Notices by Eleanor Saitta (dymaxion@infosec.exchange)

Repeat after me: all technical problems of sufficient scope or impact are actually political problems first.

@quinn
Never underestimate what a gamer can decide they enjoy
@whvholst

@quinn
Idk, that sounds pretty interesting
@whvholst

This year for tdor, I read a lot of the posts and... Like, fuck, we're going to remember our dead the best ways we can. But if you're cis, I don't give two shits about your sympathy, I care if you're willing to fight for us. Don't talk to me about your feelings, send me a picture of the entrails of a transphobe whose belly you just cut open in the middle of fifth avenue. Make next year's list shorter the fucking hard way, because the "easy" ways aren't real any more.

[PS: Please do not actually send the photo, I don't want to get charged as an accessory. Better yet, don't take it, have good opsec, and live to gut another dozen transphobes.]

[[PPS: if this offends you or seems too radical, congratulations, you are the white moderate who terrified Martin Luther King. You are the obstacle.]]

[[[PPPS: No, this isn't me saying transphobes aren't people. Everyone is human and deserves basic common decency. But as they said (paraphrasing) in Tahrir Square, "yes, we're nonviolent, but that didn't mean we're going to just stand her and let them murder us. "]]]

@futurebird
Hmm. Often, really just basic statistical numeracy so they could understand data they seeing in papers, etc. Sometimes, more the ability to reason about what is and isn't good data for quantitative decision-making — folks really love to make up meaningless numbers to let them avoid qualitative decisions when quant data isn't there. Sometimes data analysis to understand things like perf impact from log data for edge cases. So in some ways, not really statistics itself, but all things that I find that folks who made it through at least one real stats course are likely to be better at, if that makes sense?
@whknott

@futurebird
Yeah, largely in that kind of space. Also rigor around what it means to measure something, etc. Like, obviously calculus is useful — if nothing else, not having the conceptual tools of first and second derivatives makes looking at a line on a graph or the area under it less intuitively useful — but I think it's more about the things that you learn along the way.
@whknott

@futurebird
I work in tech, not physics or more classical engineering, but I can say that the number of times I've wished staff knew calculus when they didn't? Zero in twenty years. The number of times I've wished they knew basic statistics when they didn't? At least once a month, for twenty years.
@whknott

The RNA technology that was used to develop most of the covid vaccines is driving an absolute revolution in medicine right now. A vaccine for malaria, the disease that has killed more people than anything else in history. Personalized vaccines for cancers — the list goes on and we're just getting started. Much of this development is locked up in commercial pharma companies — there are papers, of course but replicating them in practice, let alone continuing development, is very hard without active access to the team involved. It's also very expensive. A lot of that development money comes from the US government. Now, yes it's a problem that that funding is going to private companies that are ransoming patients for their life savings in exchange for life-saving medicine, but this is as much a regulatory problem as it is a structural one. As long as those teams exist, the possibilities of these tools exist also.

Having an American government that wants to actively dismantle vaccine-related research and eliminate its funding is an existential threat to humanity:

https://mas.to/@Fitnessfoundry/113484127007301813

@GossiTheDog
The xcode project

@GossiTheDog
Post the link?

You know what would make AI even better? If we brought THREE MILE ISLAND BACK ONLINE TO POWER IT.

At this point it's just a standup routine about the anthropocene.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-09-20/microsoft-s-ai-power-needs-prompt-revival-of-three-mile-island-nuclear-plant

If you say the phrase "cyber war game" in any context that's not taking the piss, you just lost

Yes yes, technically this is also a parser ambiguity issue; you can stop it either way and should fix both.

Dynamic typing is a mistake, and a vulnerability waiting to happen, again: https://tmendez.dev/posts/rng-git-hash-bug/

I wish Signal had per-chat settings for read receipts and typing indicators, plus global defaults for new chats (and a way to reset everything to the defaults, ideally showing a list of what would be changed).

@beebalm
s/problem/human/ ❤️

@jessamyn
❤️
@debcha

@quinn
It feels like it is possible even a prerequisite for any significant destupidification. Hell, even a nine and a half.

There's a ton of really useful work to be done around harm reduction in many many different health contexts, and there is absolutely a bunch of stuff that you can do with any skillset — even more if you have some money to throw around — to help out. Listen to the people actually affected and the people already helping them, and do what they say will help!

Yes, you likely won't get a lot of adulation for this, but you will make a real difference.

For no reason, just saying:

If you want to make medication yourself and/or suggest that other people not already in the business do so, you need to a) figure out how to prove *for each dose* that whatever substance is produced doesn't have anything else bad in it, and b) will be effective and at the expected dosage, and c) what degree of certainty you've done and and b to. You should probably also prove d) what the expected shelf life is, but a, b, and c are the absolute minimum. They are also significantly harder than making a substance.

If you have no plans for a, b, and c, you're not doing anything that should be described as making medication.