The Unclear Impact

@malin @sotolf @Everbern I always thought that the ‘critical’ bit refers to ‘critical theory’, i.e., it’s a fairly specific and academic endeavor. It’s weird that people who rile against recognizing that racism can still exist in society chose to target a specific group of academics. Or is this the same thing as branding Frankfurt school / critical theory as ‘postmodern neomarxism’, whatever that may be (other than an oxymoron)? Alas, I’m also not well versed in uspol madness…

I'd like to have a general view of how many people are really working on FLOSS projects and how do they make ends meet, where/what did they study

In order to talk about FLOSS in a less naive way, we'd need some more data

Way more data, actually

@akira @jbauer Based on some experience with teaching maths at uni online with a very entry-level Wacom tablet:

1. It’s very weird to draw while having to look at the screen, and probably leads to bad posture unless paying attention to good posture. I was hurting after having to mark a bunch of exams on screen (couple of hours of writing with a tablet).
2. Make sure that the aspect ratio of the tablet matches the screen, or the drawing area is appropriately cropped by the driver. Otherwise it’ll screw with hand-eye coordination to have whatever you draw come out wider/taller than what the movement would produce on paper. This might be easy on X11, but I still haven’t figured out how to do this with sway and Wayland (it seems to ignore the callibration matrix, probably I’ll have to patch something).
3. I thought buttons on tablets are useless (and I got one without any), but that means having to keep one hand on the keyboard for shortcuts => even worse posture. Maybe the driver could be hacked to emulate some buttons outside the (cropped due to aspect ratio) drawing area?

I guess most of these issues would just go away with a tablet monitor. But the expense…

@aral It’s not only schools or kids’ TV. Even in the justification section of the law, it says it regulates all TV programs (regardless whether they are specifically targeted towards kids) to have an R rating added if they feature any representation of LGBTQ identities. The actual normative text contains an amendment to the family protection law that bans making any content available to children that depicts LGBTQ identities. The amendment inserts verbiage after a paragraph in the law that speaks about media providers, but doesn’t explicitly refer to the media in itself. Arguably, it could even be used to ban any public displays or demonstrations (like Pride) with the reasoning that some children might be in public spaces at the time.

The ban on representing LGBTQ identities in schools is implemented as a state registry of sex educators, so any sex ed in schools is a misdemeanor, unless specifically approved by the state. There are some concerns whether the state is going to approve any non-religious sex ed at all.

Here is the full text of the law: https://www.parlament.hu/documents/129291/40734520/T16365_1.pdf It’s in Hungarian, though, and for some reason, it didn’t load over VPN for me, so it might be restricted to Hungarian IPs. Here’s the family protection law it modifies, also in Hungarian: https://net.jogtar.hu/jogszabaly?docid=a1100211.tv

By the way, the UK was an EU member since 1973 (and left in 2020), yet Section 28 was in effect from 1988 to 2003. #EuropeanValues indeed.

@hazel @clacke @hazel @clacke If you fix some categories C, D, you can talk about the functor category [C, D] of functors from C to D, where functors F: C \to D are the objects and, as you say, natural transformations are the morphisms.

If a category of endofunctors is just a functor category [C, C] from C to C. If F, G: C \to C are objects of [C, C], then so is their composition G \circ F. The composition \circ is associative, and the identity functor 1_C: C \to C is its identity element, so \circ is the monoidal operation on [C, C]. (This is why we have to use an endofunctor category, so the composition of the objects is defined.)

Then a monad is an object F of [C, C] along with two natural transformations \eta: 1_C \to F (“return”) and \mu: F \circ F \to F (“join”) subject to some extra rules.

In particular, a monoid over some set A in is a function +: A \times A \to A and an identity element e, but if you squint hard enough, you could have a function e: 1 \to A from the one-element set to A that gives you the identity element instead. The rules required to make this pair of functions a monoid, if you interpret them as morphisms in Set (where the Cartesian product \times is the monoidal operation) are precisely the same than those required from \eta, \mu to make them a monad in [C, C], so we call monads monoid objects in [C, C] (and we call monoids monoid objects in Set if we want to be extremely obtuse).

The “joke” in the deliberately impenetrable monad definition is that it’s very backwards: you don’t happen to run into monoidal categories of endofuctors and decide to give their monoid objects a fancy name. Instead, you define monoid and monads (“fundamental constructions” is you want to sound very important) because you find them useful, and then you might eventually notice that you can give a single definition for both of them.

(Wikipedia links, because nLab wants to take the joke even further, and defines everything in 2-categories.)

Since the news about the effective privatization of state universities and the Hungarian version of Section 28, my otherwise more conservative colleagues have started using words like ‘direct action’ in the context of what progressives should do, and that’s… based?

@kev @floppy Their quantity has a quality of its own. Due to the sheer number of sites they MITM, they have a nearly exceptional ability to correlate and analyze user behavior across sites. Granted, a site may still chose to share data with trackers and data aggregators, which gives aggregators the same correlation ability, but at least that’s overt, while sites opting to use a CDN with MITM inadvertently give away connection data for free (or even pay for the ‘privilege’).

@jookia It’s mind boggling how many layers of input event translation are in, say, a computer with a USB keyboard and Linux (even just think about all the weird abstraction layers in xkb), and every layer can have (nearly) arbitrary remapping. For some cases, it makes sense (you can plug the programmable kb into another computer and have the same layout), but most of it is an unwelcome history lesson when trying to debug stuff (like xkb trying to abstract away the kb model and the localized layout, but most model-specific abstraction is nowadays in the kernel, anyways).

Computers are just bad.

Egon Willighagen is stepping down as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of #Cheminformatics. The journal now being part of Springer Nature no longer allows for running the journal in the spirit of #OpenScience.
https://zenodo.org/record/4926031
https://www.reddit.com/r/Open_Science/comments/ny7ufc/egon_willighagen_is_stepping_down_as/?utm_source=ifttt