Shamar @Shamar@mastodon.social
Father, husband and programmer.
Joined Dec 2017
Shamar
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Next Coq Meetup will be held at Paris, February 7… and I will give a talk about FreeSpec \o/.
Shamar
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If you're a #woman doing a #phdstudent or #postdoc in #France, you can earn a scholarship. Go girls!
Shamar
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@dgold A guillotine wouldn't work though, because the problem is structural. If those 26 people were to disappear another group of people would eagerly take their place.
Shamar
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26 people own the same wealth as half the population of Earth. Those few people could all fit on one bus. If they were students it would be equivalent to one classroom.
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/oxfam-report-wealth-inequality-poverty-tax_us_5c408586e4b027c3bbbeb91d
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/oxfam-report-wealth-inequality-poverty-tax_us_5c408586e4b027c3bbbeb91d
Shamar
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But anyway, when you look at it from an actual anarchist perspective, that concept is so freeing and so all-encompassing while remaining so subtle. This culture has forced us to constantly think in terms of permission and red tape as a means of control, but that's not actually how society is run
I remember I saw an anarchist on tumblr encourage filling potholes as direct action, and someone replied "lol - is that something people can just do?" That's that authoritarian mindset: who will let you just fill a pothole? Nobody, there are strict rules for that, you can't JUST DO that
But who will stop you? You think anyone in the neighborhood's going to call the cops on you for doing them a favor? Hell no, go grab some asphalt patch and just do it
Shamar
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Late last night @scintillatinator materialized out of nowhere (?) to design this solarpunk emblem idea I'd had!
The gear represents technology, workers, and by extension socialism, whereas the sun represents sustainability and nature, with the colors being the same as the green anarchist flag. The idea came from @Wewereseeds and @starwall 's flag design so big thanks to them!
This design is creative commons, feel free to use it for whatever solarpunky non-evil purposes you have - no credit or permission needed!
Shamar
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@Shamar
https://github.com/cryptoscope/ssb
I know something is afoot in Rust, too, but haven't found it yet...
Shamar
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The Somali terrorist group behind last week’s Nairobi hotel attack is earning over $7 million a year by smuggling charcoal to Gulf nations.
Shamar
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Dear #fediverse. I work as an #architect and design buildings that harm the planet. I am looking for a practicing #engineer who can teach me building energy modelling using #opensource tools. I have a background in software dev, run #gentoo #linux and am willing to learn down to the details.
I do not have a background in heat transfer or thermodynamics, which is why I am asking for a tutor.
I promise to use this to design better buildings.
Please help retoot this so I can find someone.
Shamar
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@Shamar
> I have to decide to give SSB a try. Its coupling with NodeJS is what keep me off.
Some new implementations of SSB in Go and Rust are work-in-process. If I see one of those take off, I will be sure to announce it in the fediverse.
Shamar
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Simplest GUIs in the 21st century: Still too fucking complicated to get even the simplest thing done.
Proposed solutions? Framework this, framework that...
Apart from a lack of caring and a lack of creativity, it's quite possible a side effect, made possible/mandatory by the imperatives of the market and economies of scale. (A space dominated by Google, Microsoft, and Apple)
Every time I'm faced with this situation (every other week or so) I renew my determination to radically change that.
Shamar
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I spent a whole day wondering why on earth the amplitude of the response for the plate elements and solid elements was different and the problem was that I was comparing different magnitudes.
Today after a relaxing weekend I saw it clearly in one second.
Have a great start of week Fediversians! 🤗
Shamar
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@aral I have no strong aversion to using JavaScript or not using JavaScript. However this brought me to an interesting question. If we are essentially writing full fledged apps that run in the browser should we be thinking of going back to traditional apps that run locally instead?
Shamar
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@velartrill Flexiblity at cost of performance comes at cost of flexiblity; Because such a flexiblity is something that nobody needs. They try to make it "easier to use" (read: bearable) by developing wrappers around it; Then... (You know the rest)
This is a story of a false technological progress.
I'd say the end of Moore's law is as catastrophic as climate change. Flexiblity is the new fossil fuel.
Not that many people care about future.
Shamar
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anyone ever told you "premature optimization is the root of all evil"?
let me tell you a story. about computers and javascript and hitler and the soviet union.
a friend of mine just dug up some numbers and did some math for my dyscalculic ass and came up with the conclusion that just by transmitting the minified version of jquery around (not even executing it!), Planet Earth is likely using up somewhere between 7-14 billion kWh of power every year.
let's put that into some perspective.
world war two was the single deadliest conflict in human history. it killed somewhere around 80 million people, which at the time was three percent of *all humans, everywhere.* it left europe in ruins, and nowhere was the damage so intense and horrific as the Soviet Union.
the Battle of Stalingrad is one of the most famous battles of the war. two million people died there alone. in the opening salvos the entire city was flattened by nazi and soviet bombs alike. eventually the Union prevailed, at a tremendous cost.
but Stalingrad was only one of the cities flattened, only one of the battles fought as Europe burned. the devastation was so comprehensive that nearly every western nation had to rely on aid from the US, one of the only powers on either side whose economy was intact, to rebuild. (it didn't help that American wartime policy was designed more to inflict as much Nazi death and destruction as possible on the Soviets, of course).
if we add up the energy of every single explosive device detonated over the course of that terrible war, from hand grenades all the way up to the two atom bombs the US detonated over japan, slaughtering civilians en masse and turning two cities to rubble in the space of a moment, we get the figure of about 3 megatons. or in kilowatt hours, 3.4 billion, spread out across all those years of war.
compared to 7-14 billion kWh just to transmitting the same tangle of bytes around again and again. every single year.
and that's just jquery. not the cost of executing it. not the mass of other garbage javascript and analytics and social media spyware, which now often adds up to megabytes per page. not the cost of rendering or running any of that.
just to zap jquery back and forth across the internet to every computer accessing a website that uses it.
a final point of comparison, now that i have your attention: bitcoin uses up 46,000 billion kilowatt hours per year. a number which is likely to keep on growing.
draw your own conclusions about web design & software optimization.
let me tell you a story. about computers and javascript and hitler and the soviet union.
a friend of mine just dug up some numbers and did some math for my dyscalculic ass and came up with the conclusion that just by transmitting the minified version of jquery around (not even executing it!), Planet Earth is likely using up somewhere between 7-14 billion kWh of power every year.
let's put that into some perspective.
world war two was the single deadliest conflict in human history. it killed somewhere around 80 million people, which at the time was three percent of *all humans, everywhere.* it left europe in ruins, and nowhere was the damage so intense and horrific as the Soviet Union.
the Battle of Stalingrad is one of the most famous battles of the war. two million people died there alone. in the opening salvos the entire city was flattened by nazi and soviet bombs alike. eventually the Union prevailed, at a tremendous cost.
but Stalingrad was only one of the cities flattened, only one of the battles fought as Europe burned. the devastation was so comprehensive that nearly every western nation had to rely on aid from the US, one of the only powers on either side whose economy was intact, to rebuild. (it didn't help that American wartime policy was designed more to inflict as much Nazi death and destruction as possible on the Soviets, of course).
if we add up the energy of every single explosive device detonated over the course of that terrible war, from hand grenades all the way up to the two atom bombs the US detonated over japan, slaughtering civilians en masse and turning two cities to rubble in the space of a moment, we get the figure of about 3 megatons. or in kilowatt hours, 3.4 billion, spread out across all those years of war.
compared to 7-14 billion kWh just to transmitting the same tangle of bytes around again and again. every single year.
and that's just jquery. not the cost of executing it. not the mass of other garbage javascript and analytics and social media spyware, which now often adds up to megabytes per page. not the cost of rendering or running any of that.
just to zap jquery back and forth across the internet to every computer accessing a website that uses it.
a final point of comparison, now that i have your attention: bitcoin uses up 46,000 billion kilowatt hours per year. a number which is likely to keep on growing.
draw your own conclusions about web design & software optimization.
"If however, they only get infuriated because I don’t play my game according to their rules, I cannot resist the temptation to ignore their fury and to shrug my shoulders in the most polite manner. (The other day I was shown—in Science of Computer Programming 23 (1994) 91-101 a Book Review by Egon Börger; it was a nice example of that fury.)"
ROTFL! ! ! 🤣
https://vanemden.wordpress.com/2018/07/21/dijkstra-and-logic/
Why I love #Dijkstra:
"I never felt obliged to placate the logicians. I (kindly!) assume that their customary precautions are needed and sufficient for reaching their goals. If they can help and correct me by pointing out where my precautions have been insufficient and where my own discipline has led or will lead me astray, they are most welcome: I love to be corrected. (Besides being a most instructive experience, being corrected shows that the other one cares about you.)"
1/
Shamar
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@Shamar Yeah, the impact of bad decision-making is one of the central themes in the book.
And the author isn't sparing the technologists, either: People who know everything about the internet as a technology generally do not have a clue as to the social context in which the technology is used, leading to more ineffective and bad policies.
Shamar
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You can hate what white people as a whole have done without that affecting your ability to recognize some do it to survive and some are actively working against those things.
(You also could argue "white" is a fake race generated by a pile of Europeans desperate to justify mentally why they were enslaving humans, too.)
I'm not interested in a debate. I hate racist actions, I hate white supremacists themselves to a degree, and I will absolutely judge white people naive enough to think "hate" is one big monolithic thing.
We should hate hate. Hate is organizing, though. Should we hate hate in the least organized manner possible? Doesn't that sound like the exact way to, um, die?
I'm glad you're not generalizing, but the way you phrased it did seem to invite that assessment, IMO. (And it'd be terrible to accidentally become part of the propaganda machine that the white supremacists are cranking up: "white persecution", and such. Those folks, I mostly pity.)
Father, husband and programmer.
Joined Dec 2017
