Notices by Eʟʟ (c9a@cathode.church)

@AlSweigart Another factor I've seen that is rough but rings true: more rich white folks survive long enough to *be* old, so the balance skews as a cohort gets older simply by virtue of conservatives outliving the folks they're busy marginalizing.

And COVID has only made this worse, it hit people of color much worse than white folks (because of economic factors/access to healthcare/etc).

I think both dynamics are at play though, and that there will be a shift as millenials and gen Z become a larger and larger portion of the voting populace, because yeah...even many of us who did manage to land a decent job have too many friends who didn't (and/or are queer to boot)

@b0rk This is one of my favorite parts of this whole thing! I don't think there's a clear technical reason, given that we had 6-bit computers as well - even numbers are nice because you can split them into even nibbles, and powers of two feel familiar, but since bits aren't individually addressable, I don't think there are any material reasons to prefer powers of two.

I don't have any links on this, but one pressure keeping bytes from 10 bits is wasted space - how often are you going to use those top two bits? 256 is a pretty good balance, you have room for Latin text with some accents

Comment I just left on a PR: "YES!! I love this, always love to see more smaller functions, and this is a really nice self-contained chunk of logic to break out. Excellent call."

This is your semi-regular reminder to call out the good things in code reviews along with the changes you're suggesting! Coding is an inherently human endeavor, humans have feelings, and that is an attribute, not an inconvenience to be optimized away.

Also, this applies to many other feedback-oriented scenarios too, I imagine. When interfacing over digital mediums, I can always use more reminders that there's a person on the other end.

@cstross @GreenFire Taking this thread even further afield: one complicating factor here is electric cars, battery packs are heavy!

From some quick math, the Tesla Model 3 has an envelope of 12.5m^3 but has a curb weight of nearly 1840kg. For comparison, the BMW X3 is 15m^3 and 1880kg, which is a 20% bigger envelope but only 2% more mass.

I've heard (but not verified) that part of the reason Teslas have such good safety reason is simply the fact that they're heavier - they have the inertia of an SUV in a sedan-sized package, so they win the inertia battle more than you would expect, with the bonus of a very low center of gravity.

@GreenFire @cstross I think it's still a complicating factor if your main concern is along the lines of OP's thread, namely impact on visibility and the knock-on effects on walkability/bikeability/pedestrian collisions.

But yes, if you're mostly concerned about road damage then mass is clearly a better criteria. Different concerns, different criteria.

I should also make clear I am certainly not trying to defend EVs for their own sake here: the Model 3 in particular brings up its own issues around walkability with its "self-driving" systems and that mass still makes a difference.

Additionally, I think EVs in some ways are a poison pill that enables us to blissfully perpetuate car culture while pushing our environmental costs downstream into places like far away lithium mines.

But the bit that was pertinent to this thread is that they're also a prominent exception to "vehicle mass scales with volume", ha.

I just started listening to Gender Reveal so I'm two years behind, but damn, I'm listening to the episode with Daniel M. Lavery and he's basically speedrunning my last year of therapy ?

More and more lately I've been hearing folks pushing past the sanctioned trans storylines into stories that look more like mine. It's so refreshing to hear stories that are about uncertainty, hesitance, self-doubt.

Hearing someone else talk about things like evaluating the exit ramps and weighing detransition stories before even starting is so fucking important. Hearing two trans folks talking openly about their genders *changing* over time, about not being able to trust their own sense of self, and still being trans, is so important.

The world needs more trans stories from trans interviewers, this show is a blessing ?

"I maybe wasn't ready to say something like 'I know what I am and I can move from a place of identity' and then have my actions follow up with it, or certainty...I might not have those things, but I can at least...when I say out loud, 'Here's a picture of me at 75 and I've never transitioned' I'm like, 'That one fucking sucks, that's not happening'"

"It was only when I was able to relinquish the fantasy of nothing irreversible, of uninterrupted cisness, that I could begin to imagine a livable future for myself"

Talking about the complicated nuance of how reversible and not the many aspects of transition are, and how it matters but also doesn't.

This show is such an important gift, many thanks from your latest patron, Tuck :blobhaj_hearttrans: