Hrefna (DHC)

SRE at Google. Queer. Poly :potion_polyamory: Trans :verified_trans: :nonbinary_potion: Engineer. Ace :flag_ace: Member of AWU-CWA. #ActuallyAutistic :rainbowinfinity: #UnionStrong

Opinions my own. Does not suffer fools gladly.

pronouns: xe/xem/xyr or she/her
Twitter: waterprinciple
Location: Longmont, CO
LinkTree: https://linktr.ee/hrafna

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npub1sq24x9tgfra9xwnfpwssaegxfj6hwfhnpa2nfjecp78x8wujfx2sqagk0y

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hrefna_at_hachyderm.io@momostr.pink

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relay.damus.io

nos.lol

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npub1sq24x9tgfra9xwnfpwssaegxfj6hwfhnpa2nfjecp78x8wujfx2sqagk0y

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Published at

2024-08-09T11:28:51Z

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Last Notes

2024-08-04 05:45:48

One toxic manager—including tech leads, project managers, etc—causes significant harm to the people around them and below them.
They destroy people's lives, derail careers, and can kill companies before anyone who doesn't report to them knows what is happening.
One is all it takes.
But companies pretty much always and very consistently side with the person who has power. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, giving them grace, and providing second chances.
While they destroy.

2024-07-31 10:34:04

- reply

Harm reduction is about reducing harm.
One of these yahoos claimed that "instead of voting" we should "form unions."
Which. Uh.
I'm a big proponent of everyone unionizing, but:
1. Do you realize how many ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE HARDER unionizing will be under a Trump administration?
2. Do you realize what the difference of _scale_ is between unionizing your workplace and showing up to vote?
Yes, do unionize. Absolutely.
But also vote.

2024-07-31 10:30:15

Positions I have actually seen people take in the last week on here:
1. Harm reduction doesn't count because not everyone is saved.
2. Harm reduction is privileged because how sad that you suffer a fraction of the harm you "gleefully inflict on others."
3. Harm reduction doesn't count because there's more work to do.
Next time someone comes in with "no one is saying" I have a stack of these to throw at them.
I just.
am so.
tired.

2024-07-30 09:15:47

Something important that @npub1g90…r22m is talking about here:
It's going beyond blocklists.
There are so many things we can do that aren't blocklists, and certainly aren't consensus blocklists.
Quarantine is such an obvious and simple step and a time honored tradition for tackling these sorts of problems.
As is a keyword embargo: require moderator review before posts with certain keywords make it through from people who aren't being followed, or equivalents thereof.
https://hachyderm.io/@inthehands/112872266316450280

2024-07-27 23:26:30

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I'm always amazed.
--
"If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven"
--
John replied, “If you have two shirts, give one to the poor. If you have food, share it with those who are hungry.”
--
Jesus looked at him and said, "How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of heaven! Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven"
--
Not. Subtle.

2024-07-27 21:25:03

Wtf is Musk on about, do I even _want_ to know?
https://media.hachyderm.io/media_attachments/files/112/860/561/293/715/776/original/bdc7292b1565963e.jpeg

2024-07-22 20:16:47

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I asked a different chat bot of a different lineage the same question (basically asking for a VSO structure) and it gave me something that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike what I asked it for.
What it gave me was a setup for a VS sentence structure (no O) and then it gave me a bunch of lovely example sentences "from this grammar" that were all SVO.
These tools wouldn't even pass like… the very first homework assignment for context free grammars at the most basic level.

2024-07-22 20:11:21

- reply

But yeah, you can replace a software engineer with this. Sure.
I wasn't even asking a particularly _challenging_ context free grammar question, like, "first ten pages of the chapter" level question, and I didn't even ask about determinants
It just went off into the weeds on its own and got worse at every possible step.

2024-07-22 20:08:16

Hilarious experience with an AI bot today.
I asked it to generate a context-free grammar for a particular word sentence structure.
It decided that "the" was a verb.
I asked about that, it confirmed that "the" is not a verb and tried again.
…so it made it worse and made the an intermediary node (and still a verb).
…I pointed out that this wasn't right either. It agreed and…
decided that "dog" is a determinant (and the is still either an intermediate node or a verb).

2024-06-12 15:33:25

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I'm wondering how much processing systems naïvely do to understand the result here.
If I provide a link to a 10 MB object do you have safeties in place?
Does it traverse? If so that has lots of exciting edge cases.
If it refers into a loop will it catch that?
etc.

2024-06-12 08:09:04

- reply

For those who are playing at home, two questions across a few examples should illustrate the frustration:
Q1. What should happen?
Q2. What do you think _would_ happen with implementations today?
Scenarios.
S1. Replying to two separate posts.
S2. Replying to itself.
S3. Providing a Link object reference.
S4. Providing a Link*
S5. Providing an Actor.
S6. Providing an Activity.
What actually happens isn't a mystery but it isn't pretty: https://funfedi.dev/support_tables/generated/in_reply_to/

2024-06-12 08:03:33

Ugggggghhhhhh. Whhyyyyyy.
I know I've ranted about this before, but still, looking at it tonight and just… why.
#ActivityPub #ActivityStreams
https://media.hachyderm.io/media_attachments/files/112/602/605/796/852/952/original/e7af62541a22a13b.jpeg

2024-05-30 20:25:22

Mustards: "I can take 2 years to eliminate from a pasture!"
Kochia: "I take 3!"
Thistles: "We can take 5+ years!"
Bindweed and Russian Knapweed, speaking together: "Amateurs! AMATEURS!"

2024-05-30 18:30:00

Time to do some light reading on this flight. We'll see how far I get before I need to take a break and switch over to something less… substantive.
https://media.hachyderm.io/media_attachments/files/112/531/458/974/229/760/original/3b5a918b5cb67052.jpeg

2024-05-30 16:09:59

- reply

It's also relatively common for people to think that things are a performance consideration because they don't understand them.
Like the number of situations I've seen Guice be the source of a performance problem? I can basically count on one hand and usually a) it's a misconfiguration and b) it's rectified with like two lines of code.
But the number of times I've seen developers _blame_ Guice? Many, many more times.

2024-05-30 16:06:59

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I've talked about this here before, but in general: Java performance advice is just so often… horridly wrong. Like you can still find pieces of advice that date back to pre Java 1.4 days.
But this doesn't mean that there aren't performance considerations, it's just that they are almost never the performance considerations that people think of when they think of how to tune java or debug performance issues.
The outdated (or just flat incorrect) advice is often worse than no advice at all.

2024-05-30 16:03:06

- reply

Especially because so much has changed between the LTS releases that it's worth revisiting every so often.

2024-05-30 16:01:34

I should give my "How I learned to stop worrying and love the JIT" (not my original title, but someone suggested it and I'm stealing it) talk again.
I also need to do a followup "Fear and Loathing in HotSpot" talk about "things you are seeing as problems, why they exist, and how to address them."

2024-05-30 15:52:26

I really just need to only date other asexuals (:flag_ace:). It's so much easier and lower stress.

2024-05-30 08:13:33

- reply

Like I've now seen "no one said not to vote for harm reduction" said in a thread with someone who _advocates not voting_ in that exact same thread.
This "no one said…" line is extremely tired.

2024-05-30 08:10:54

"No one said not to do harm reduction"
Except I have multiple examples of people doing exactly that.
Come on, this isn't particularly difficult to find.

2024-05-30 02:47:12

"Harm reduction is just reformism"
No, "reformism"—or whatever particular brand of "rebuild society" you are for—is about what you are doing with the other 365 days out of the year and how you are looking to drive change.
Harm reduction is about reducing harm in the meantime.

2024-05-29 22:52:34

Girlfriend is describing #EchoesOfThePlumGrove to me, my response:
"So it's like a hybrid of Stardew Valley and Don't Starve as if written by Paradox Games?"

2024-05-29 22:26:43

"Person who won't do anything claims that the problem is no one else will do the only things they approve of, film at 11."

2024-05-29 22:23:35

- reply

I present: The "praxis" of those who proclaim "but both sides are bad and we should do something else." Grey on black pixels, 2024.
https://media.hachyderm.io/media_attachments/files/112/526/715/200/701/088/original/31c86f4888c279a6.jpeg

2024-05-29 20:44:19

- reply

You are being given an almost literal example of a trolly problem and a bunch of people have decided that the solution is to sit on their hands and whine about how they can't change how trains work.

2024-05-29 20:37:36

Like, seriously now. WHAT DO YOU THINK THE DEFINITION OF HARM REDUCTION IS?
"Harm reduction" is providing clean needles. It's making sure they don't trip while walking through the fire. It's providing a less harmful drug so that they don't self medicate with the more harmful drug.
It is not generally "putting out the fire."
Now. Again. Harm reduction is not sufficient, but it's not _meant_ to be sufficient. It is a way of reducing harm in the meantime.
https://hachyderm.io/@hrefna/112526283353648297

2024-05-29 20:33:41

- reply

That is _literally the definition of harm reduction_ wtf. "I can reduce my probability of tripping when I walk into the fire or I can increase the risk of tripping" could be _used as an example of harm reduction_.
If you want to go do illegal solutions then go do illegal solutions
In the meantime, there's harm reduction. Harm reduction isn't the end of the road, it's not the only thing you should do, it's a strategy so that you _reduce the harm in the meantime_
@npub1pgs…q6t3 @npub10cf…fmxr

2024-05-29 20:30:28

This is the kind of thing that I mean when I talk about harm reduction.
Harm reduction is about _reduction of harm going forward_. People seem to have gotten it into their heads somehow that "harm reduction" means "reducing the harm that has already happened."
That has _never_ been the definition, yet here we are.
https://mastodon.social/@shoq/112513633430716776

2024-05-29 20:25:03

"None of the potential harm reduction Biden voters promised me before has come to pass"
On what planet do you spend most of your time? How's the weather there?

2024-05-28 23:39:54

Me: "I think this alert is a false positive for us. There may be a real issue, but it is directing it to the wrong group and we can't do anything about it."
Coworker: "I'm not sure I'd characterize it as a false positive given that it identified a real issue."
Me: "I'm not disputing that there is also a false **negative** involved as well."

2024-05-28 18:11:05

"I miss the old internet, when the cruel people were contained to one or two websites I could ignore"
What internet would that be, exactly?
It certainly wasn't any internet I've been on, and I've been around since the 1990s.
This "nostalgia for the 'heyday of the internet'" almost always seems to be rooted in these rose-colored glasses about how things were.
I won't argue about whether things are better or worse overall, but this idea that the internet was somehow _nicer_ is weird to me.

2024-05-27 20:13:59

Pet peeve "Happy memorial day."
-.-

2024-05-26 20:35:17

Just in general I see saying "oh btw there's a whisper network you aren't apart of and no I won't invite you, but there are actively unsafe situations I'm aware of that you should be cautious of, no I won't even tell you the genre of concern so that you can ask relevant questions" to be… at best in poor taste.

2024-05-26 20:25:58

- reply

Like, look. I get that you don't want to name names.
You can mention the group. Or vaguebook about your experience so that people know what to ask or listen for (see what I'm doing here?) You can say "DM me for details." You can say "I'd be cautious around <entities> run by <org> and make sure you ask about trust and safety considerations." Even "here are some questions you can ask"
But this "there's a whisper network, you aren't in it, but be careful! predators are out there! " is not helpful

2024-05-26 19:48:34

- reply

You can let people know the group without letting people know specifics. You can give people guidance on which questions to ask. You can give people a category of problem that you are talking about.
This whole "THERE'S SOMEONE OUT THERE WHO MIGHT (or might not) HURT YOU AND I KNOW DETAILS BUT I WON'T SHARE THEM" is entirely too common and it is actively harmful.
It also encourages "vibe checks," which I have strong negative opinions about.
What are they supposed to be looking for?

2024-05-26 19:45:42

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"We can't communicate openly for Reasons™"
Great, fantastic. But saying "SO BE CAREFUL BECAUSE AN ABUSER (who I won't mention) IS OUT THERE SOMEWHERE (that I know but won't state)" is the opposite of helpful.

2024-05-26 19:44:23

Being vague about specific harmful experiences with groups who you won't name and just advising people to "be cautious" is the opposite of helpful and further propagates the problems of the culture of silence around these topics. In this essay I will…

2024-05-26 16:58:44

If everything else wasn't sufficient: After seeing what happened to tooters and my own previous experience with communities disappearing overnight, I'm _extremely_ disinclined to move servers even if another one would be a better "fit" and _especially_ if that server is not fairly significantly sized.
I've done the "my community might disappear tomorrow" dance for entirely too long (1990s) and I don't particularly want to invest the time or the energy into worrying about it any longer.

2024-05-26 15:59:44

- reply

Like so.
https://media.hachyderm.io/media_attachments/files/112/508/218/924/611/292/original/ef892ac84b3ea75c.jpeg

2024-05-26 15:56:48

Meeting from last week.
Manager: "Are you available for a conversation tomorrow? I know it will be very early for you."
Me: "…is it a capital-C Conversation?"
Manager: "…a what?"
Me: "Does it involve HR or is it about my performance in some way?"
Manager: "OH! No!!! I'm getting feedback about the recent reorg from various senior people and I'd like you involved, that's all."
Me: "whew. Okay. Had me concerned there for a second. Yes. I can be available early for that."

2024-05-26 15:45:50

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But, and this is a core theme that I think it is easy to miss (and something that Asato Asato called out): This isn't just "this is all doom and gloom." There are legitimate light moments, legitimate moments of fun, they humanize—effectively—the people.
They show that these are kids. They have light moments, they play, and yet they know (or learn) what this is.
Sometimes when stories use kids like this it feels cheap. In this case it feels purposeful.
It's a damning indictment of society

2024-05-26 15:40:31

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Sometimes stories _use_ the horrors of war. They don't flinch from it, but it isn't about that. That's the backdrop so that they can tell their story about hope or remembrance or friendship or love. So that they can pull you along with the tragedy and loss.
This story uses the light elements to make its point about racism, genocide, and war.
The anime does in some ways a better job of using those light elements to draw you along while not losing the point. The light novel is relentless.

2024-05-26 15:34:38

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The first season of the #EightySix anime does this, but the book grinds the point in. Behind the anime aesthetic, the sci fi elements, and the cute imagery the story is not only deathly serious, but deathly serious to a purpose. The war, the racism, the genocide is all done with a real world analog and the book wants you to understand what it is doing.
The book repeatedly references All Quiet on the Western Front and it isn't just for show. This is an anti-war novel, underscored in triplicate.

2024-05-26 15:29:51

At least the first book of #EightySix (Asato Asato/安里アサト) is a masterclass in talking about the limits of being the privileged savior. The limits of your ability, of your experience, of your _capability_ to empathize
Again and again it drives its point home:
That when you have privilege you cannot "give up that privilege." You always have it, and you _cannot_ understand what those who do not have it go through
About how prejudice is systemic and genocidal, and how the system propagates itself

2024-05-26 07:19:03

I want the hide and go seek version of #windtrace back ;_;
Not this Dead By Daylight nonsense.
#genshin

2024-05-23 16:23:32

Oh good, one of my least favorite presentation patterns: "here's a video of a bunch of random people saying what $foo 'means' to them, usually using low-quality microphones and no sound editing to speak of."

2024-05-23 05:44:12

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This doesn't mean that we don't work to fix our language, but it does mean that we need to be aware of the context a word or phrase exists in and the cultural intersections that go along with it.
We just aren't trying to move someone necessarily "away from an imperfect form" and "toward a perfect form that we decided on fifteen minutes ago." Instead there is a cultural gap, there is a matter of identity, and humanity (and all of nature) likes to defy categorization every chance it gets.

2024-05-23 05:22:07

Converging on perfect, non-problematic language:
1. Isn't possible.
2. Erases a lot of identity in the margins.
3. Will not fix oppression. Especially when your target audience are the group that uses that label.
Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.

2024-05-23 05:16:37

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The Owl House is absolutely amazing, start to finish.

2024-05-23 03:15:42

One of those things that's worth keeping in the back of your mind:
Things tend to change at the orders of magnitude.
What you need at 99% reliability is not the same thing you need at 99.9% reliability is not the same thing that you need at 99.99998% reliability.
So when you see people confidently assert that "let's just throw a neural network at it" you should immediately be asking "what is the cost of a failure."
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/05/on-self-driving-waymo-is-playing-chess-while-tesla-plays-checkers/

2024-05-23 01:05:36

Cis people sitting with each other and saying "protect trans kids" to each other and then undermining that in every interaction with a trans person or in any opportunity to actually support trans people is…
…well, it's definitely a thing.

2024-05-23 01:02:00

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I was at a Native fundraiser awhile back and they had a _very_ powerful land acknowledgement at the front, but part of what made it powerful was their statement about how "this can feel useless, sometimes, or like it is the only thing that it is done" and their reflection on "what it means to us to be doing this."
It wasn't colonizers doing it pro-forma for other colonizers.
@npub1fvh…sedu

2024-05-22 06:35:41

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I don't have the power to make the US Congress functional, or the SCOTUS not terrible, or get the EU to move more quickly, so what are the concrete actions I can take?
Unions are a concrete step that many people have the ability to take and one that can help.
Think that there is no effective action and we're all doomed to a Malthusian ending?
Then how do you respond to that, because that is the one thing you _can_ control: your response.
@npub1l0v…sv7r

2024-05-22 06:24:11

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The fundamental assertion that the value of the labor will drop to zero I think is a fundamental flaw.
Good luck to them with that theory of labor value. They've been pushing this idea since at least the late 1980s that the "next big thing" would "eliminate" the need for software engineers
Could this be it? Could this finally be it after forty years?
Maybe! But I'm not holding my breath, and in the meantime the question is "what actions can we take in this moment"
@npub1l0v…sv7r

2024-05-22 06:08:23

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If you want to fight back there are a handful of predominant methods, depending on which theory of power.
Unions are the most practical and the most in your day-to-day control. The others are things like political solutions, which both take time and tend to be out of your average person's hands in a way that unions are not.
Will they always work? Absolutely not. On the other hand: they already have today for this exact problem in the software industry.
@npub1l0v…sv7r

2024-05-22 05:54:53

- reply

They think that because it has already been done. The WGA being one example. In tech it's already happened as well: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-11/microsoft-agrees-to-union-contract-terms-governing-its-use-of-ai
Then there is the book Blood in the Machine.
@npub1l0v…sv7r

2024-05-22 02:28:08

The #RustLang "Rust by Example" is absolutely brilliant. Mad props.

2024-05-22 02:18:49

- reply

They _will_ try. It being a terrible idea doesn't mean that they won't try. It ultimately being doomed to failure doesn't mean they won't try. They've been pushing this narrative for _years_, waiting for a moment when they could try to find a justification to cut our numbers or our pay.
So they will try.
Go unionize. That's your only way of resisting them trying.
But.
Our skills will still be valuable on the other side when they eventually figure out that this doesn't work.

2024-05-22 02:12:28

"But you will be using AI in…"
Possibly! I don't dispute that it may happen! I've seen a lot of thoughts in that direction for other technologies that never panned out, but I've also seen it go the other way.
Finding a _use_ for the generative AI tools in the development process won't surprise me. Especially if the cost comes down.
What I balk at are _replacement_ narratives or the idea that somehow it will invalidate human engineers.
Also: you should _unionize_ to fight them trying.

2024-05-21 16:00:06

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"we have this language that can express something precisely and even in some cases provably. We do need specialists who can think in terms of the problem, however, and deconstruct the ideas so that they can be worked on. Especially because you are never clear in your ideas."
"Okay, but what if we just had the execs say whatever [nonsense] ideas in English and software [that we can't understand or deconstruct] _generated_ it, what then, huh?"

2024-05-21 15:58:15

"What happens to developers when AI can write code?"
I feel like I'm in a constant back-and-forth of "how-much-wood-could-a-woodchuck-chuck" every. single. time. this comes up.
Like… just…
No. Stop it.
https://media.hachyderm.io/media_attachments/files/112/479/901/500/695/821/original/cdfb03b10b93d19b.jpeg

2024-05-21 04:52:29

"Women would rather run into a bear in the woods than Lord Byron"

2024-05-20 18:12:20

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She nicked a vein in her ankle on a wire cut, any deeper and it would have been VERY bad, but as it was it was just a matter of bandaging and rest for a bit.
She broke the splint bone in her leg, but the splint bone is an auxiliary bone and it healed fine.
She broke her jaw behind the cheek plate, so she could still chew food but just couldn't take a bit for a while.
She really must be part tortoiseshell cat.
14/14

2024-05-20 18:08:58

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So now we wait and see if this manifests into something longer term. She doesn't get ridden and is basically a pasture pet at this point, so it's not like she needs to hold weight or be in any sort of rush to improve. When the inflammation is down I can do a lameness check and see if there's anything else we need to look at
This horse has a habit of getting into _very very near misses_, so this hopefully is just another one on her list
13/

2024-05-20 18:06:42

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By the morning Red is feeling a lot better. There's clear signs of inflammation and I can see the extent of the superficial damage (which is, well, superficial) and she lets me do a more thorough check on her leg
We agree that it doesn't need to be looked at right now
Today I updated my primary vet on it: she's continuing to do better and now will put significant weight on that leg. So that eliminates most of the Really Bad™ scenarios
12/

2024-05-20 18:03:10

- reply

Within ten minutes she calls me back. We talk about triage, possibilities, and options.
We agree with her showing improvement and since I can inspect it a little more thoroughly now that this is not an Emergency Emergency™ (in that she needs to come out tonight).
Whether it even makes sense to x-ray depends on whether we would be willing to perform surgery, and that isn't happening tonight regardless.
So we'll talk in the morning.
11/

2024-05-20 17:59:38

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When a large animal vet who provides emergency services is out of town they will designate someone to take their clients during that time.
So her pager lists a number to call for the vet who is her oncall for the weekend.
I call that number and it's a business-hours phone number but lists _her_ emergency pager, so I call that.
By this point Red is toe-touching, which is an improvement from holding it completely off the ground.
10/

2024-05-20 17:57:53

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These are not conclusive things, but from a triage standpoint they inform my next actions. I text our vet an update on the situation and while I wait for the vet to get back I call my partner.
I update them on what happened and we talk about it. I don't hear back from our vet in about 15 minutes and so we agree that I should escalate to her emergency pager.
So I get the number for her emergency pager and call it and… she's out of town
9/

2024-05-20 17:55:55

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I try to check her but she is having none of it. I can see that there isn't a significant amount of blood, which means she hasn't got a severe laceration, but there is definitely damage to her leg.
She's refusing to put weight on it, but there's minimal blood and it isn't a compound fracture. So that's a good sign. I eventually get to prod it and she _does not_ like that but I don't feel any inappropriate movement. No hoof damage.
8/

2024-05-20 17:52:45

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When she stands she refuses to put weight on the foot that was trapped. That's a _very, very_ bad sign
Now in categories of Things That Are Bad™ from an injury standpoint the big ones that you are likely to see in practice _all_ involve their legs and feet
A broken leg can be a death sentence
Once the wire mesh was torn free it also had sharp points, which are a risk of a puncture wound. Again on the Very Bad™ list of potential problems
7/

2024-05-20 17:49:22

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In doing so she creates a metal clanging noise which spooks the other horses.
They spook, she spooks, and she panics and tries to upright herself… and gets stuck in the fence. She panics and thrashes and dislodges the no-climb mesh attached to the fence and gets her foot stuck between the pipe rail and the no climb.
Now she goes into a full panic.
There's virtually nothing I can do safely at this point, and she then gets out.
6/

2024-05-20 17:47:06

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Mind you, this sort of thing is really common with horses. Give them a way to injure themselves and they'll use it. Don't give them a way and they'll manufacture one
You put a chesterton's fence in the middle of a pasture and _that's_ where they will want to roll. Invariably. In a way that looks like they might get stuck
So before I can do anything—and honestly there's only so much you can do—she starts rolling over right by the fence
5/

2024-05-20 17:45:01

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Now, lying down and rolling is not _usually_ a danger sign in horses but it can be an indication of colic or some other issue, so I immediately look up when I hear it to watch her behavior.
She has laid down and is trying to roll right next to a metal pipe rail fence with a wire mesh on it (the wire mesh was installed for a former roommate's pig who no longer lives here).
That's… not great.
4/

2024-05-20 17:42:30

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There are a lot of things you don't want a horse over-indulging on in a feed room (and a lot of things that the horse really wants to indulge on), but we were low on most of the more dangerous supplies (thankfully) or they hadn't gotten into them (e.g., the ration balancer), so I am cleaning up the debris and making sure everyone is alright when Red decides to lie down.
This is Red when she was drunk from a dentist's visit.
3/
https://media.hachyderm.io/media_attachments/files/112/474/649/110/712/912/original/892fa2731c796ee1.jpeg

2024-05-20 17:37:43

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It isn't enough to close the feed room, you need to _lock_ it, or our gelding will find a way to open it at some point. Especially if he gets bored or doesn't like his food options for whatever reason.
So hay was scattered all over the place, hay bales had been pulled out and were like… 50+' away, containers for different supplements and feed were destroyed and thrown about the area, beet pulp containers were tipped over, etc.
2/

2024-05-20 17:34:52

I swear this #horse is part cat with nine lives based on the number of near disasters she has had.
So my partner is out of town visiting their girlfriend and I go outside to do evening feeding on Saturday and discover that the horses have made their way into the feed room. I had evidently forgotten to latch it in the morning and they had a GRAND old time in the feed room.
1/

2024-05-20 17:29:48

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I mean isn't "there is no signed constitution but we locked a bunch of people in a room to decide what is canon" basically the British government?
*rimshot*

2024-05-20 16:54:51

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Yup! Exactly. Inclusive of what most people think of Christianity up until the First Council of Nicaea and the Council of Laodicea.

2024-05-20 16:50:29

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When the Prophecies of Merlin got translated into Old Norse-Icelandic (Merlínússpá) they turned into poetry in the form of the sagas, modified the characters, and adapted it for the local audience
Later stories were written by (gay, bored) monks for entertainment. Other characters are they take either Irish heroes (e.g., Cú Chulainn) or their local equivalents and create a knight out of them (Gawain)
Modern readers often want to build a consistent corpus and timeline out of it, and you can't.

2024-05-20 16:43:37

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My partner and I have talked for a while about this phenomena: there is no "canon" to Arthurian Literature. None. There is a huge body of work, but none of it can be considered canonical.
Lancelot comes about because someone (potentially Eleanor of Aquitaine) commissioned a writer to basically expand the story in a way that she would enjoy. Perlesvaus (The High Book of the Grail) is someone processing their trauma of war, and probably specifically from the Sack of Constantinople.

2024-05-20 16:37:54

While researching fairy stories I stumbled into the story of Childe Rowland—which involved a child of Guinevere, Merlin showing up, etc in this story of the fairylands—and was chatting with my partner about it and how Arthurian characters are basically "stock characters" of a certain era: they have certain traits and show up together in certain ways to tell whatever story.
My partner then sent me this from an intro to Perlesvaus.
#ArthurianLiterature is really just fanfic all the way down.
https://media.hachyderm.io/media_attachments/files/112/474/395/163/885/306/original/78976417853fb164.jpeg

2024-05-20 15:12:28

It goes without saying, but explicitly, if you show up on me saying something like this to say that "almost everyone at Google is incompetent down to the rank-and-file" I am just going to block you.
You aren't being even remotely rational in your approach and I question whether you are here in good faith.
https://hachyderm.io/@hrefna/112470793925252496

2024-05-20 01:22:00

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People will occasionally poke at Google's _developers_ for something about one of Google's products and its like… I agree with you, as do most developers I know (not that I talk about specifics publicly in the moment).
You have to look above the team who is doing the work. They've probably already said their piece and were simply ignored.

2024-05-20 01:20:12

I find it worthwhile to go back now and again and look through analyses of why a piece of software succeeded or failed.
It's always particularly illuminating to look at three things:
1. The role of leadership in the failure.
2. How much leadership got paid regardless/what happened to leadership afterwards.
3. What happened to the rank-and-file who actually build the software.
The story is always basically the same, with a few variations on the themes.
https://kotaku.com/how-biowares-anthem-went-wrong-1833731964

2024-05-19 21:59:59

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I feel that saying in my bones.
I've been learning pasture management and it is a _lot_. As you say a lot of it is building a solid intuition about plants (and conquering "green blindness," but that goes along with developing that intuition).

2024-05-19 21:56:57

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If you need to keep a lawn for your HOA there may be nothing you can do about it, but again the solution is not "just let whatever grow" (if you would even be allowed to do that, many of them specify grasses).
The solution is learning the soil, learning the land, and learning the plants.
That is the way.
4/4

2024-05-19 21:54:03

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What can you do instead?
Learn about native plants, learn about noxious weeds, learn about water conservation in lawn building, look into strategies like xeriscaping. If you need a lawn then look into local grasses and legumes
Be prepared for this to take a long, long time/
You may have to water, you will have to do maintenance, but it will be better for the environment than just letting your lawn go with whatever invasives happen to be in your area
Not all substitutes are created equal 3/

2024-05-19 21:50:23

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You can do significant damage to your ecological system by just doing things like "not mowing" arbitrarily, especially depending on where you live. You can also cause more damage by leading various things in the environment to "take shelter" in your yard and then _resuming mowing_ come June.
What's more, just letting things grow will usually invite in invasives and noxious weeds and will promote invasive monocultures.
Grass laws are terrible, but "ignore it" isn't the solution.

2024-05-19 21:47:24

People who know nothing about ecology hear about something that requires no work or understanding on their part but where they can "spread awareness online": "YES THIS IS THE BEST THING EVER."
Applies to more than just ecological activism, of course -.-
Rather than saying "I'm not going to mow for a month!" take a while and actually learn what is in your yard. Don't just hop on arbitrary bandwagons with no understanding of what you are looking at
But learning is complex, "not mowing" is easy

2024-05-19 20:45:48

I hate #RussianKnapweed -.-
The root fragment on the right is a remnant from last year that is mostly dead except for about once inch on the end. I just pulled it.
https://media.hachyderm.io/media_attachments/files/112/469/707/584/551/517/original/078ee12b62ecc68d.jpeg

2024-05-19 19:10:02

This is really, amazingly cool work. https://recurse.social/@lindsey/111180369571322649

2024-05-19 18:15:37

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(I've already grabbed the paper and will be going through that later!)

2024-05-19 18:10:54

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Okay, as someone who is into distributed systems and more recently dependent types I nearly did a spit take: wait what do you mean happens-before as a dependent type!? Is this somewhere I can read about it or see more?

2024-05-19 18:02:03

Holy… 5.5 hours of #ArmoredCore6 lore x_x Well that's my freetime for a few days.
https://youtu.be/4n9eakXNsIQ?si=WFmeJeZfEhGVn84N

2024-05-19 15:54:36

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Like I used to help run these study groups that would involve discussion and an exercise
I would let people do small talk at the beginning but wouldn't participate, because some of the other participants were more extroverted and liked to do their "Are you a dog!" "I'm a dog!" exchanges early. When it lulled I would step in and we could run the group, but then we'd return to small talk and I would participate in that as part of the social ritual
Because it is important as a piece of the ritual

2024-05-19 15:49:43

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I can just see Quijano going:
https://media.hachyderm.io/media_attachments/files/112/468/543/376/589/618/original/a096d3deec1a7e77.mp4

2024-05-19 15:45:47

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This has a lot of very strong parallels and resonance with a presentation I recently saw from Prof. Steven Bird about non-extractive methods of training language models (based on this paper https://aclanthology.org/2024.eacl-long.50.pdf).

2024-05-19 15:37:57

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Heh, there's definitely an overlap in experience there (I'm an out of practice 2nd dan in Hapkido).
There are a lot of muscles you just never think about that these disciplines actively use and develop.

2024-05-19 15:23:28

*slams desk emphatically* THANK YOU. This matches my exact experience with small talk and gives me a good analogy for it.
The one comment on cockatiels is just *chef's kiss*, because that is _exactly_ how it works with birds (and in people, though we like to deny it).
It's not my favorite mode of interaction, but if you understand its purpose as a social ritual it seems a _lot_ less meaningless.
The other thing: I like to stick it at the _end_ of the conversation.
https://www.tumblr.com/thetetra/750913052342419456/i-figured-out-i-was-autistic-when-i-was-explaining