provide fresh shelter to the homeless. Neither to install booths with free fresh water. Neither to increase the number of public spaces (outside of shopping malls) where people can gather, instead of burning energy to keep their homes cool 24/7. Neither to boost its investments in renewables and pivot away from the oil that it keeps digging.
No, the government just gave that money away to Bitcoin miners to convince them to turn off their energy-hungry machines, so everybody else can also use energy to keep themselves cool.
Let that sink in. Even a life-threatening heatwave can't get miners to behave cooperatively and turn off their machines, whose only purpose is as pointless as randomly guessing a number whose SHA256 hash satisfies a certain arbitrary numeric constraint - and they skim some profits out of these pointless puzzles just because someone decided that putting up a system with such perverse financial incentives was a good idea. In order to get them to behave as someone who's not a complete selfish sociopath and evolutionary failure, the government had to compensate them for the losses that they would make by turning off their computers.
I guess that today's capitalism is that system where it's actually ok for the government to spend public money - as long as that money goes to those who need it the least.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bitcoin-mining-cryptocurrency-riot-texas-power-grid/
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Washington Post's most ardent practitioner of normalizing extremism found a report that supports the "both sides" bullshit that pervades Big Journalism.
It is infuriating, but it's so damned standard -- even now when democracy is on the ballot next year and the new fascists stand a frighteningly good chance of winning.
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Comment about Mitch's freezing
'To everyone upset that people are cheering for this man's apparently declining remember what Mitch said to Obama when he was trying to explain the immense benefit public healthcare would provide:
“You must be under the mistaken impression that I care.”
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I just heard someone refer to a certain politician as "Kentucky Fried Palpatine" and spat out my coffee.
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I really appreciate hearing denunciations of racist murders by Republican politicians who spent the last six years saying racism doesn't exist in America and demonizing millions of people protesting it and passing sweeping cookie-cutter legislation to outlaw any mention of it in history books and inspiring their neo-Nazi fans, who 100% agree with these positions and policies, to gun down black, brown, Jewish and LGBTQ people in malls, clubs, supermarkets, synagogues and dollar stores.
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A few years ago i had the idea for an 8bit Tom Waits video game that's actually a full retrospective of his works and i still think about it a lot.
It starts off as a like a bluesy jazzy noir, then shifts to like a weird dreamlike quest across a country, then this whole section that's just like "What If CARNIVÀLE, but like… REALLY fucked up? Like I mean, what if CARNIVÀLE and TWIN PEAKS got pregnant in the Black Lodge, and SATAN was the baby's godfather," at the end of which you have to run a chase across a frozen pond in the shape of the name ALICE, and just when you can see the other shore ,you fall through the ICE, the you have a brief stop in Hell and Wonderland where you can only get to the BLOOD MONEY section if you make it all the way through the "Poor Edward" level and search for the secret doorway to hell inside the teardrop coming out of one of his Devil Twin's eye; but if you do, you wake up on a boat on a blood red and phosphor green and grey sea, sailing to a new land, which is exactly the land you came from, but Changed; you walk into a diner and spend one whole level just glowering at Iggy Pop until he blinks and leaves; then the rest of the game you teleport and fight and bindle beans cook your way from railyard to junkyard until you claim your crown as Hobo King.
I think that'd be pretty fun.
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All of my spaghetti code is open sauce
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@sonyasteele @Incognitim
The fecklessness of federal officials quoted in this piece validate the mindset of wannabe Ubermensch techbros that they are simply smarter than the agents tasked with regulating them, so deserve to win.
It didn’t have to be this way.
Vocation: Oceanographer developing numerical modeling/data assimilation/coupled ensemble forecast systems on #HPC platforms mostly using FORTRAN/ksh/python.
Avocation: Mentor/coach for grade 7-12 FIRST #FRCrobotics and #FTCrobotics competition teams, so jack of all trades in/adjacent to closed-loop control and navigation, computer vision, digital graphics, CAD/CAM, 3Dprinter/laser cutter/CNC router and other shop fab. #omgrobots
Joined Oct 2022
