Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

Can't help but feel like a bunch of small/mid-sized companies are increasingly making the NixOS community their personal battleground, and I hate it

The various replies I've been getting to my Congress COVID thread are certainly a very good illustration of why I do not "trust in the [orga] process".

And if you don't have an answer to "how will the supply chain have been improved if my company folds tomorrow", then you're not rescuing the supply chain at all, you're just running a business

Like, all the systemic industry-wide security issues weren't solved with More Capitalism the last 3 times people tried that either, and in the end it was always some frustrated unpaid random creature with an angry blog post who did the actual work, if it was ever solved at all

Not so excited about the sudden explosion of "supply chain security startups" whose sales pitch seems to basically be that we can solve systemic problems with FOSS dependency security and funding by just Buying Their Specific Magical Product, rather than a commons-based solution.

It's also extremely telling how many people seem to be much angrier about me causing a stink, than about the prospect of vulnerable/disabled folks being excluded.

Also, something I want to clarify: my criticism isn't and never was towards those in orga who were trying to keep the event safe for everybody. I recognize that some of those involved in the orga will have tried their best. My criticisms were specifically about those who didn't.

Update: it's just been announced that (centralized) Congress will be cancelled this year: https://ccc.de/en/updates/2022/no-congress-2022

Mixed feelings; I would have liked to see it continue with safety measures, but this is certainly better than continuing it with *no* measures.

The alternative suggested in the post (smaller local events) is probably a good one; the overall risk should be much lower there. I'm also more optimistic about Camp; with it being outdoors (= lots of natural ventilation), it would be much easier to limit the spread.

From what I'm hearing, the plan is to organize this year's Chaos Communication Congress in an absolutely packed venue with *zero* COVID measures because the orga doesn't care about even *trying* to find workable solutions.

This would be grossly irresponsible and unacceptable. And as usual, vulnerable people are being thrown under the bus.

"Being inclusive is good, sure, buuuut maybe vulnerable people just shouldn't come for a few years."

This is not good enough. Fix this. There are *so many* possible solutions, see eg. the MCH2022 measures.

Encourage people to self-test, and provide free self-tests for those who cannot afford it. They're cheap in bulk now.

Tell people to wear a mask, even if you can't 100% rigidly enforce it. Public health measures are not all-or-nothing, it doesn't *have* to be perfect.

CCC folks speak loudly about inclusivity, but that requires actions, not just words. Pretending that COVID doesn't exist is ableist and needlessly harmful.

If the Congress orga go through with this, I will not go to #37c3, and neither should you.

I think we all know how widespread hacker pest is every Congress, so you're almost *guaranteed* to be exposed to COVID at #37c3, with all the consequences that that entails - including serious risk of chronic disability and, y'know, *your brain* not working right anymore.

And yes, this is information from the grapevine, but this needs to be talked about *now*, before things are set in stone and the only response we'll get is "sorry, it's already decided". I'm sure that the orga will be able to issue a clarification if the policy changes.

Wrote a little library that can be used to do relational queries on linearly-ingested larger-than-RAM datasets, demonstrated here on the (tiny) GTFS sample data feed: https://gist.github.com/joepie91/a1b702e693202653f0d94483e844dd43?ts=4