Thomas Dickerson @elfprince13@mumak.app
- Personal
- http://sfgp.cemetech.net/
co-Founder // Chief Science Officer at @geopipe (🖖🏻), PhD from Brown CS Dept (w/ @maurice), SMCVT alum (Math/Physics/CS), admin at Cemetech, AFOL & open-theist.
Decentralizing systems (human & digital). Opinions are my own.
📍 Vermont
Joined Nov 2022
Thomas Dickerson
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The tragedy of the commons is a pernicious myth.
The demise of the commons of Britain and Europe wasn't the result of misuse by commoners, but enclosing by the landowners. The original hypothetical was made up for storytelling purposes, and the term was popularized by an ecologist with anti-immigrant and racist views.
Here is my recommended reading for heading into 2023:
https://aeon.co/essays/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-is-a-false-and-dangerous-myth
@mulegirl auto-follow for fellow Ostrom stans
@mekkaokereke I spent a few years trying to get family/friends to switch to watching eSports (especially Starcraft/Heroes of the Storm) with the argument that it basically hits the same mix of fast-paced action/violence mixed with strategy, but without ruining the players' lives...
Thomas Dickerson
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@mekkaokereke @jpgoldberg the really annoying bit is a lot of the GOP’s current swing towards nationalism began with anti-immigration rhetoric based on the same idiotic assumption that people fleeing socialist countries will … want to replicate that here?
Thomas Dickerson
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@morgan3d that’s my experience with all of the major open source art tools (Inkscape, GIMP, Blender) - everything you need, *if* your Google-fu is strong enough
Thomas Dickerson
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When you first learn about vectors and rotations and dot products in Cartesian space, they’re simple and easy to understand. And then you learn about Minkowski space and curved spacetime and different reference frames, and you need to work with metrics versus coordinate transformations...and things get complicated. Here is my attempt to untangle the metric versus the coordinate transformation: https://sunfishstanford.github.io/embracing%20transitory%20confusion/math/physics/2022/12/30/MetricsVsTransforms.html
@emilygorcenski it comes up on neighborhood mailing lists in VT whenever Google adds a clever new route down a class 4 road or a road that’s been closed (and physically impassable to anything wider than a moped) since the flood washed it out multiple decades ago
Thomas Dickerson
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The thing about data storage is that they are so incredibly intricate and low-level complicated, just giving a HDD or SSD some really solid whacks with a hammer that messes up the internals a bit makes it functionally impossible to recover.
And Google and Microsoft and Amazon and NSA don't software-wipe hard drives they physically destroy them.
Thomas Dickerson
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oh goody its almost time to roll out one of my more cursed hacks: retz
it changes the timezone of all my running processes, without restarting anything
@fetner any idea if Zeynep is on Mastodon yet?
Thomas Dickerson
boosted
The space of time between Mendeleev’s first stab at a periodic table and Einstein’s paper on special relativity was smaller than the time between the release of Goonies and today.
@ct_bergstrom just wanted to ask about this again when your notifications are hopefully a bit quieter
@nova a lot of the unnecessary scarcity in the US is due precisely to various groups with legal protections allowing them to eschew competition and set up artificial monopolies (hospital CON laws, medical licensing quotas, patent protections for drug manufacturers)
@rechelon Your phrasing makes it pretty clear you don’t believe that eg electrons can “choose” - are you a compatibilist when it comes to free will and cognition, or do you believe the future is open and “choice” consists of some (currently unknown) mix of computational process and genuine nondeterminism?
If you’re a compatibilist, no, this isn’t going to go anywhere, mostly because that would already put you further into woo territory than I have patience for
@rechelon necessary (but clearly not sufficient) condition. You used the phrase “The river is incapable of choice, whereas the humans (or even beavers to a lesser extent), can of course choose.” above. What did you mean precisely, by “choose”?
@rechelon the number of times I’ve gotten into arguments with “in this house we believe in science” cocky atheists with humanities (and even engineering) degrees that just turn into me trying to explain enough modern physics for them to understand their particular objection to supernaturalism is equivalent to Bell’s Theorem denialism would be hilarious if it wasn’t so annoyingly often
- Personal
- http://sfgp.cemetech.net/
co-Founder // Chief Science Officer at @geopipe (🖖🏻), PhD from Brown CS Dept (w/ @maurice), SMCVT alum (Math/Physics/CS), admin at Cemetech, AFOL & open-theist.
Decentralizing systems (human & digital). Opinions are my own.
📍 Vermont
Joined Nov 2022
