⚗️⚗️⚗️ pnathan ⚗️⚗️⚗️ @pnathan@mastodon.social

General offer to *everyone*:

I love getting email - paul@nathan.house

It's like Mastodon, but far less ephemeral. ;-)

I like talking Theology, being a Progressive Pentacostal Christian.

I also like talking Computer Science (databases and SRE topics in particular)

I also particularly appreciate talking history, with an interest in the volkisch thought.

And if you have a college thesis - I love reading them!!

Finally! Happy to read resumes of software engineers & line managers for review

If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged.

-- Richelieu

I'm not an anarchist and I reject their solutions & ideology; often considering their critique to be inadequate to manage the complexities of quotidian life.

n.b., I am aggressively muting posters who do a lot of jokey / inane toots.

if you do a lot of sort of posting and mention me, it probably won't get through - set up another account and poke me if its important enough.

"In blue Seattle, Trump supporters are starting to come out of hiding"

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/in-blue-seattle-trump-supporters-are-starting-to-come-out-of-hiding/

I did some research myself: the billionaire has donated some 50K to 45's PACs.

It's tiring, but realize the facists are here in Seattle.

Honestly I wish I had a DSA poster just hanging out in my backpack.

Democrat Neoliberal Politics Don't Work: Vote Socialist and Follow the Red Rose.

But alas.

Saw a flyer in Capitol Hill for hashtag RedPillSeattle. Arguing for #Seattle to go Republican. The background image was some homeless tents.

Redpilling refers to a conversation to the incel / alt right movement.

I tore the flyer down. We don't need that trash here.

well, that was about 400 emails I sludged through. A few are important, I'll address them over the weekend.

A lot of unsubscribes.

so I'm curious: for those who have executed campaigns with reasonable success in activist circles (and know a little about tech)- what would a backend software engineer do for you?

FWIW in 2016 I volunteered and wired together an website promoting Clinton, roughly 1M visits. It left me with ashes in my mouth: it didn't do enough, I don't think it changed the conversation and my skills were nearly pointless after it launched.

I see websites qua websites as infowar tools. true or false, they exist to promote a point of view, it's marketing. Useful but really you don't need me for that - just a CC for a domain and a wordpress account.

I've spent 3 years idly about software engineering and how it can directly relate to changing the cultural climate.

Most political campaigns are interested in voter databases, front end work (websites), and email/reachout systems. Cybersecurity work is generally unwanted by campaigns.

I see a lot of GIS being used by local activists.

As a backend/SRE chap, it's hard in my head to connect my work with cultural change.

Curious what others think here.

Ugh. International restrictions on buying / listening to songs are dumbbbbb.

(Nightwish, Century Child album).

tonight I will look into indexes for querying the data. It's just a fast-lookup data structure over a column.

here's the thing when you are deeply interacting with code at this level, possibilities of system design shimmer before you eyes like Lisp.

I'm definitely going to do the ABCL front end, it might be where I write the query planner itself.

Update. Csv loading accomplished.

Next will be indexes and a pass through of queries.

This is following out the path I etched out years ago, and avoiding technical rat holes I went into then. 😅

Following on to that will be seeing how Armed Bear can be used as the front end.

tonight I will keep grinding on my arbitrary query engine (similar in generalized notion to Apache Drill), but focused on local work.

I've wanted to do this for _forever_.

Books I'm reading.

Paul and the Faithfulness of God by the leading voice in the reevaluation of St Paul

A theology of race by a Black theologian

Masterless Men about poor whites in the pre civil war South

Honest, I'm a software engineer, really...

Reading Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South by Keri Leigh Merritt.

Fascinating stuff. I feel very grateful that we moved from the South when I was a child. A lot of toxic history there.

Who or what is a tech bro? I see so much dislike, but I can't id the stereotype

The CapitolOne hack is... interesting. It doesn't appear that actual damage occurred. It seems almost motiveness. No sense of actual financial or revenge motive.

Reading a little around and chatting with some backchannel, it seems that the hacker was known to be unstable in the local nerd community.

I really wish mental health had better funding and also, the #seattle had better in-person community as a culture. There's huge anomie in this place.

I feel so sad about this.

https://reading.supply/post/432f6903-c7cd-4cb0-a894-c09155a8ca8b

super fascinating reflection on the last 30-40 years of technological change

a brief on elizabeth warren

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/23/18183091/two-income-trap-elizabeth-warren-book

also interesting read.

a brief on kamela harris

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/kamala-harris-2020-election-interview-861340/

interesting read.

the big & sad order has been made:

* The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism

* The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race

* Reconstructing the Gospel: Finding Freedom from Slaveholder Religion

* Race: A Theological Account

I'm a Christian. I think this is going to try my faith like nothing else.

I'll be putting together a specific site to document what I find.

I have accepted follower requests fairly casually for a while. I suspect some are bots etc.

anyone have a script to do the cleansing of 'default' or botty accounts? otherwise I'll have to write it. >.<

(I'd also be curious about other automated tools for analyzing connection graphs in mastodon, fwiw)

#mastodon #fediverse #metadiscourse