Thomas Dickerson @elfprince13@mumak.app

@mekkaokereke @rebeccafinn Anyway not trying to argue here. The points Mekka is making are super important precisely because we are having this conversation in the shadow of American imperialism and colonialism. But I think it’s important to highlight that the mythology of “white achievement” or “western culture” or whatever you want to call it is a tool supporting a particular imperialist agenda and not the other way around

@mekkaokereke @rebeccafinn colonization, empire building, and cultural erasure are the global norm for most of written history (including swaths of European being conquered by “non-white” empires), and the only thing that’s uniquely white about it is the extent to which Germanic/Western-European colonial empires have been ascendant over the last 500 years or so (and Anglophonic ascendancy esp. in the last 250 years).

@mekkaokereke @rebeccafinn anyway if we are talking about whiteness specifically in the context of historical American racial politics, the core of that is really specific to Germanic western-European whiteness, with all the contradictions that entails: for a long time Italians + Greeks weren’t party to the full privileges of whiteness even though the mythology of “western culture” is rooted in Roman + Greek history.

@rebeccafinn @mekkaokereke when I was in school “the Vikings discovered the Americas before Columbus” was a claim treated with the same level of seriousness as like “Area 51 is where the government keeps crashed aliens”, even though it had basically been proven for 30+ years at that point

@BartWronski @aras @solidangle if you’re building a consumer mobile app and can get quick traction and scale organically before you exceed the check sizes that angels will support, more power to you, but it’s hard to fund scientific innovation out of pocket or on a handful of 5-6 figure checks.

@BartWronski @aras @solidangle at early stage there’s a lot of crossover between the terms (especially because VCs have pushed to standardize docs to keep legal overhead low) and even check sizes you’ll get from angels and the terms you’ll get from VCs, and similar range of attitudes/involvement-after-check in my experience.

@rebeccafinn @mekkaokereke on the other hand, the whole Madoc ab Owain Gwynedd folktale got stirred up beyond all historical proportion when England wanted to claim precedence over Spain

@rebeccafinn @mekkaokereke the point this article makes about imperialism relates in an interest way to this toot from upthread: https://hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/109926767007332595

It’s not just the “discovered it for white people” factor it’s the “discovered it for white empires” factor. Nobody talks about Leif Erikson even though he beat Columbus by 500 years because his expedition doesn’t led support for imperial territorial claims.

@BartWronski @aras @solidangle When we decided it was time to scale and took VC $$$, we went from 5->15 in less than 18 months, and now I think about burn all the time

@solidangle @BartWronski @aras we ran almost exclusively on non-dilutive grant and competition funding for a few years as a 4 person shop while we worked out some of the fundamental science issues, and had very few concerns about burn in that period.

@aras @solidangle @BartWronski speaking as a co-founder of a VC-backed startup, in a lot of ways, it means *more* worrying about burn rate because there is no off-ramp from the treadmill. Taking VC funding is a good idea pretty much exclusively if you need to scale fast now.

The toddler managed to scam my wife and I into both independently making bread with him this morning 😅

@KevinCarson1 there are some types of collaboration that really only work in person, but yeah, I’m doing 2 days/week at the office right now (and for most of the last 8 years, actually, starting well before Covid) and that feels pretty optimal.

@inthehands @shriramk living in a snowy/muddy and mountainous state, one of my favorite things about my hybrid SUV is that it still has a "manual" mode for keeping engine RPMs basically correlated with wheel RPMs.

@BartWronski this particularly chilling facet of human nature is basically the underlying premise for the original 4 book Ender's Game series (esp. the second book, appropriately entitled "Speaker for the Dead").

@cahollenbeck under that definition, I pretty much exclusively scrape papers together within a week, but that's been my approach to deadlines for my whole life 😅

@cahollenbeck are you talking all the implementation too, or just the writing/experiments?