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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • This is what frustrates me about the people saying that posting memes on social media is bullshit and waving signs won’t change anything. Waving signs and parades were fundamental tactics of the Civil Rights movement. Those iconic photos from the Edmund Pettis Bridge? Just a bunch of people marching to the voter registration office. The Freedom Riders? Just people, including a bunch of privileged, white college students on a bus tour. Most of the marches, protests, etc we never even hear about formed the foundation, and it’s only when those boring, “useless” protests met ridiculous opposition that stirred MLK’s “white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice” to attention.

    That doesn’t mean that going to peaceful protests & remaining peaceful while the fascists fash is the only valid action. But it is the most accessible to the most people, and it is the one easiest to scale as more of those moderates get motivated. Resistance looks boring, until it suddenly isn’t.




  • Just think how many people started making sourdough bread during covid lockdowns. That may not have been intentional advertising, just a few people starting a thing & then it was everywhere, and so many people who’d never cooked a day in their life became obsessed with sourdough bread. Advertising fills in the blank when you say, “Fuck it, let’s just _____”


  • In the old days, university IT put essentially no access controls on their networks, so students’ dorm computers were completely exposed to the internet. Any service you started was immediately, globally accessible. Some big sites, including slashdot and facebook, got their start in some kid’s dorm room. I feel like access controls really got going in the early 00’s - first for residential, then for broader campus.

    Check with your IT people - they may have policy or conditions under which they will expose ports on your personal computer to the internet. Otherwise, your best bet is probably free-tier AWS or Oracle.

    Not free, but there are some ‘KVM VPS’ providers out there that will rent you a small, internet exposed computer pretty cheap. They can be a good platform for experimenting with self-hosting services, without exposing your personal equipment or home network. eg: 1CPU/1GB RAM/24GB SSD $12/year https://my.racknerd.com/cart.php?a=add&pid=903







  • So, these scientists were asked to evaluate a political question, “Is there a link between immigration and welfare support?” using a large survey dataset. Not like they were asked whether temperature data supported anthropogenic climate change. The 158 scientists were in 71 teams and did, collectively, of 1200 statistical tests.

    An overwhelming majority of all analyses found no link between immigration policies and support for welfare programs, regardless of investigator ideology. A handful of outlier models, where an effect could be found, show effects that correlated with the team’s politics, but it’s hard for me to look at the mountain of “no effect” conclusions and agree with the statement “politics predicted the results.” “Politics predicted the outliers,” OK.

    Actual study: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adz7173