I don't write my elected representatives often, I don't believe the desperate claims of former staffers who assure us they keep track of just how many calls they get on various issues. Honestly, for real: is that the best way of measuring constituent sentiment? How do you say "selection bias"?
But I did have to write to Tillis's office about this dipass claim: https://fediscience.org/@petergleick/113869269804206307
Sir. Someone's lying about something here, and it's probably you.
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Maxim: any legislation named for a person, particularly a white woman, is gonna be an authoritarian nightmare.
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Anyway, here’s a gluten-free cherry pie we made to have something sweet for the day:
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My contempt for the DNC knows no bounds, but I have to admit that I had no idea that they consider the identities of their voting members to be secret: https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/10/smoke-filled-room-where-it-happens/
What a fucking joke.
I’ve been reading a lot of political history recently and an underexplored theme, popularly at least, is how states can fail when their elites become untethered from any accountability for even basic competence.
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Holy fuck, Democrats just do not understand politics as theater, and it really may be the death of us all.
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Your Triangle COVID wastewater report, at last: https://github.com/dball/triangle-covid
We're clearly in another wave locally, folks. No thanks to the NC DHHS folk for sitting on these data for basically a month straight but, well, at least we're still getting these data, which is more than I'd expected in these fallen times.
Mask up. Stay safe. We protect us.
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Your Triangle COVID wastewater report is coming, hopefully. The NC DHHS finally published new data for our sites earlier this week, but they've changed the format of the crosstab report somewhat, so my aggregation script has to change likewise.
Eyeballing our local sites - we're clearly in in a rising wave. Some sites show dips, but the overall picture seems bad.
Stay safe, mask up. We protect us.
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Remember the "whole of government" response we were promised when Roe v. Wade was overturned?
Remember the Gaza aid pier?
This week, and the ones to follow, are going to be dark and grim, but I will allow myself the smallest bit of satisfaction that we won't have to listen to the Biden apologists make excuses for his feckless apathy any longer.
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To be fair, I wouldn’t actually fucking know how it is right now because I haven’t darkened their doors in years, but last I was there, specific threats of violence and homophobic slurs were totally okay per the moderation team, and that’s just from personal experience.
Going beyond: take your pick. Genocide in Myanmar? 1/6 insurrection? Organized on “over-censored” Facebook.
Get fucked, EFF.
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“Over-censorship problem” my shiny metal ass.
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Strongly recommend not donating to the EFF. They’ve always been techno-libertarian, and now this: https://mastodon.social/@eff/113789440544631242
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I just remember, four years back, some liberals online crowing about how the reactionaries had overplayed their hand and their political movement was now dead for a generation, too toxic for the moderate middle.
Anyway. There are real limits to my intelligence and imagination, but I don’t reckon I’ve ever been that wrong.
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So we had a dodgy ethernet cable running between wifi access points and, not having access to any tools in my nearest-by friends and relations, I grabbed a tester and crimper from the hardware store to verify the fault and replace the connectors.
Aces, but now I have two (more) tools I'm likely to use, idk, once every couple of years, which is so wasteful.
Anyone know of a tool library in the area to which I could donate (and from which I could, hopefully, re-borrow when the time comes)?
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Extremely disappointed to report that, after a few months of use, our @frameworkcomputer developed a screen defect and they're refusing to issue a replacement under warranty.
I dig the repairable, modular laptop concept, but I can't countenance doing business with a company that won't stand behind its products.
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I have developed a real fondness for programming languages with good, expressive type systems, but when they become so precious about their types that working with data from the real world becomes tedious, or even not possible to do generally without recompiling, that’s where they lose me.
If I can’t readily work with the data from arbitrary sql select query with an aggregate function, for example, even accepting the cost of runtime type dispatch or the unsafety of a type assert? That’s silly.
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With totalizing rhetoric like that, potential allies can’t even acknowledge their existence without contradicting that rhetoric, inviting secondary conflict.
If such rhetoric feels necessary, consider explicitly acknowledging your perspective and avoid making broad claims about the everyones that are doing or not doing the thing.
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Folks.
When writing to persuade, consider not using rhetoric like “everyone is doing this thing I dislike” or “nobody is talking about my issue”.
They’re seldom technically accurate and invite trivial pedants to claim easy wins, but far more importantly:
When folk who agree with you, are acting like you want see your message, are they energized and activated, or demoralized and confused?
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Electoral politics is not going to save us, and that includes via the heighten the contradictions, punish the Democrats crowd. We've run that experiment, we know the results.
The premise that we haven't withheld enough votes for long enough both assumes a different electorate than we have, assumes further that a viable progressive party either emerges or takes over, and that our political system can produce just results if only it were better governed.
I don't buy it; that's hopium.
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Yo that shit that's been rolling through the tech industry whereby any "tech debt" initiative needs to be justified by some fake-ass metrics? It's really dumb and we should stop it.
Hand to god, line managers on up, you cannot escape the perils of exercising your judgment by resorting to bloodless calculations. If you think you can, you are not in the right line of work.
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Absolutely abysmal they opted their entire US population in by default: https://www.linkedin.com/mypreferences/d/settings/data-for-ai-improvement
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text/gemini
