Notices by Jez 🍞🌹:heart_autistic_pride: (petrichor@digipres.club)

US administration demonstrating just how easy it is for them to attack organisations they disagree with far outside their borders. Autistici/Inventati is based in Italy and has been running for 20 years, but the plug has been summarily pulled on their Internet presence because their domain name is a .org and therefore controlled by nonprofit Public Interest Registry and their technical partner Identity Digital which are both subject to US law.

Come work with me! We're looking for an Open Access Manager to work alongside me (Research Data Manager) in leading the research services function in the University of Warwick Library and Archives. It's a great team, recently up to full strength and with excellent support from library leadership, and you would join our Senior Management Team, a really friendly and collaborative group from across the library.

https://www.uniperms.com/job/Open%20Research%20Manager/a268416b-b2f2-452f-a356-1cfbd3b7e8c4

#GetFediHired

@cwebber I've been considering giving guix a more serious try. Do you have a feel for how it compares with nixos these days? Last time I checked guix seemed less well developed (i.e. fewer programs and services with integrated config) but also nix is an irritating language and its community has far more governance issues. I'm growing in appreciation for LISPs in my old age...

@cyberpunklibrarian Meanwhile gallons of water pouring across the road the other day from yet another burst water main, because *someone* has spent the last few decades prioritising extraction of unearned rent by shareholders over little things like routine maintenance

OK, so I would love to write a new bittorrent client to support the science & culture preservation work of @SafeguardingResearch and https://sciop.net.

We're running into some edge cases where the assumptions of the mainstream bittorrent clients don't hold, partly just the sheer size of some of the datasets we're archiving, partly the structure of them (many smaller files vs one large incompressible movie).

@derek would love to give it a try but it mandates a Google or Microsoft login which is an instant turnoff for me. the other three you mentioned allow me to use them without logging in (albeit very annoyingly in the case of PictureThis)

@dalias @fraying I think this every time I hear some "business leader" whining about wage inflation or minimum wage legislation. If your so-called profitable business can't survive paying people enough to live in modest comfort, you don't have a profitable business you have a scam, and your profits are being extorted from your own workers not fairly earned by your business savvy.

@anna ooh, unusual key caps, what are they?

@hcj @dalias @aral Selection by lottery, like many countries have for jury duty

@clacke No worries! In any case your point that they're cool and interesting things stands, and the analogy with software systems is thought-provoking

@clacke not exactly that, but more a piece parchment (usually) that has been scraped/washed clean and reused in whole, and where sometimes the previous writings can still be discerned (by eye, or by scientific analysis)

I guess this is where the truism about every overnight success being a decade in the making comes from. We saw it with Open Access: a lot of folks perceived it as arriving very suddenly, but a number of dedicated people had been working towards that for well over ten years.

One thing I've learned from #SystemsThinking so far is that systems tend to be extremely robust and able to absorb a wide range of variation in their parameters. In some ways that's pretty depressing because that's why it's so hard to make systemic change.

The silver lining is that you can actually be moving a lot of parameters in the right direction and it won't seem like it's having any effect, but then it will flip to a new state seemingly overnight.

@clacke I haven't listened to Ranarim for ages, thanks for the prompt to go and look them up again!

@clacke Also check out Hoven Droven, Tsuumi Sound System, Fru Skagerrak, Groupa, JPP, Nordic Fiddlers Block, Trolska Polska...

@clacke @n8 @liw @mlinksva But yes, this is 100% essential to solving this: building a sustainable base of skills within the institution instead of always employing research software engineers on soft money fixed-term contracts and throwing their expertise away every 2-3 years.

Changing the research culture as suggested is the other part of the equation. So many researchers hate admitting that they are anything less than expert in anything they do.

@clacke @n8 @liw @mlinksva Plenty of examples of this in the UK: Sheffield, Manchester, UCL, Edinburgh, Imperial College to name a few https://ukrse.github.io/groups.html

Worth checking out https://society-rse.org/ and https://software.ac.uk/ for the growing body of evidence of the benefits of these roles and groups. Several other countries have Research Software Engineer associations too, including Germany and USA

If anyone wants to learn more about #Threads, the best place to start is probably the original trilogy, starting with Dragonflight (first published in 1968). https://bookwyrm.social/book/61702/s/dragonflight

Anne McCaffrey's worldbuilding is incredible, and the background hints about the world that slowly build over the course of the series are wonderfully well done.