zerakith @ zerakith @lemmy.ml

Posts

2

Comments

83

Joined

2 yr. ago

They are common and yet I still really struggle to quickly understand what any points but the three extremes mean. I'm not sure there's an alternative though.

Its a great idea. I think it would be challenging to implement and would need quite a lot of domain expertise to really unpick. Need to have enough teeth to be able to assess whether level of action and emission mitigation is: above and beyond; in line with paris agreement needs; below needed but active work due to constraints; actively harmful company . E.g. some companies might be intrinsically high emitting because of their sector (e.g. steel manufacture) but doing all they can to decarbonise whilst some might instead be "decarbonising" largely through accounting tricks like offsets and others still just bankrolling delay and denial. Assessing what a Paris Agreement compliant pathways for sub- and multi-national organisations is actually really tricky. Similarly tricky to assess what "as fast as possible" really is for the same organisations.

For finance sector I know this: https://bank.green which might help some.

It also, I think, centres the ability of drivers to act independently of the visual design of the infrastructure and whilst, that is possible of course, research suggests driving behaviour is more strongly determined by design than conscious choice.

Not to be too negative but begging for drivers to consider us human is so tiresome.

We already know how to nearly eliminate road death. Unbundling the modes (segregation) and treating cars as guests where that's not possible. After that treat infractions by drivers seriously. If you can't drive safely your license should be removed. No more arguing in court that you need to drive to get to work.

I hope Nix sort it out too because technically I think its one of the better options for packaging.

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.

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!

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.

I appreciate you are setting up a sort of platonic ideal of what science is but I think its important to deal with the real people and processes that science is performed by and we would be doing ourselves a disservice if we fail to acknowledge how those people and processes have often worked hand in hand with capitalist and colonial projects. We need to be introspective about how those choices have influenced the science (and the methods!) that's been done. We, as scientists, engineers and science appreciators need to do this work so we can make different and better choices.

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.

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

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.

I agree and I didn't think you did mean at the global level but I think its important to be clear because a lot of comms is (deliberately?) vague on which scale and who is being talked about. I think a lot of people do get confused about it and I think its used a lot to bamboozle and greenwash.

I'm not sure of the solution but I do think more needs to be done at the GHG protocol level to stop accepting fixes (like buying up some land that's a net negative) that don't actually shift the global picture. Sadly, I've seen some well meaning people and organisations do just that and its hard to blame them. If someone is offering you an option that minimises the disruption and you don't know the detail of why its problematic you will take it. We need a way of going back down from to global level pathways to more local organisations so we can see clearly they aren't just buying up more than their fair share of mitigating options.

Just to be clear this might work at organisational and individual levels but not at a global system level where net zero or net negative human emissions is the only viable way to limit the damage and begin to repair.

I do agree with you rule of thumb at lower scales though as there's too much accounting mitigation which can directly oppose system wide net zero (i.e. by buying up small bits of negative emissions that need to happen anyway whilst not mitigating your own emissions).

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.

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).

Very interesting, thank you. I guess then the centralised server must have some sort of economy of scale.

In my head, I'm comparing the network to the electricity grid with certain shapes of network making different technologies more or less feasible. I would guess the internet network is probably similar to the electricity grid in most places having fewer hubs and lines of high bandwidth rather than a more evenly distributed network. Maybe the analogy is bad though.

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?

Its a really interesting question. I wonder what the underlying economics and ideologies are at play with its decline. Economies of scale for large server farms? Desire for control of the content/copyright? Structure and shape of the network?

I guess it has some implications for stream versus download approaches to content?

This isn't uncommon in lots of physics calculations where you are working at the same scales a lot and its cumbersome to keep carrying the constants around and it adds risk of making a mistake.

Think of it as assuming you are working in a system of units where you measure all your speeds relative to the speed of light. So rather than saying the speed limit of a road is 30mph you would say its .000000045c.