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zerakith

@ zerakith @lemmy.ml

Posts
1
Comments
118
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Much ado about "nothing" - Xe Iaso (==Goodbye NixOS)

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  • It's not about "satisfying the minorities". It's about ensuring a basic base level of respect and behaviour for people from all backgrounds. The roles you are talking about were specifically to deal with the fact there was an active problem around that minority in that community that needed dealing with. So bringing in that lived experience is absolutely important. Someone can be adequate, sane, have "proper" mindset and judgement and be from a minority that is currently being targeted with lived experience of the problem. Dealing with issues around diversity and inclusion make life easier and better for everyone: it's well evidenced. I benefit daily from work that's been done to make my area easier for people with disabilities despite not having one. Those only came about by people with disabilities challenging and getting in the room where decisions are made.

    It's really not that hard! If you don't feel minoritised in your daily life and therefore don't see the importance, fine, but all of us are only one incident or cultural shift to end up being the target so if you aren't motivated by the plight of people you are happy to "other" than do so because one day you might be the other.

  • Much ado about "nothing" - Xe Iaso (==Goodbye NixOS)

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  • You say remove discrimination and then use a discriminatory strawman. No one is suggesting a code contribution must be accepted based on a minority status. They are saying that to get a decent functioning community for everyone you need a diverse range of people in positions that set the behaviour of the community. You can't get the CoC and enforcement of it right unless those affected are in positions that influence it. Your enforced anonymity doesn't work because there are other ways of gendering and racialising people (e.g. based on who people talk). Additionally, what you are saying is that minoritised people have to hide who they are so they don't get discriminated against rather than just deal with those doing the discrimination. They are called communities because that's what's they are: people want to be part of something and that involves sharing a part of themselves too. Open source projects live or die on their communities because they mostly don't have the finances to just pay people to do the work. You need people to beleive in the project and not burn out etc.

    You lose nothing by making sure people from all backgrounds have the same opportunity and enjoyment being part of it. If you aren't in a minority and don't care about those that are then just say so!

  • Much ado about "nothing" - Xe Iaso (==Goodbye NixOS)

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  • Others have replied pointing out this is a strawman and that merit doesn't make any sense as a metric if you have discrimination. In practice performance ('merit') is complex interaction between an individual's skills and talent and the environment and support they get to thrive. If you have an environment that structurally and openly discriminates against a certain subclass of people and then chose on "merit" you are just further entrenching that discrimination.

    This is a project that seemed to be having specific problems on gender that was causing harm and leading to losing talent. In a voluntary role particularly this is a death spiral for the project as a whole. Without goodwill and passion open source projects of any meaningful size just wouldn't survive.

    I'm glad you care enough about diversity and evidence to have worked out how to solve these problems without empowering and listening to those minorities. Please do share it.

  • Much ado about "nothing" - Xe Iaso (==Goodbye NixOS)

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  • This is a basic represention and inclusion issue. Unless you are actively seeking out voices of those minorities and addressing their concerns you will have a reinforcing loop where behaviour that puts people off engaging will continue and it will continue to limit people from those minorities being involved (and in the worst case causing active harm to some people who end getting involved). From what I understand the behaviour that has been demonstrated and from who those people leaving it is clear this is active issue within Nix. Having a diverse range of people and perspectives will actually make the outputs (software) and community generally better. It's about recognising the problems in the formal and informal structures you are creating and working to address them.

    Additionally, but just to clarify nepotism would be giving positions based on relationships with people in power and not ensuring that your board contains a more representative set of backgrounds and perspectives.

  • We might be closer to changing course on climate change than we realized | Greenhouse gas emissions might have already peaked. Now they need to fall — fast.

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  • More of the CO2 currently in the atmosphere has been put there since it was a known issue.

    Depressing but a bad situation is better than a terrible one, so we must push on.

  • Fedora Linux 40 Officially Released with Kernel 6.8, Gnome 46 & KDE 6

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  • I looked at the agreed changes for 41 but couldn't see any accessibility. Do you know what changes are coming?

  • “The city of the future uses bikes” Seen in Puebla, Mexico

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  • Being available in a niche market isn't the same as being affordable because its a mass product. There's more use-cases then you outline: they are particularly good for those with certain types of disabilities. You are right that mixing with traffic is another key reason why they arent as popular. There's a reason you see them most commonly in areas with decent segregated infrastructure. Personally I have a DF for some of the reasons you outline. My point wasn't all about the frame though that was just an example, its also true of the focus at component level where R&D has not prioritised low-cost low-maintance options because the high-cost high-performance market was more lucrative and that stems from in part from the direction performance cycling took.

  • “The city of the future uses bikes” Seen in Puebla, Mexico

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  • I didn't mean that all bikes sold were UCI compliant as directly as that. The market has focused on pursuing a fairly narrow definition of performance for a bike in part because of the narrow definitions of racing cycling. That's had knock on effects for the type of components that have been focussed on and developed. The near ubiquity of diamond frames over recumbents which prioritise comfortably for example.

    I think we have seen that effect lesson over the last decade or so (e.g. belt drives for example). Ebikes help as they have very different markets, need different properties and have by definition no need to overlap with UCI compliance at all.

    Of course its quite hard to unpick the other factors that have led the market to be cater so strongly to leisure market over the utility market but the UCI I think is up there in setting a cultural standard for what a bike is at the cost to alternatives.

  • “The city of the future uses bikes” Seen in Puebla, Mexico

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  • I wonder how much damage to utility cycling the UCI has done. Maybe its not worth unpicking since the harm is so much less than the motor lobby.

    Its just such a shame that UCI compliance dominates cycle manufacturing.

  • No birdsong, no water in the creek, no beating wings: how a haven for nature fell silent

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  • This is harrowing

  • Caustic Soda Locomotive at a Drying Station

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  • Hi sorry for delay I wanted to read and absorb it before replying and my energy levels have been unpredictable.

    There's some cool and great stuff in here.

    I got overwhelmed about airships trying to work out if they were viable. You can (as I'm sure you've found) find a lot of aeronautical industry talking about how they fundamentally are unlikely to be able to fill any niche for some of the reasons you mention and some technical details which I really struggle to understand. Obviously industry spokespeople who are heavily invested in jet engines are unlikely to give a balanced picture...

    I'm skeptical about wood burning vehicles to be honest. I think its more likely we will see (electric) micro mobility plus public transport. There could still be a niche for it but I suspect we would struggle to dedicate much land for wood production for this purpose given all the other demands we have.

    I particularly like your focus on industry which often gets shuffled into a difficult-to-handle category and sort of forgotten. I wonder how much concrete demand we can avoid altogether.

    Have you heard of solar.lowtechmagazine.com or its companion notechmagazine.com. They are full of this sort of thinking. Also there's http://www.oldandinteresting.com/default.aspx lots of examples that might inspire!

  • Caustic Soda Locomotive at a Drying Station

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  • Lots of discussion on the technology and the pros and cons and likely implications which is super interesting but also think it should be noted how cool taking a concept like this and making some art out of it.

    Really nice way of showing other worlds are possible using a technology thread that got closed by the take off of fossil fuels. I think a lot of the future solutions will look like this.

    Kudos!

  • Has anyone calculated the administrative costs associated with traffic safety research?

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  • I agree there may be quite a large range but just to say that can still be useful.

    I think its crucial to start denormalising all the costs and externalities of car focussed transport policy. Motornormativity means policy makers and general public internalise costs of progressive infrastructure and are blind to the huge costs of the status quo.

    So even being able to pin a wide range on it can be helpful. Not for financial costs but for emissions I was able to show even for the lower end of a wide range of additional hard-to-quantify emissions for scenarios that didn't drastically reduce private car usage as well as electricify would blow past thier carbon budgets.

  • Has anyone calculated the administrative costs associated with traffic safety research?

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  • I haven't seen any work estimating this. I have as part of my work spent some time trying to estimate the upstream effects of private cars (and other forms of transport) and it quite quickly gets very hard to find very much data. Even something quite basic like road maintainance gets quite difficult to unpick. So we know broad generalisations like heavier vehicles cause more damage but its quite hard to isolate this connection with individual traffic make ups (e.g. how much change in costs does a 10% change in average vehicle weight cause)

    Sadly, we don't have a culture that particularly wants to know or track the costs. I'm not sure I'd be so confident though that the administration costs would be completely neglible. Some of the costs are quite high level: highway engineering, infrastructure and enforcement which can have high labour and materials costs. Probably what you need is a "natural experiment". Find a town or city that already happens to have a strange policy (I vagually recall somewhere that has a network of golf cart usage?) and try and ask the relevant authority whether they can provide the back history of spending and compare it to a similar size "normal" road network.

    Related bugbare of my mine is the term cycling or walking infrastructure when in reality most if it is actually only necessary because of cars so its really car infrastructure (i.e. to facilitate cars going non human speeds without killing people or damaging buildings).

  • Kohei Saito’s “Start From Scratch” Degrowth Communism | if taken seriously, it would lead to political disaster for both the socialist left and the environmental movement | Jacobin

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  • This is frustrating because its a strawman. A degrowth scenario could still have growth in some areas (and I would expect it to if it was part of a realignment on more equitable and sustainable principles) and the whole global experience degrowth.

    At the core of this is the physical limits of energy sources (and therefore economic activity which is highly coupled and is likely to remain so). There is room for disagreement here but its down to whether or not one believes that tech will save us by providing a different high energy source in time (or a sufficient combination of energy sources and efficiency and decoupling options). On the timescales of Climate Change I'd say that's highly unlikely and a period of degrowth will be necessary and the precautionary principle suggest we should work to this in case the tech options don't work.

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    Hot Take: Stop Recommending Windows-y Linux Distros

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  • I suspect this will generate a lot of discussion and opinions on both sides but what I think we lack is a culture of longitudinal data and study. Maybe you are right or maybe dropping new users in the deep end puts them off forever. It would be nice to see some quantative study on the Linux user experience. Does it shift wider tech beliefs or political beleifs?

  • Scientific Leaders: "No Anthropocene" Vote Was a Sham

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  • Agree, a headline of "Humans aren't dominating the climate" does the damage of subtly suggesting climate change/human impacts on environment isn't a big deal or is overblown. Even if there is legitimate disagreement about whether we can say it has definitely technically begun or not.

    If that were the case it could have been communicated as "Human Interference in the biome is at an unprecedented scale but scientists aren't clear if it dominates natural systems... Yet"

  • ExxonMobil is suing investors who want faster climate action

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  • My understanding is the internal calculation is that they know the time is up and eventually the money train of fossil fuels will come to an end the only question for them is how much more money they extract before they cut their losses, hide the wealth and move on.

    The calculation is that, because of the sheer scale of profits from FF any amount of delay in the transition away from them (even say six months) is worth to them billions of dollars which massively outweighs the size of any fines.

    Basically they are banking on there being no real consequences or accountability and to the extent they think about the climatic consequences at all they think they'll just be able to buy their way out of them.

  • Gnome Flashback And Gnome Classic.

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  • Can we not use austistic as a pejorative. Thanks