Mark Levison @mlevison@qoto.org

honestly

if you think you have a good solution to fixing some social issue

put yourself in the mindset of a Bad Person who just found that system. how would a Bad Person attack it? how would they weaponize the system to harm those it was designed to protect?

if your proposed system requires the people in power to be good people to stop bad things, you should read any history book ever

Herschel never secured his own domain name so I thanked him by using it to build a new and informative website.

https://www.herscheljwalker.com

'There is no doubting the centrality today of Mendel’s ideas in evolutionary biology. The current theory’s foundation, the modern synthesis, depends arguably as much on Mendel as it does on Darwin. The 200th anniversary of Mendel’s birth is thus an appropriate moment for both reevaluating and celebrating his legacy in evolutionary biology.'

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2122144119

I've collected some #Mastodon 🦣 #instances to help with the #TwitterMigration focused in #inclusion, #accesibility and #minorities. They look like safe spaces for most of us. I'd appreciate the boost and new recommendations to add to the list:

🔗🇬🇧 https://ableism.rip/about - space to fight ableism
🔗🇬🇧 https://disabled.social/about - for disabled people
🔗🇬🇧 https://neurodifferent.me/about - neurodiversity and neurominorities
🔗🇬🇧 https://iaccessibility.social/about - interest in assistive technology
🔗🇬🇧 https://blacktwitter.io/about - history and voices for black people
🔗🇬🇧 https://lgbt.io/about - for LGBT+ and allies
🔗🇬🇧 http://queer.party/about - queer-oriented instance
🔗🇬🇧 https://tech.lgbt/about - for tech workers, academics, students, and others interested in tech who are LGBTQIA+ or Allies

Please boost to reach more people!

African black-footed penguins will be functionally extinct in the NEXT 5 years. Unless…we have very short window that’s still open to save Africa’s only penguins. Good news is the window IS still open, great news conservationists know what needs to be done (spoiler it's agile). Now we’ve "only" got to DO IT. And we must. Can’t bear the thought of living in a world without African Penguins. Just can’t.

I’m Steve. I’m friends with penguins. That’s my long-winded #introduction. (and this is Ayoba)

If Harry Potter characters were names of programming languages:

RON - Beginner-friendly language, nice clean natural syntax. Very poor performance, not suitable for production code.

MCGONAGALL - Formal logic language developed in the 1970s. Full of exotic punctuation marks that require a special keyboard. Average developer has two categories in category theory.

DOBBY - Tries too hard to be helpful, overoptimizes everything.

HERMIONE - Fast, performant language but hard to learn. Very strict typing and compile-time exception checking, with compiler errors to tell you that you're doing it wrong before you take someone's eye out.

DUMBLEDORE - Legacy language, missing many modern features and promoting practices now considered antipatterns. Important in its day, but there are better choices now.

DOLOHOV - Developed by the Soviet space programme in the 1960s, surprisingly advanced for its time and now seeing new applications in embedded systems.

PETTIGREW - Low level language, tons of security vulnerabilities. Would not use. Had much potential, but now universally hated.

SNAPE - Java.

GILDEROY - JavaScript.

POTTER - Annoying dev community who go on and on about how great this language is, despite its many shortcomings.

Toronto's curbside patios made 49 times more money than the parking they replaced.

“This is an example of how productive a place can be when we don’t fixate on parking"

“The key is to think of the street not as inherently being a space to park or drive cars, but as public space that can be purposed for any sort of public activity"

#strongtowns #urbanism #urbanization #climate #parking #LivableCities #UrbanPlanning #CityPlanning #toronto #CurbsidePatios

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2022/11/22/torontos-curbside-patios-made-49-times-more-money-than-the-parking-they-replaced

Facebook not had enough of privacy scandals then, apparently.
https://themarkup.org/pixel-hunt/2022/11/22/tax-filing-websites-have-been-sending-users-financial-information-to-facebook

I'm going to say this again - my white friends who aren't racists do not mind me talking about racism. If you find yourself disturbed by or uncomfortable with topics on racism, you may want to tell yourself some hard truths. And then, work on your findings. You may be racist.

I have encountered more image descriptions on Mastodon in 24 hours than I have in Twitter in a couple of years. Seriously. I'm not exaggerating.
As a blind person, this means a lot to me. If you read this and you describe your images, thank you so, so, so much on behalf of all of us. If you don't, now you know you'll be helping random Internet strangers make sense of your posts by typing in a few more words than usual.

“There are a whole lot of ways to be perfect, and not one of them is attained through punishment.”

Ursula K. Le Guin on the art of growing older and what beauty really means beneath the veneer https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/10/21/ursula-le-guin-dogs-cats-dancers-beauty/

I just presented Art Spiegelman with the National Book Award Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, on the same day that PENAmerica put out a letter signed by Art and Margaret Atwood and me, among others, protesting the latest round of book bannings.
https://pen.org/spiegelman-atwood-sign-pen-america-letter-against-missouri-book-bans/