timorl @timorl@qoto.org

software: no one knows what you do, and everyone who does including yourself hates it. there are limitless niches of valuable work to be done — valuable in a social sense, as open source of course goes unpaid — but most such niches are so obscure that the necessary connective tissue required to form the greater whole will never materialize, unless done by capitalists, who will ruin it.

writing: everyone writes. everyone writes better than you. everyone writes so much that editors beyond number are bored of stories better than anything you’ll ever write. they are so bored that even joking about the boredom is cliche. when you receive a $20 check for a work you spent a month shopping around, you will feel grateful. but at least it is much harder to write anything deadly than it is in software.

Tech opinion: we need a Linux of phones

And I don't mean like android or like an actual Linux distribution for phones, I mean the same approach to mobile development that's taken to Linux development, which is make shit that works on the worst of devices, have a million forks for users to pick from, try wacky stuff and weird configurations, and let me touch every single part of my device

Two of my friend once wrote a paper that was vaguely related to intelligence, and they got it in to a quite big IQ research conference. They came back complaining how racist the whole thing was. So far, so good, maybe they are just SJWs confronted with actual Science™ for the first time, and seeing slightly shifted Gauss curves made their snowflake hearts melt into tears. But they went into considerably more detail and... yeah.

One of the main parts of the event was a talk from an invited guest, clearly revered within the community. The talk was about differences in IQ between races, and at the end the presenter went into a rant, including claims that it can be inferred from the IQ curves and the distributions of jobs in the US that the average black neurosurgeon should be an office drone (this part might differ slightly in details, as I'm relaying from memory what my friend was relaying from memory, but the gist should be intact). Now, considering that black neurosurgeons are AFAIK not disastrously incompetent, we can infer that the person giving the talk had trouble in their relation to reality in one of the following ways:

1. The influence of IQ on neurosurgeon ability is far smaller than they believed.

2. The differences in IQ are far smaller than the research indicates.

Obviously one can ask "¿Por qué no los dos?", and I suspect that is the correct answer. Influence of IQ on personal success is hard to prove (the attempt I know of produced no evidence of this, while producing evidence that average IQ correlates with quality of life within a country), and it's a simple fact that personal beliefs of researchers are biasing studies in nontrivial ways (there are some famous ESP studies that had very hard to explain and apparently unintentional problems). Considering the latter, the fact that the IQ research community (or at least a significant part of it – I'm not sure whether this was _the_ biggest IQ conference, but it was definitely mainstream enough) seems to be reality-defying racist implies that their results should be taken with a grain of salt.

And yes, I only mean a grain not completely discredited – they seem to try following proper methodology and sometimes get credible effects that are big enough that they cannot be completely explained away by their bias. Just don't believe any titles or abstracts automatically, you have to dig deeper to actually learn something.

@velartrill

Za godzinę na Nowolipie 2 demonstracja przeciwko policyjnemu bezprawiu; aresztowaniom za plakaty, uniewinnieniom za morderstwo na Stachowiaku, zastraszaniu demonstrantów...

RT @RexChapman@twitter.com

“Everybody’s trying to shame us.”

🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/RexChapman/status/1270461722420183040