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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: January 30th, 2024

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  • Apologies for the tangent:

    I know we’re just having fun, but in the future consider adding the word “some” to statements about groups. It’s just one word, but it adds a lot of nuance and doesn’t make the joke less funny.

    That 90’s brand of humor of “X group does Y” has led many in my generation to think in absolutes and to get polarized as a result. I’d really appreciate your help to work against that for future generations.

    Totally optional. Thank you


  • kersplomp@programming.devtoScience Memes@mander.xyzWomen in STEM
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    5 months ago

    We should always add a mental asterisk to the names of male researchers who discovered things while women were oppressed.

    That said, this meme is playing loose and fast with the specifics, which undermines that important message.


    Just picking the first one:

    Payne’s work was her Ph.D. thesis and Russell did not tell her not to publish it, her advisor did. The advisor told her not to rock the boat in her thesis. This is good advice that even Einstein was given. Payne, badass, declined.

    When Russell later reproduced her research, he cited her thesis as the “most important research” he’d seen on the subject.

    The real snub with Payne is that her title was “Technical Advisor” for 20 years despite being well regarded as a full time professor. It wasn’t until the 50’s she was recognized as a professor, when she was also made chair of the department.

    Source: https://www.amnh.org/learn-teach/curriculum-collections/cosmic-horizons-book/cecilia-payne-profile











  • FWIW I don’t really like tech companies in general. They’re monopolies.

    That said, I really admire Google’s environmental policies. I worry a lot about global warming and habitat destruction. They’re doing better than any other tech company on that front.

    Other companies will just lie about their emissions. Like Amazon claiming it’s 100% renewable (it’s not even close). Google has been honest and clear with it’s emissions numbers since the beginning. And it has never been afraid to call out when they were wrong. For example, they recently updated their numbers when they realized one of their accounting methods was wrong. No other company has kept themselves as honest as Google on environmental things.

    It’s a big company with 170k employees. I can name a million examples of it doing shitty things. Like shutting down Inbox. But the environment is far more important to me than some product I didn’t pay for.



  • I’ve been a big fan of monorepos because it leads to more consistent style and coding across the whole company. It makes the code more transparent so you can see what’s going on with the rest of the company, too, which helps reduce code islands and duplicated work. It enables me to build everything from source, which helps catch bugs that would only show up in prod due to version drift. It also means that I can do massive refactorings across the company without breaking anything.

    That said, tooling is slowly improving for decentralized repos, so some of these may be doable on git now/soon.