Ahmed FASIH @22@octodon.social

"#Pepys could only add and subtract right up to the time of his appointment to the Admiralty, but then quickly learned to multiply and divide to spare himself embarrassment. … You can learn what you need, even the technical stuff, at the moment you need it or shortly before."
—John Taylor #Gatto, *Underground history of American education* (https://archive.org/stream/TheUndergroundHistoryOfAmericanEducation_758/TheUndergroundHistoryOfAmericanEducation_djvu.txt)

Read this fifteen or more years ago, see its truth every day.

Oh no. StackOverflow must have recently started customizing its front page, now I'm seeing all these interesting numerical Python and JavaScript questions when I go to stackoverflow.com (which I maybe do once or twice a day), and I'm contributing to someone at StackExchange's satisfaction at seeing engagement increase with this new system!

Grownup achievement unlocked: we ordered family cards (like business cards, but to hand out to personal friends we make, also called contact cards, with parents+kids' names).

“#Beliefs are hypotheses to be tested, not treasures to be guarded.”

*Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction*, by Philip E. Tetlock

"I don’t believe in a traditional #God, but if I did, the God who I’d believe in is one who’s constantly tipping the scales of fate toward horribleness—a God who regularly causes catastrophes to happen, even when all the rational signs point toward their not happening… The one positive thing to be said about my God is that, unlike the just and merciful kind, I find that mine rarely lets me down." —Scott Aaronson, https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3654

“be prepared to accept that what seems obviously true now may turn out to be false later.” —Philip E. Tetlock, *Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction*

Words to live by. This book is 🔥.

Juicy nerd details: because history can change, analytics data (like the number of editors seen each day) is recomputed starting from the beginning of time. This is a huge computational burden so such daily data served by their REST API is updated only once a month! Yesterday's edits data will be available only around May 1.

The thread mentions some optimizations that Wikimedia will get to some day, and also other ways to get real-time data, but this was really cool.

Forgot to post this: https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/analytics/2018-March/006258.html

For almost ten years, Wikipedia has had a RevDel system, where an admin can permanently purge an edit even from history (e.g., for copyright infringement or illegal content). This could never be done if Wikipedia used an append-only system now in vogue (Secure Scuttlebutt, Dat, blockchains, &c).

Details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Revision_deletion

Cool paper: http://www.andrew-g-west.com/docs/wikisym_11_revdel_final.pdf

This makes life hard for analytics, but is critical for social/legal reasons.

CC0 license/public domain—setting your data totally free since 2009 🙌 brings a joyful tear to my eye.

https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/analytics/2018-April/006304.html

TFW you want to upload your fifteen lines of Python that do something stupidly simple (combine multiple univariate/bivariate populations' sample means/variances into one), and you end up with ninety lines of code (original + unit test, docstrings, and fixes for Python2), README, UNLICENSE, requirements.txt, and requirements-test.txt in the git repo.

😳. I (sometimes) love the smell of professionalism in the morning.

(https://github.com/fasiha/simple-combine-population-statistics)

Our bodies are like planets for the microbes that live on and in us. The planets sometimes come close enough to touch, and some tourists are exchanged, but most microbes stay home.

Ed Yong gave us this image in *I Contain Multitudes*.

Having said all that—about the quality-of-life improvement when you lose the assholes (& the well-meaning people who showcase assholes to ridicule them, which makes Twitter impossible), regaining positive feelings and energy—there's always this nagging feeling…

Because the assholes are still out there, festering, scheming, till maybe one day I wake up with a tag round my neck and boarding a train like this kid circa 1942.

We need saints—Gandhi, MLK—to engage them. Being a saint is too hard.

"You will make progress faster if you move with people who want to move with you than if you waste time arguing with those who don't." —bobhaugen drops righteous truth (https://viewer.scuttlebot.io/%25NCqUUeNDSKawJbZKWSQNIXlcx39z1uPlqdiJMjhOHDA%3D.sha256)

So shoutout to @CobaltVelvet and all the others making Octodon a good home for us to hang our hats. Thank you.

'Randos with "ideas" constantly swoop into channels such as feminism with poorly researched theories for all to see, including new people who will be put off the community for good.' —substack

'At this point in my life, I have no interest being subjected to BS. … I don't give a shit if I end up a complete no-asshole filter bubble. Sounds great to me. There are plenty of ideas to share and work to collaborate on with non-assholes.' —Alanna

And that concludes this edition of #SSB Internet Drama.

In the past I've slightly disparaged Mastodon/ActivityPub's data model & replication protocol, compared to aforementioned Dat, IPFS, Secure Scuttlebutt, BitTorrent DHT, et al., but have concluded that, for me and some friends (small N), Mastodon has succeeded tremendously in providing a home where I don't have to worry about "the rando problem" that substack is struggling with:

https://viewer.scuttlebot.io/%25OkgDsogCxesWEWn77Znu2alWlqNTpZVgRI4AWxcckBc%3D.sha256

Alanna is basically describing a well-run Mastodon instance here: https://viewer.scuttlebot.io/%25bM6TrtRhduWNQcm%2BfOsgHpzcp%2F0olJjgqo3l14FM4GM%3D.sha256

Pinafore, a web frontend to Mastodon by the indefatigable @nolan (a fellow Gilbert & Sullivan fan!) comes at a time when I'm thinking a lot about decentralized p2p Dat IPFS SSB choices, and makes a strong case for entirely† client-side apps that talk to a "your" server (centralized from your perspective), and letting that server do Dat/SSB/BitTorrent DHT(/ActivityPub) magic behind the scenes.

It's also offline-ready PWA—fantastic!, as expected from Mr PouchDB.

†Functionally client-side.