Notices by Greg Wilson (gvwilson@mastodon.social)

saw a t-shirt this morning that said "mad scientist" except "mad" was crossed out and "angry" written above it in sharpie and yeah… that

When I asked researchers if they have started planning what to do if the US gov't decides to restrict access to GitHub or other bits of US-hosted digital infra, I was hoping some people would say that they are forming federated multi-institution/multi-national collaborations because any single site in any single country is just another single point of failure. It's not "can my university spin up a self-hosted version of [thing]" but "let's figure out how to federate this stuff."

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/hungar-pride-events-law-1.7486462 😠

@zipkid Thanks, but what I'm looking for is not a one-line "do X", but rather for fully thought out plans for what to do and in what order. For example, what about user accounts - do they have to have the same names on CodeBerg as on GitHub? What if someone outside your org has already claimed a username that someone on your team was using on GitHub? What changes are needed to contributors' guides? Etc.

@ericjelli02 Thanks for the links - there are several options, but my question is "who has actually started making a plan and trying things out" ? If we wait until we need it, we're going to have a repeat of our near-miss with SourceForge (almost) going offline, and as recent events have shown, even a partial unplanned interruption of collaboration can take a long time to recover from.

Q for research friends: have you started planning what to do if the US gov't suddenly restricts access to GitHub? Could happen in several ways, e.g., Microsoft has to filter DEI content to stay eligible for federal contracts or a "nothing Ukrainian" rule, but the mechanism doesn't matter: what does it that it's no longer impossible. Yes, you have a clone of your repo, but not of your issues, and how will you reconnect with contributors? If you have a plan, please share a link - thx.

My family has moved its files from Dropbox to Sync (https://www.sync.com/) to ensure that our data is stored in Canada and covered by Canadian privacy legislation.

Be the @TeenVogue you want to see in the world: "To put it bluntly, Trump is now violently pursuing, rounding up, and disappearing immigrants, the majority not charged with any criminal offense, while right-wing loyalists convicted and sentenced for violent felonies against the country are released and celebrated." https://www.teenvogue.com/story/donald-trump-criminal-justice-agenda-public-safety

Please help: we need housing for a female refugee who will be arriving in the Greater Toronto Area next Wednesday (Feb 26, 2025). Cost is an issue, so we expect it will be shared accommodation; helps if dog-friendly but we can work around that. If you have leads please reach out (gvwilson@third-bit.com). Would be very grateful if you could share the request in other forums. Thanks - Greg #gta #toronto

This link has been taken down from the NASA site by someone who probably told themselves as a kid that they would have stood up to the Nazis in the 1930s: https://www.nasa.gov/universe/nasa-intern-found-hope-in-the-moon-2 Here's the story that Musk and Trump and their goons are so afraid to let you read https://scitechdaily.com/nasa-intern-found-hope-in-the-moon/

Re-enabled arxiv.org's software engineering feed, looked at the titles, turned it off again.

In the midst of rolling layoffs at Shopify, Tobi Lutke finds time to show that he can kiss presidential ass just like his idols in the Valley: https://nypost.com/2025/02/02/us-news/shopify-ceo-defends-trump-tariff-demands-slams-trudeau/ (reminder: every alt-right influencer the Christchurch killer cited in his manifesto had a store on Shopify, and Lutke refused to deplatform any of them)

25 years ago I had a colleague who had grown up in the PRC. He had a forest of newspaper clippings pinned on the wall of his cubicle with stories about school boards in the US banning the teaching of evolution, discussion of sexual health, and stuff like that. When I asked him about it, he pointed and said, "Every one of those is an engineering job moving to China." I've been thinking about that a lot over the past week…

There are two other versions of the story. In one, Charlie Brown knows Lucy will pull the ball away but keeps trying to kick it because he has internalized everything have said about him and believes repeated disappointment is all he deserves. In the other, he's waiting for Lucy to grow bored and ask, "Why do you keep trying?" so he can say, "Because I love you, and am here to help you get past this." Schultz's point is that from the outside, it's hard to tell these stories apart.

I believe it should be possible to distribute Python packages as Rust crates. If you have actually done this and can point me at an open source proof of concept, I would be very grateful for a link.

On the one hand, I am genuinely excited by this book. On the other, it will cost over CAD$300 per copy for the digital edition and even more for print, which greatly reduces the number of people who will have a chance to be excited by it. Academic publishing makes me very sad.

Speaking of free speech, Facebook is deleting internal posts criticising it for adding UFC president Dana White to its board (you know, the guy caught on video hitting his wife). Facebook is also deleting internal employee posts asking why the first ones were deleted. https://www.404media.co/facebook-deletes-internal-employee-criticism-of-new-board-member-dana-white/

I am very excited to be doing a joint talk with my friend @yabellini this coming Wednesday - I've learned a lot from her over the years, and am looking forward to being able to share it. https://pairprogramming.ed.ac.uk/winter-school-25/

Zhang et al 2022: "Corporate Dominance in Open Source Ecosystems: A Case Study of OpenStack" http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3540250.3549117 "We find evidence of company domination in >73% of the repositories in OpenStack…We identify five patterns of corporate dominance: Early incubation, Full-time hosting, Growing domination, Occasional domination, and Last remaining. We find that domination has a significantly negative relationship with the survival probability of OSS projects." #nwit

Three keys to being a great teacher:

1. Have students who are safe and well nourished, not victims of systemic discrimination, and live in supportive home environments.

2. Work in an educational system that has stable long-term funding and is administered by people who respect your professional expertise.

3. Ignore posts that put all the responsibility for being a great teacher on you rather than saying that collective action to achieve #1 and #2 are what will actually make a difference.