Daniel Lowe @dl@cantos.social

@chr
If this is your first moot
You _have_ to toot.

#introduction

I used to be a lot weirder. I'm a middle-aged geek, father to two boys, and I bang out code at #Google. I live near Boston now, but I grew up in central Mississippi.

I know the conlangs #Lojban and #TokiPona. I write hobby code in #Tcl and #CommonLisp.

I play a bunch of #music instruments, but none well enough to perform. I've been playing around with a DAW.

I started the cantos.social instance, trying to be a part of the small-scale Internet.

I try to be as kind as I can.

If you want real consistency:

1mol = 1e10
1s = 1mol cesium-133 oscillations
1m = c/1mol s
etc.

Mood: wishing the standards people had fudged SI definitions to nice round numbers, so that:

1s = 1e10 cesium-133 oscillations
1m = c/3e8 s
1mol = 6e23

Obviously too late now.

I think this may actually represent almost the entire office here.

Google Cambridge walkout #GoogleWalkout

All I want is a 5"x7" (or A5) notebook with rules only on the right for both journaling and daily sketching, and nobody seems to make that that I can find.

https://sluggerotoole.com/2018/10/12/bitcoin-must-die/

Choice quote:
If Bitcoin were to cease trading tomorrow, 0.5% of the world’s electricity demand would simply disappear. This is roughly equivalent to the output of ten coal-fired power plants, emitting 50 million tonnes of CO2 per year – which would cover one year’s worth of the carbon emission cuts required to limit temperature rises this century to 2C.

OMG.

https://czep.net/17/legion-of-lobotomized-unices.html hits a note with me. I was the sysadmin of one in the last era of the unix-as-social-pod servers (circa 1998-2002). I, too, am nostalgic, but it was hard to argue when all my user-friends left for livejournal and myspace.

The new http://common-lisp.net/ site looks pretty nice.

I don't like the usual replacement of Indigenous People's Day, because it's not nearly active enough. Yup, those Indigenous people. There they are.

I think people should take a good hard look at their own sordid history.

You oppressed people out there, you wouldn't need to do anything. Just talk, if you are moved, while we try to listen.

I realize there's a minor name collision here, but this would be a more specific thing than Yom Kippur. I don't think there's a better word than "Atonement" for this.

I wish that instead of Columbus Day, we would have Atonement Day.

This would be a day where we who are privileged reflect on how we abuse our power and benefit from an abusive system. How our wealth comes largely from colonialism, where a handful of countries enslaved the world and took all their shit. To reflect that, as individuals, we could not possibly repay the world in our lifetimes for hundreds of years of injustice.

Then we try to make amends by working on it.

Corporate denials lack meaningful signal but "we thought a strong and specific denial would be better than not denying it." I'm not convinced either way, but.... it sure would be weird if China didn't try something like this. They have the opportunity, the means, and the motive.