Notices by nindokag (nindokag@refactorcamp.org), page 2

Was talking about Mastodon with an old-school sysadmin guy. We reached the realization that defederating from instances with no/bad moderation is essentially the same thing as blocking open relays back when you ran your own email server: open relays always end up getting used for spam, you block 'em to protect your users.

Email was and still is the first federated social network, so it already faced a lot of the same problems; we should study its solutions (and its failures).

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2019/05/30/the-age-of-diffraction/

"The latter condition is what I’ve been calling the Great Weirding. Another good term for it is narrative collapse. The present interregnum between aeons of human history which began with the death of Harambe the gorilla."

I understand maybe 40% of this post, but it sure was mind-expanding to read. My takeaway is that we should be taking this opportunity to forge our own, new, better narratives rather than trying to put things "back to normal". @vgr would you agree?

Procrastination advice:

Something that seems to work for me, when I gotta do a thing I don't wanna do, is just putting a box around the maximum of time that my procrastination can expand to take up

i.e. "i have to finish the dreaded task before I work on the fun task" leads me to just procrastinate about the dreaded task all day.

"At 2pm i'll switch from the dreaded task to the fun task" means I at least get the fun task done, and surprisingly I often get more of the dreaded task done too.

https://ithacavoice.com/2019/05/sheep-get-to-work-maintaining-newfield-solar-array/

"Sheep get to work maintaining Newfield solar array" #solarPower

"...it's cheaper for the company to use sheep for maintenance instead of paying for people to mow and maintain 30 acres during the warmer months.... Unlike goats who will munch on almost anything, sheep stick to grazing on the greenery and not harm any wires or solar equipment."

@Kitts i think this is near you!

(Is this #solarpunk ?)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqTyfMDnK-k

very cool animated visualization of the classic Talking Heads song, "The Great Curve" from "Remain in Light"

if you've ever wondered how those wild polyrythms are put together and what the backup vocalists are actually singing, check it out in motion

when I sarcastically say "thanks Brendan" about Javscript design flaws, I'm not really blaming Brendan; none of us would have designed a good language in the two weeks Netscape gave him. I'm really saying "Thanks, inscrutable market forces that led to Brendan's 2-week side-project becoming an industry standard that nobody in the last 20 years could change without breaking the web"

Computers are nothing but giant piles of historical mistakes kept for backwards compatibility, from QWERTY on up

https://assets.kwhanalytics.com/documents/public/solar-risk-assessment/Solar_Risk_Assessment_2019.pdf

My company (kWh Analytics) got together with 9 other companies to talk about risk factors, i.e. reasons we see #solarPower projects underperforming their estimates. Here's our report, with each company contributing a page.

It's a dense read but there's a lot of really good information here, if you want to learn about the nitty-gritty of providing solar power, and where the industry has room to improve.

(I mean, the real answer is that there are three ways of dealing with climate change: the cheap way, the expensive way, and the INCREDIBLY expensive way.

The cheap way would have been to act 40 years ago. The incredibly expensive way is to do nothing.

https://newrepublic.com/article/153702/green-new-deal-costs-less-nothing

"The Green New Deal costs less than doing nothing")

https://grist.org/article/insurance-experts-rank-climate-change-as-top-risk-for-2019/

Survey asking insurance actuaries about risk ranks #climateChange above any other risk for 2019

this matters because of the extent to which insurance company policies have taken the place of government regulations these days

#heyfeedfox

Cool positive thing I learned today:

Since 2007, 20 african countries have been planting a wall of trees across the Sahel to stop the spread of desert and restore the environment

https://www.greatgreenwall.org/about-great-green-wall

#heyfeedfox

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyGqToLJBx4

my taiko drumming group performing at the Cupertino Cherry Blossom festival on Sunday

#mastoMusic

me, asking my sister if she wants to keep working on our shared Stardew Valley farm:

"you wanna... do the Dew?"

a coworker was asking how to clear browser cache and I told her to "press apple-shift-R"

Her: "Apple"???

Me: oh uh i mean Command

Her: why do you call it Apple?

Me: that's what it used to be called... 30 years ago... on the Apple II

jeez i'm OLD

my wife made Shakshuka for dinner and I had never heard of Shakshuka before, but now it's my favorite food

I was driving a borrowed car on a long trip by myself today, so I ended up listening to somebody else's radio station presets. I heard a show on Stanford university student radio where they played music by black women artists through the decades starting with the 1930s. It was, no kidding, the single best playlist I've ever heard on the radio.

I found the playlist online, so if you wanna expand your knowledge of classic tunes this is a great list to start with:
http://zookeeper.stanford.edu/index.php?action=viewDate&seq=selList&playlist=38467&session=

https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/the-smarter-grid/chinas-ambitious-plan-to-build-the-worlds-biggest-supergrid

Neat article about the engineering challenges of getting terawatt-hours of energy from the world's largest wind and solar plants in Xinjiang to the population centers in east China that need it.

One surprising detail: they use DC for long-distance power transmission! I always learned AC was used because it's less lossy over long distances. But I guess they figured out a way to do even less lossy transmission using DC in the megavolt range. #renewableEnergy #heyfeedfox

Similarities between #DoctorWho and Bugs Bunny:
-- shows up by accident while trying to get somewhere else
-- finds himself in the middle of a plotline swiped from some well-known genre cliche
-- refuses to take the villains seriously at all
-- subverts the narrative logic of the genre by substituting his own, much sillier logic
-- makes the villain's plan backfire like some sort of trickster god
-- skeddaddles before he can face any consequences

🤔

Half-formed thought about how all the small towns in the American interior, that are dying because their one factory or one mine closed down, are the American equivalent of the old European empires' resource-extraction colonies, which (as opposed to their settlement colonies) were set up as giant single-crop plantations, never got any infrastructure investment or economic diversification, and remained some of the poorest places in the world even after they achieved independence

I'm trying to learn about graphic design so I'm reading stuff like this: https://www.canva.com/learn/visual-design-composition/

So much capital-G "Graphic Design" stuff really rubs me the wrong way, and I finally figured out how to articulate why:

Capital-G "Graphic Design" is ALWAYS trying to "look expensive" first and foremost. Communicating whatever the design is supposedly intended to communicate is always subservient to signaling "spent a lot of money on graphic design". And nobody's allowed to admit it!

I love rock music videos where somebody's "playing" electric guitar in, like, the middle of a grassy field, without a wire, amp, or speaker in sight.

Like... do they think they're fooling anybody? Or are we supposed to be in on the joke?