Paul Ganssle @pganssle@qoto.org
Programmer working at Google. Python core developer and general FOSS contributor. I also post some parenting content.
Joined Nov 2019
Paul Ganssle
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Hello! A brief #introduction - I’m an Asst Prof at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. I study organizational principles of #neuralNetworks. We study #neuralCircuits underlying #motorControl, #sensoryIntegration, and #decisionMaking across species. We also develop methods for synapse-resolution #connectomics. Looking forward to learning more!
Paul Ganssle
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#qotojournal
I'm a PhD student obsessed with bio-based nanoparticles, so I'm trying my hand at 3D printing seaweed using at-home supplies. The troubleshooting is intense. Creating an at-home lab without funding is VERY HARD. Mashed seaweed was OK to print (with cellulose nanocrystals), but optimization? Yikes. Would love any tips !
This week is my son's school's first "lockdown drill". I was hoping I might have more time to lobby against the idea of doing these things at all before then. 🙁
In the meantime, I'm just going to keep him home to do duck and cover drills instead. 😅
Relevant link: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hgpbwzvm4gYsioPsh/against-active-shooter-drills
Paul Ganssle
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If you've been on here a bit and you're liking the group of folks you're following, be sure to periodically export that list and save it somewhere safe.
Settings > Import and export > Data export
One of the (scary but rare) downsides of decentralization is that if the instance you're on goes down permanently for any reason, you'll lose your account. It's customary for the admin to give plenty of notice if that's going to happen, but better safe than sorry.
Paul Ganssle
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@tekwizz123
These lists are unreliable and are usually the result of 3+ generations of "just import this guy's list trust me bro", and the reasons given are things like "the usual" or "no tos" or "anime profile picture" or "peers with an instance I don't like"
As an example, my single user instance are on both of these lists. Who knows why it's there. Good luck trying to get off of it.
@aut@sideslip.social @nova Yeah, I think certain folks (notably the mastodon.technology admins) didn't like that qoto doesn't usually do full instance bans, particularly for certain reasons, and banned qoto for that reason, not because it actually affects any of the servers who refuse to federate with them.
It's not like federating with qoto brings in posts from other instances they federate with, especially not ones that are actually banned.
By the way, if you are starting up your own fediverse server, it may be tempting to blindly copy someone else's block list, but some corners of the fediverse have been a bit over eager with full instance bans, in my opinion, which tends to break the whole federation model (imagine if you couldn't email anyone with a certain university's email domain because your email provider disagrees with the university policies).
If an instance is putting a lot of irritating stuff in your server's global timeline, it might be better to just mute them from the global timeline.
@nova Would be nice if qoto.org were not on that list. We're a nice instance.
@hynek To be clear I mean like the kind of podcast a med student would listen to to immerse themselves in the field, or that a doctor would listen to to keep up.
@graingert If you literally want one click, I think you're out of luck, since any sane provider will have you at least select the services you want.
I guess you can install vimium and then you don't have to do any clicking at all. 😉
@graingert I dunno if it covers everything, but Bernard Tyers uses cloudron, and that seems pretty convenient: https://www.cloudron.io/
@kushal I've been running #archlinux for long enough that I'm a bit set in my ways, but #fedora would be my next choice of distro.
I'm thinking I should dip my toe in the water by using fedora as the base image for some of my docker containers...
Paul Ganssle
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here's a free tip for all the #TwitterMigration people:
mastodon ONLY has text search for your toots, and the toots of people you follow, nothing beyond that, so you MUST use hashtags for others to be able to find things you post. And don't be afraid to use them - unlike the hellsite, mastodon doesn't limit your reach in any way based on how many hashtags or links you use in your posts :)
oh, and there's an edit button too 
Something interesting I noticed on Mastodon vs Twitter after being on both for several years: posts get way more meaningful engagement here (per capita) than on Twitter.
I have an order of magnitude more followers on Twitter, but other than the occasional outlier, my posts here get similar numbers of likes, boosts and replies as they do over there.
It's an interesting phenomenon, and I wonder if it will continue if more content is actually being generated on this side.
Paul Ganssle
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New introduction, given we have lots of new folk.
I'm Naomi, formerly chair of the Python Software Foundation, Python coder, team lead, & author (Quick Python Book), recently retired.
Current interests: what makes communities work (or not work), learning classical guitar, and art (which is why I'm on mastodon.art :-) ).
Sometimes I close my eyes, make some scribbles, and then see what it turns into, which is how I came up with this lovely creature. Isn't she cute?.
Cartoon eye contact
Paul Ganssle
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Anyone know any data journalists who hang out on mastodon?
@trinsec I use it for interacting with the people and institutions that don't use Signal, which is most of them...
A huge amount of the value add of Signal was that it is "SMS that gets encrypted when the other person is using it, too."
Now it's a proprietary messaging app where you have to use your phone number as your username, which is, not nearly so attractive.
So for all the people who I convinced to start using Signal because it works as an SMS replacement, sorry. 🙁
Programmer working at Google. Python core developer and general FOSS contributor. I also post some parenting content.
Joined Nov 2019
