Simon @spoltier@qoto.org

So it really is a time to be curious and not contemptuous in my opinion. There is a tendency to say either that tech is sacrosanct and cannot be criticized or tech is evil and must be obliterated. I pretty much felt the same working with the public education system. Tech is people, at least the parts of it that I am interested in engaging with and for whom I think applied psychology can be a benefit. Some compassionate curiosity about WHY we see utility in "contest cultures" can be very helpful

I'm very into learning programming languages:

a) kind of “badly” — often never learning major features or major parts of the ecosystem, or not using very popular tools
b) with a lot of confidence -- where I feel 100% confident in the limited subset of the language that I do use
c) over a long time -- sometimes only starting to use a 'basic' feature maybe 5 or 10 years in

4/?

Jointly pre-defining what qualifying is, is a known protection against bias later in the process. I think that it's an underappreciated part of this whole thorny problem, the fact that the END of a hiring process can start to warp and introduce uneasy and invisible bias as people start to parse things as differences under the pressure of decision making. Same with grad school admissions imo: it's foolish to act like we are identifying the ten best when the top 100 are completely comparable.

It's also just a way that some areas rigor-wash their terrible, terrible practices that are failing the majority of students. It's maddening to see the status games that some fields play to assert they are too smart, technical, and unique to do things like "be able to teach all the students this university serves not just the ones hand selected by you to be just like you"

As a postscript I've been working on tying together the experience of advocating for change with learning science in public schools and nonprofits and my work on ability beliefs on software teams into a talk I have called "Fighting Dirty for Good Culture" and it has not yet found a home -- would really love to give it at a tech conference sometime 🙌

@b0rk is Python 'worse'? not in any way I can't work around with some elbow grease (for example every library entry point has dynamic handwritten type checks as a policy)

is Python 'too slow'? i recently implemented a naive userspace networking driver in Amaranth and asyncio. I could hit 80 Mbps and some tens of kpps with three days of effort and very little optimization

choice of language is a tradeoff and most people present it as a far more dramatic one than it actually is

#notesArt #mastoArt #art #illustration #typography

@KFosterMarks Love you surfacing this. I think situation selection is often overlooked and is probably the most effective form of self-regulation. I wonder if there is a paper examining it as an even broader strategy.

Personality psych also talks about situation selection in the context of the "Is it the Person or the Situation?" debate.

So ...let's face it. A LOT of folks in tech circles are somewhat amazed a fully #blind person can even find the power button on a computer, let alone operate it professionally. I am such a person, and I'd like to bust that myth.
It's also true that many #hacking tools, platforms, courses etc. could use some help in the #accessibility department. It's a neverending vicious circle.
Enter my new twitch channel, IC_null. On this channel, I will be streaming #programming and #hacking content including THM, HTB and who knows what else, from the perspective of a #screenReader user.
What I need, is an audience. If this is something you reckon you or anybody you know might be interested in, drop the channel a follow or share this post. Gimme that #infoSec Mastodon sense of comradery and help me out to make this idea an actual thing :) https://twitch.tv/ic_null #tryHackMe #streamer #selfPromo

Unexpected quote in the parcel locker when I stored my shopping to go into the Museum of Prohibited Art (airplane tomorrow first thing)

really appreciate everyone who buys corporate licenses for the zines! I always love hearing about how people are using zines to share knowledge about SQL or debugging or git with their coworkers ❤

if you're disabled, consider getting an air fryer.

i've struggled with meal prep for as long as i remember. it's not _completely_ infeasible for me, but it's a lot of effort on the best days, and completely and utterly draining on the worst ones, where every time i stand up pushes me closer to just staring at the wall forever

an air fryer and a pack of single use inserts mean that meal preparation is now a two-step process
1. put stuff in and click start
2. get stuff out
and it tastes nice too

The https://phanpy.social/ timeline browsing experience is genuinely the first time I've actively enjoyed scrolling through my Mastodon timeline, it feels really fresh and the way it groups boosts together is a huge improvement on the default chronological lists from other tools

Things I will really miss:
- plain yogurt that isn’t sour
- beaches! Everywhere!
- zumo
- walking all the places because they are near, and mopeds for the rest
- wild parrots!
- having my CET folks be in my time zone (or me in theirs hehe) for once
- thinking to myself “what is that plant?” And when I look it up 9 of 10 times it’s a cooking herb!
- being asked if I want coffee at 10pm with my dessert, because folks of the Mediterranean are apparently my mom’s flavor of adhd and can drink all the caffeine 🥲

Things I will not miss:
- not being able to say even good morning sometimes because I am having a database error and instead of buen día what comes up is eg bon morning sō desu ne 😳
- apparently being an honorary German
- an hilarious plumbing job I would be obliged to fix if it was in my house (the sink in my hotel room has? No? p-trap? And it would take me like an hour to put one in)
- the apparent expectation you will carry all your bags up AND down allllllll the stairs unless you have a baby carriage in which case the husband carries the carriage, Poseidon help you if you set foot in the elevator under the age of 75 seemingly

Wir suchen eine*n Kommunikations-Manager*in, um unsere (deutschsprachige) Kommunikationsstrategie, Content-Produktion & Markenaufbau zu stärken. Wenn du dich für #OpenSource und Themen wie digitale Daseinsvorsorge interessierst, komm zu uns! Wir haben viel vor 💪 z. B. digitale Infrastruktur sichtbarer und resilienter machen.

Die Bewerbungsfrist endet Sonntag, den 30. Juni 2024.

Wir freuen uns sehr auf deine Bewerbung bzw. wenn du die Ausschreibung weiterleitest!
https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/de/stellenangebote/kommunikations-manager-in

i will try one more time

SEND ME YOUR FUCKING WEBSITE AND OR BLOG I WANNA LOOK AT YOUR COOL FUCKING WEBSITE AND OR BLOG

FEEL FREE TO BOOST THIS REQUEST

Qu’est-ce qui se passe à l’#UNIL ce soir? Tout le secteur Château, Ferme, Grange est bouclé. J’étais tellement perplexe, j’ai oublié de poser la question à l’agent de sécurité.

#Lausanne

if you use git submodules, do you use them in a read-only way (where you never edit the code in the submodule, only pull changes sometimes) or read-write?

You may not know me as such, but I have spent a lot of time moderating a lot of platforms; I spent two years as a moderator for one of the biggest chats on twitch. Megasites like Twitter try as hard as they can to hide moderation and make it seem as fully automatic and neutral as possible, but the reality is that anything more complicated than automatically blocking slurs is emotional labor by a specific human being. If you click "report" on a post, you are saying it is so dire, so urgent, that you need to put up the Bat Signal so Civility Batman (who, on mastodon and many other places, is likely an unpaid volunteer) knows to take the time and energy to swoop in and resolve the situation.

And that button exists for a reason! You can and should click it if there's a good cause. But moderators often find themselves drained by a barrage of "posts/users that I didn't like" rather than "posts/users that are active hazards." They have to take the time to look around and make a judgment call on whether there's something they're missing and it really is a dire post, or just someone being annoyed by a personal pet peeve. I encourage you to keep the human element on the other end in mind when deciding what your personal threshold is for reporting posts. And note, a post can be bad in the sense of "this is not the sort of post we as a community Love To See" without it being "summon the gods of justice" dire.

I will conclude with a funny story: twitch uses (or perhaps used, past tense) ML to detect when specific uncommon words in messages get manually moderated a lot, and assumes that's the hot new slur and begins moderating it automatically. Somehow, I don't know what happened, the word "Sega" got onto this list. I had to manually fish dozens of people out of automated ten-minute mutes for committing the crime of Sega on a video game discussion site.