Brian Beach has moved @bwbeach@qoto.org

Alaska Says It’s Now Legal “in Some Instances” to Discriminate Against LGBTQ Individuals
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On the advice of the state’s attorney general, Alaska’s civil rights agency quietly deleted language promising equal protections for LGBTQ Alaskans against most categories of discrimination, and it began refusing to investigate complaints.

#Alaska #LGBTQ #CivilRights #Discrimination #SCOTUS

https://www.propublica.org/article/alaska-drops-lgbtq-discrimination-ban?utm_medium=social&utm_source=mastodon&utm_campaign=mastodon-post

Comment I just left on a PR: "YES!! I love this, always love to see more smaller functions, and this is a really nice self-contained chunk of logic to break out. Excellent call."

This is your semi-regular reminder to call out the good things in code reviews along with the changes you're suggesting! Coding is an inherently human endeavor, humans have feelings, and that is an attribute, not an inconvenience to be optimized away.

Also, this applies to many other feedback-oriented scenarios too, I imagine. When interfacing over digital mediums, I can always use more reminders that there's a person on the other end.

@pluralistic we frankly need a huge tax on virgin plastic to reflect the externalized costs it involves

Very good look at the variety of problems with automated decision making for social services, credit ratings, predicted recidivism, etc.. Products exist doing these things right now, and there are no regulations or checks.

The systems are flawed and dangerous; resulting in deaths, false accusations, imprisonment, children being taken away, and more.

#ML #ExpertSystems #SocialJustice

Against Predictive Optimization https://predictive-optimization.cs.princeton.edu/

Let's all use our outside voices as we shout once again:

The law that protects hate speech on the internet is *not* Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

The law that *actually does* protect hate speech on the Internet is the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/23/your-simple-solution-to-section-230-is-bad-julia-angwin-edition/

"I think that if you're going to dump on something in the way many people do about ORMs, you have to state the alternative. What do you do instead of an ORM?"

I've only had this tab open for months. I love this: https://martinfowler.com/bliki/OrmHate.html

This is your regular reminder that “pre-crime” is a lie. Using surveillance to predict crime does not work and disproportionately targets marginalized people and communities.

https://www.crikey.com.au/2023/02/22/auror-crime-intelligence-surveillance/

Kudos to Coinbase for publishing this fantastic write-up on social engineering. Really would love to see more orgs normalizing their wins (because make no mistake about it, this IS a win).
https://www.coinbase.com/blog/social-engineering-a-coinbase-case-study

legit cannot believe I have to keep saying this:

if bigotry isn’t a dealbreaker for you…

you’re tolerating bigotry and are part of the problem

Twiddler: Configurability for Me, But Not For Thee

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

#platformEconomics #enshittiffication #critihype #freedomOfExit #Fediverse #Mastodon #Twitter #configurability #monopoly #BigTech

New blog post: https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2023/02/19/good-category-bad-category-or-tag-dont-bucket/

Over on the birdsite, some people have been discovering geometric packing problems, about how small of a bounding shape you can draw around some number of a smaller shape.

(Sometimes the solutions are really beautiful, you see. And sometimes, um. See attached.)

I'd been unable to find this page I remembered about these. Turns out the professor who maintained it retired, so the old links to it broke. But it does still exist! So you too can experience the rollercoaster of https://erich-friedman.github.io/packing/index.html

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.