angrygoat

oh, thanks :)

hah – yes, it's an old username, it's not possible to change username on here or I would :)

cleric here, so excuse me for getting theological: but there should be (and at times truly has been, even if flawed) a shared understanding of the dignity and worth of every person. if we have that, then when one party or another is in power, they know that they are expected to care for minorities and for the stranger, and for the 'other side'.

we should be willing to vote for that.

that seems to be breaking down, throughout the western world.

we should never denigrate or infringe upon the personhood of anyone. we should take the higher road. and I'm not arguing that the oppressed should accept their oppression: I'm arguing that the oppressors should listen to the oppressed, and change.

I live in Australia – our constitution is a strange mashup of the UK model (which is certainly the primary influence), and things gleaned from the US. Something I observe is that we're more willing to admit the possibility of non-partisan spaces. For example, rather than electoral commissions being bipartisan, they're non-partisan, with partisan input. It is a serious matter if an official of such an organisation is found to have publicly stated political views. We have some people who make it their profession to be boring, and to simply uphold the precepts of society: including the rights of minorities. That's a serious sacrifice, made routinely by judges and senior public servants.

I find myself quite terrified that this is being eroded. I don't know how we turn it around: but I certainly speak up for the dignity of all through my ministry. We all ought to speak up.

thanks to you both, I'll check whenever and Pendulum out! :)

I used this (via polyfill) for my Typescript implementation of the calendar of the church, and it was fabulous. Using the old Javascript dates I felt like I was always tripping over something... this was actually nicer than Python's (already quite good) datetime support.

https://github.com/grahame/church-calendar

How are decentralised platforms managing abusive content? TikTok had some bumps in the road maybe five years back with this, but got it under control. I know I don't want to be scrolling through video content and see illegal or unethical content.

That compliance aspect seems like one thing that pushes us towards centralised architectures for social media, but I'm guessing that AI models to screen images / videos are pretty widely available now and cheaply deployable?

Some extension of the Patreon model onto decentralised social media could work. I pay a few bucks a month to the creators of webcomics and other content that I enjoy, just because it's the right thing to do, and I dunno, it makes me feel more connected to these people that I've never met but who bring me some joy?

I was taught Biblical Hebrew by an Australian scholar who learned hers in the south of the US, and I picked up from her the habit of translating the second plural as "y'all" :-) You can of course do the same with Greek. For some reason I preferred "y'all" to the more Australian "youse."

"Of all the stories you told me, which ones were true and which ones weren't?"

"My dear Doctor, they're all true."

"Even the lies?"

"Especially the lies."

What a beautiful use of technology to uphold someone's personhood, and let them know they are loved, despite (and with regard to) a profound injury.

This reminds me of a desire I've had for a long time: a simple, wall-mountable eInk device that could be configured with a URL (+wifi creds) and render a markdown file, refreshing once every hour or so. It would be so useful for so many applications – I'm a parish priest and so I could use it to let people know what events are on, if a service is cancelled, the current prayer list, ... the applications would be endless. I'd definitely pay a couple of hundred dollars per device for a solid version of such a thing, if it could be mounted and then recharged every month or two.

It's pretty heavily used in some on premises HPC contexts... used to run a large supermicro cluster which we would power down when not needed, which saved a fair amount of electricity (and by extension emissions and money.) It's quite solid.

The great thing about Australia/Eucla is that it’s not officially gazetted, and yet there are road signs informing travellers about it. I love that people just do it and everyone goes along

My car has this stuff in it too (BYD Dolphin) and it's a mixed bag. I find the "watch out, car/object moving into your path" stuff really useful – here in Australia, driving in the bush, it's picked up roos I'd likely have missed otherwise.

It whinges if it thinks I'm speeding, but it's often totally wrong on the speed limit: reading the wrong signs, holding a lower limit when I've turned onto a road with a higher limit. I find the alerts extremely distracting, and unfortunately they use the same sound as alerts I might want to know about. It also makes that same sound every time it reads a new sign. And then it feels the need to claim I'm speeding all over again, even if the limit hasn't changed.

I turn it off most times I get in the car, although there's no shortcut for it, so it's just a constant annoyance: the car won't remember the setting.

There's a tendency for Westerners to view every religion through the lens of protestant Christianity. Religion is a notoriously hard to define concept (this was the running joke of a sociology of religion unit I took at university; each week we'd look to another attempt to define it.) The idea that it's all about 'belief', some confession of fact-statements, is very much from that protestant Christian understanding, a post-Enlightenment focus on words.

The boundaries between religion, culture, language, myth and storytelling, reflection.. these are all extremely porous and vary widely. It looks to me that the researchers in the article are aware of this.

Brent Nongbri's book "Before Religion" is excellent on all of this.

(Full disclosure, I'm an Anglican [Episcopalian in the US] priest)

We had a situation here in Australia where there wasn't an open source way to verify the outcome of Federal senate elections. The algorithm is slightly complicated, mostly because it's set up so that it's possible to count it manually as it was devised prior to computerisation of the voting system.

In 2013 this became important: in Western Australia, we had a very close senate election. There was one critical exclusion in the count where just 14 votes determined the outcome between two candidates. Obviously the accuracy of the counting software was key; it actually crashed when they were doing the count. They restarted it, but that shook the confidence of a couple of people I knew, and so I decided to write my own software to verify the count. I knocked it up in two all-nighters: https://github.com/grahame/dividebatur

Of course, I/we were fortunate that the electoral commission was forward-thinking enough to have published the data required to fully reproduce the count.

Some open government folks later on used the existence of my software to try and get the electoral commission to release their software system under Freedom of Information laws, so that it could be verified. I was quite amused when the commission alleged there was no way I'd done it in two nights. I had; but of course, what I had was a Python implementation of the count, not a fully-fledged electoral management system like they had.

Later on in 2017-18 we had a constitutional crisis[0], as various senators were found to hold foreign citizenship and thus be ineligible to hold office. Those ineligible senators were replaced by running a count-back of the vote, with them excluded. I happened to be the only person who had a system that could work out the results ahead of the electoral commission, so I had quite an exciting few weeks providing the media with predictions on who would take over the various seats that were lost.

Now there are better and more robust systems that have followed mine, but I must say I was quite happy with this two-day hack!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017%E2%80%9318_Australian_par...

Temporal is quite nice; should be coming to browsers soon: https://tc39.es/proposal-temporal/

Here in Australia, ISDN Data over Voice (DoV) was in fairly common use. Telstra (the major telecom here particularly in those days) charged an untimed flat "local call" rate (a few tens of cents) for an ISDN voice call, and by the minute for an ISDN data call. It didn't take many minutes for a voice call to be vastly cheaper.

At a technical level both types of call are a 64kbps data connection, with just a flag to discriminate between the two. All the major suppliers (Cisco, Nortel, ...) had software options for their ISDN gateways to tell them to set the voice flag when making an outgoing data connection, and to treat voice calls as data calls when they were received.

This was extremely common and Telstra never seemed to do anything about it. Just a funny memory that this article brought to mind.

Awesome! Have a look at https://github.com/grahame/church-calendar which the current code uses; it should be fairly easy to add the Episcopalian calendar. One neat thing with my church-calendar library is extensive metadata, so you can find out more about the feasts (Wiki, but also the CoE and Episcopal books of lesser feasts.)

I was surprised too – and if you use Github's inbuilt editor for `README.md` you can literally drop an mp4 file on the editor and it uploads it and pastes in the link. Quite fancy!

https://github.blog/2021-05-13-video-uploads-available-githu...

Back in 2009, Matthew Garrett measured a blinking cursor as costing 2W of power consumption. Presumably it'd be less of a big deal now, but it does show that UI updates on a low frequency can cost watts.

https://lwn.net/Articles/317923/

it's a complicated answer: faith is at the heart of it, of course. In Christianity there's the idea of vocation, which applies to all, not just the clergy. A simple way to think about it is to consider the things you're good at, the things you can do that will serve others, and what you enjoy: imagine that as a Venn diagram, and try to discern what lies in the middle for you.

My software skills still play a part in what I do. But seven or eight years ago now I felt drawn to explore a vocation in ordained ministry – after study, a formation programme, completing a Masters degree in Divinity, and a lot of thought and prayer, here I am. It's the happiest I've ever been. Which isn't to say that it hasn't been difficult: being a cleric is not easy work.

Intentional discernment about vocation really has made my life a lot happier, and it's something I talk about a little because it's of value to other people as well.

(I'm in the Anglican [in the states, Episcopalian] tradition, but the process of ministerial formation is very broadly similar between the various mainline protestant denominations and Roman Catholicism.)

I'm a priest who was a software engineer for twenty years. This morning during the service in a small semi-rural church, the bluetooth speaker broke. I paused the service briefly, joked that I knew what to do, and turned it off and on. The IT Crowd got that part of the industry right!

or along the highway near the Western Australia/South Australia border, which informally uses +8:45 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTC%2B08:45

it feels like every time I go into Jira with the intention to do something, I'm shown a needy modal about some new feature that I really don't care about. and then I can't remember why I went in there in the first place. it's horrible to use.

Yes, at least here in Australia there are a lot of libraries, churches and other public places where charging is available. Rather than expecting those without homes to pedal for basic access to services, access to basic infrastructure like charging should be expanded – and dare I say, be bold and actually make housing available to all people.