Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

i was maybe a bit surprised but not really. there are a bunch of privileged people in this network and it's mostly insufferable white liberals who will make excuses to not give money to people and who do believe in meritocracy deep inside. it can be undone but it's a lot of work. you might not even see each other's posts even.

so yeah, of course there's is money, they are just not being spent on mutual aid

I’ll add some personal bonus information to why I’ve come to think opening a git issue is peer review.

I started my PhD by beginning to develop little software/hardware tools by myself. I could “finish” them off and get a publication out of it (actual academic currency) and leave it at that, as happens ever too often.

Yet, I believe that we (the scientific community) need fewer projects, that are (1) better maintained, (2) with a larger community and (3) better adoption. I think this is crucial to ensure not just future reproducibility, but also that skills we researchers acquire (and learned how to use a piece of software is a skill that takes valuable time) will benefit us for much longer.

So what I decided, instead, I re-aligned, and decided my efforts were better spent contributing to existing projects that were *almost* what I needed, but not quite. Rather than committing code, I’ve written countless detailed feature requests and bug reports, spending countless hours coming up with minimal reproducible examples to help the developers pin down issues. I’ve worked closely with a number of project maintainers improving their projects (at least I think so) without contributing a line of code.

I think it’s the best decision I could possibly have made. It means the software that is already used widely (or that I think will be) improved, and personally I have had so many great interactions because of it. But there is no formal way this adds *anything* to my CV - grant applications, job applications are completely unaffected by what I consider some of my most important contributions to science as of now.

I feel like the one of the lowest level human internet problems we haven’t solved is how to be around millions of people, many of whom vocally disapprove of at least some of our thoughts and actions, without letting our hyper-social status-sensitive primate brains either melt or devote themselves to arguing that all our positions are the right positions for everyone.

Like yes, some algos are bad, but we also just built structures we can’t quite handle and are perma-mad at each other about it.

The deeply frustrating thing about this is that I also believe we have to be able to find our people in the big morass of the world, so I can’t accept that the Dark Forest/group chat model is the way forward, which is why I am spending all my available time and brain on this stuff. 🙃

i could go on, but it's just a small fraction of what i went through. it's an unimaginable amount of pain and i am genuinely fucking in awe and confusion how the fuck am i even still alive right now. it's something i went through, nonetheless, and i can't change it, but i hope that one day i can be happy, somewhere.

calling that "trauma porn slop" is spitting on everything i just described

@scanlime "we look forward to contacting you again when our HR system has a data breach"

Braziliaanse veehouder krijgt boete van 47 miljoen voor ontbossen Amazone. https://nos.nl/artikel/2530367-braziliaanse-boer-krijgt-boete-van-47-miljoen-voor-ontbossen-amazone

re-upping this one again

so many forms of writing are rendered nearly useless if they have no info on *when* they were written

https://infosec.exchange/@0xabad1dea/109768393609628133

Hey #wildfire fediverse - I'm a qualified forest firefighter currently available for deployment. Based in Australia, open to anywhere.

I do need to get paid for my work, and need someone to fund a chainsaw ticket refresher (last done in 2007). Otherwise I still have a valid arduous medical (until late November), 4wd, FFMV PPE, valid passport.

Not sure how much difference one extra pair of hands can make, I'm sure there are other people in the same position.

#fire #emergencyResponse

@kissane Amen.

Having said all that, I'm now interested in what the outcome of Windows being (largely, at least) Free Software would be. I suspect it'd be fairly like the Chrome situation - Microsoft's supported commercial release would probably still dominate even if anyone else could theoretically compete, since the sheer level of effort required to maintain a fork would make it impractical for anyone else to compete