Notices by Peter Drake, he/him, LFHCfS 🔥 (peterdrake@qoto.org), page 3

@pluralistic It causes your hair to grow at right angles to your scalp.

@b0rk I don't have any useful links other than the one you probably looked at first:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte

I remember (but can't find) a list of alternate historical sizes. My favorite was the 13-bit "baker's byte".

Just-so stories I can't back up with sources:

A power of two is convenient as a memory size. It takes three bits to address the bits in an 8-bit byte, but it would take four (with the last one partially wasted) to address the bits in a 10-bit byte.

If you want a character set that includes upper- and lower-case English letters, digits, and some punctuation marks, you're going to need at least 7 bits. I believe the 8th bit was originally used for error detection.

Some thoughts on the qoto.org situation:

1. Many of the attacks on qoto are deliberately or accidentally misinformed. A look at the public timeline (https://qoto.org/public) shows that we are not the cesspool of Nazism that some would portray us as. @freemo is bringing screenshot receipts in his defense; I haven't seen them from attackers.

2. I have no idea how to deescalate this.

3. No matter how noble our intentions, their may come a point where we simply lose. It sounds like we've lost @Gargron and @FediThing@tech.lbt. Does anyone know @stux's opinion?

4. If the people I want to interact with are all on servers that have defederated with qoto, I will migrate.

5. I appreciate the value of hearing different points of view and the danger of being too quick to cancel someone based on a rumor. At the same time, there are toxic people and certain servers are full of them. Saying it's up to individual users to block things they don't want to see feels a bit privileged. Marginalized people may very reasonably just not want to run into constant microaggressions and expect their moderator to keep it out of their feeds. Trolls are *very* good at getting right up to the ban line and insisting, "I'm not touching you!"

@QOTO @trinsec #qoto

Does anybody have a good resource for college students to learn about working in a team (communication, organization, etc.)? I'm looking for something longer than a blog post but shorter than a book.

#college #teaching #pedagogy #academia #teamwork