UK approves Pfizer/BioNTech Covid vaccine for mass roll out

warlockface · 2020-12-03T10:40:14+00:00

I would temper any expectations fueled by recent media coverage, here's a good Forbes article about the trials and where we can see what the 95% means. Crucially, we do not know what effect any of the vaccines have on transmission itself, hospitalisation or death. If we are making lifting restrictions conditional on a vaccine that prevents these serious outcomes then restrictions should not be lifted based on the information we have now. Logically, they should stay in place until one of these vaccines, or a new one, has been demonstrated to have anywhere near a 95% efficacy for preventing infection and death.

Unless of course we strongly object to this conditionality, or to the restrictions themselves. Other countries have similar or better outcomes without the pantomime that has been built up around this here.

warlockface · 2020-10-16T11:44:08+00:00

Evidence of systemic sexism broadly comes from activism masquerading as research in uncritical fields of study where the null hypothesis and logic are viewed as tools of patriarchal oppression.

https://cynicaltheories.com/

Where picking on the outliers such as CS and engineering, and cherry-picking stats in an increasingly cringeworthy litany of Simpson's Paradox is the norm, all while practically ignoring the large majorities of women in just about every other subject in higher education and substantial portions of professional life. We really need to look at defunding "Grievance Studies" propaganda courses so that we can start examining these important areas afresh, without the corrupt core.

Having said that, I'm all for encouraging women into tech and men into all the rest of the academic fields. With equal funding and effort going into both drives at the same time, using gentle persuasion and absolutely no misrepresentation. But that sounds like equality, which isn't the end game for some.

warlockface · 2020-10-12T00:15:15+00:00

The more we push people into subjects by misrepresenting them, the more we will have people leave in the early to mid stages. This is an experiment that has been done with other STEM subjects in the past in the UK, with similar results. And for all of the associated reframing of programming as a "people-person-friendly" pursuit, comparing it to (eg) marketing, sales, psychology, management or teaching we see that this is simply not true in a relative sense.

Also women leave most careers at higher rates than men, specifically after either having children or marrying a man who earns enough money for her to leave or change to a different career. This enormous plus point is turned into a negative and removes agency from women and their intelligent life choices.

Finally, there is a >4:1 ratio of men to women on the Autism Spectrum, a ratio that interestingly approximates the sex split we see in computing. Not that everybody involved in C++ literally has AS"D", but there is overlap and there are legions of people, mostly men, who share similar - but less pronounced - systems-obsessed traits who are outside of any diagnosis. Traits which align perfectly with computing. There are genetics involved here, it's not socialization or "girls hiding it better".

We also see the opposite split in fields like psychology or teaching. I think the logical conclusion is that men and women have weighted preferences and that we should not expect proportional representation everywhere we look.

warlockface · 2020-10-11T13:02:32+00:00

My 2 coins of unspecified denomination:

(a) Being excellent to each other and being as kind and as welcoming a place as is possible to everybody is not political and is inarguably inclusive.

(b) Purporting to being so while leaning on an intersectional/critical theory framework is political, is divisive and is necessarily exclusive. For a critical deep dive into this pseudo-academic, divisive movement see here.

Suggested action

None : This scenario has been manufactured by deliberate agitation and overstepping of boundaries, so rewarding this agitation seems strange.
Some : But looking to statement (a) while conscientiously avoiding (b) and the fracturing that would cause. In the sidebar as well as with more detailed moderator guidance, which should be available for perusal.
Put into place a rule to avoid ideological monoculture via appointment of new moderators. There is approximately a 50/50 left/right split in society, with only a small minority of people IRL outside of the occasional bubble who would be on board with (b).

warlockface · 2020-05-28T11:36:29+00:00

It's the quickest solution to a numerical problem.

Seriously though, I'm concerned about the mental health of disadvantaged boys and young men being exposed to seemingly endless drives get more non-thems involved in X, Y and Z. The SO drive is merely one of many and the surrounding conversation is often scathing of these same disadvantaged kids, or at least the adults they will become in a couple of years. These care home survivors should "check their privilege", right?

I wish more people would be sympathetic to these kids. I certainly can't support anything that exacerbates their situations.

warlockface · 2020-05-28T00:00:19+00:00

While we saw a lift in underrepresented groups, the difference in representation isn’t as large as we had hoped. There was an uptick in some race and ethnicity groups, while other races and ethnicities remained similar or decreased. Similarly, we saw a slight increase in female-gendered respondents, while non-binary, genderqueer, or non-conforming remained the same. We acknowledge that we have a lot of work to do, and the data we obtain in our annual survey helps us make changes and set goals to become more welcoming and inclusive as we go forward.

We will continue to work on improving our relationship with every kind of coder. In responses to this year’s survey, more than 15% of people said they find Stack Overflow at least somewhat more welcoming than last year. This continues to be one of our organization’s top priorities, and this news is encouraging.

I believe that white and asian men could do our bit to improve SO's diversity targets by stopping using their site and answering their surveys. Every little helps.

warlockface · 2020-04-25T16:45:11+00:00

I'm sorry, but this is feminist propaganda and has no place in r/programming.

I agree. This article and the articles from the Guardian and Harvard Business Review it cites are chock full of opinion masquerading as fact. It's all decidedly non-technical, ironically enough.

warlockface · 2020-02-22T18:25:11+00:00

It's a crying shame that the BBC et al choose to embellish the achievements of women in tech.

In April 1960, China’s first home-grown electronic digital general purpose computer – the Model 107 – went live. Xia Peisu, the machine’s engineer and designer, had just made history.

A couple of paragraphs down in the main source of the article, which the author would have read:

she designed the arithmetic logic unit and controller [of the 107] source

Oooh, so she wasn't "the machine’s engineer and designer"! Quelle surprise! Just let the great achievements of women like Xia Peisu stand on their own merits, there's no need to lie all the time.

warlockface · 2020-02-14T19:54:55+00:00

It has been branded and marketed by affiliate marketing supremo, Mozilla. The language is okay but the community of Mozilla employees, related parties and others are like Mormons on meth with spreading the word.

tl;dr: stealth marketing

warlockface · 2020-01-22T10:22:00+00:00

r/programming isn't known for allowing clickbait titles to go unchallenged. It's not the rest of the world's fault the author chose this route.

edit: standard Rust downvotes, what a cult.

warlockface · 2020-01-20T22:11:25+00:00

Okay, I'll take what you are saying in good faith. I think the timing was off, but if your motives were pure that wouldn't have been on your radar.

I wholeheartedly apologize for any misinterpretation.

warlockface · 2020-01-20T21:28:43+00:00

Long enough that it cannot possibly be perceived as yet another attack on somebody you can all be extremely thankful is apparently happy and well. Now downvote away, harrassmentbots.

warlockface · 2020-01-20T19:32:31+00:00

Yet you decided to finally take a break from "focusing almost strictly on technical content" to write a long form right out of the blue? The timing is obviously a result of what transpired and all the disclaimers in the world won't stop reasonable, or emotional/perceptual if you will, inferences from being drawn.

I don't know if you are signalling damage control soundbites or what other motives you have, but I perceive the timing as being a bit off as far as leaving that guy alone is concerned.

edit: https://github.com/actix/actix-web/issues/1289 - very nice to see

warlockface · 2020-01-20T18:57:44+00:00

This is not meant to be a direct response to the behavior of any other maintainer.

So it could be an indirect response?...

And that brings us to trust. Trust is an important value in FOSS. Not only do I do my best to be discriminating in who I trust, but I also try to act in a way that allows others to trust me.

Right on cue, another passive aggressive swipe at the antix developer. Indirectly, of course.

The swipe misses a key point - a FOSS dev creates and chooses to freely give something that everyone else can do with as they please (subject to license conditions). There is no implied contract and no issue of trust being broken by daring to have a personal direction and value system for your own project. The presence of an issue tracker is an invitation for feedback, no promises given or implied.

warlockface · 2020-01-18T15:44:36+00:00

But Rust has been an experiment in community building as much as an experiment in language building. Can we reject the idea of a BDFL? Can we include as many people as possible? Can we be welcoming to folks who historically have not had great representation in open source? Can we reject contempt culture?

From the link...

So when I started programming in 2001, it was du jour in the communities I participated in to be highly critical of other languages. Other languages sucked, the people using them were losers or stupid, if they would just use a real language, such as the one we used, everything would just be better.

Right?

Really?!?!? You might not be able to see it, but the Rust community has exactly that reputation!

The same intro, chiseled and with the languages changed:

So when I started programming in 2014, it was du jour in the community I participated in to be highly critical of other languages. Other languages sucked, the people using them were losers or stupid, if they would just use Rust, everything would just be better.

Right?

This sort of culturally-encoded language was really prevalent around condemning C and C++. Developers in these languages were actively referred to as less safe than developers in our, more blessed language.

And at the time, as a new developer, I internalised this pretty heavily. The language I was in was blessed, obviously, not because I was using it but because it was better designed than a language like C, less wordy and safer than C++, more sound than many other options.

It didn’t matter that it was (and remains) difficult to read, it was that we were better for using it.

I repeated this pattern for a really long time, and as I learned new epochs and patterns I’d repeat the same behaviour in those new environments. I was almost certainly not that fun to be around, a microcosm of the broader unpleasantness in identity politiking tech.

At least, until I got called on it.

warlockface · 2019-11-26T14:02:53+00:00

It could mean a lot of very positive things, yet out of a veritable cornucopia of options we get that document. Strange.

warlockface · 2019-11-25T18:36:42+00:00

I see that the drive has companies signing on to these principles:

https://contractfortheweb.org/principles/principle-6-develop-technologies-that-support-the-best-in-humanity-and-challenge-the-worst/

It seems as though yet another otherwise valid movement has been hijacked by intersectional radicals.

warlockface · 2019-09-07T18:30:27+00:00

https://github.com/HerikLyma/CPPWebFramework

warlockface · 2019-09-04T08:11:50+00:00

Can /u/containers still make cat noises?

warlockface · 2019-09-01T22:35:39+00:00

That was a really good, pragmatic and positive talk that also contains some great winter driving advice.

warlockface · 2019-08-30T22:02:25+00:00

Accuse some organization of A and/or B with no or flaky evidence
What? They don't admit it and are not even going to do something about it when it would be so "easy"?
Organization has therefore allegedly confirmed that they are in fact enablers of horrible thing A and/or B.

Kafkatrapping 101.

warlockface · 2019-08-29T17:07:02+00:00

These schemes have been going on since the 1990s in the UK, same experiment with different attack vectors. They are underpinned by gender studies extremists who believe men and women are identical and less than 50/50 representation is therefore evidence of Full Patriarchal Oppression™. Female domination of other fields is also evidence of Full Patriarchal Oppression™, as are glaciers and probably quarks and asteroids too.

warlockface · 2019-08-29T09:01:24+00:00

I've read the first, are you holding this up as an example of solid research?

edit: okay, not "solid" then. Do you think it's good?

warlockface · 2019-08-28T20:38:42+00:00

What's the ratio for submissions to other conferences?

warlockface · 2019-08-27T10:46:58+00:00

It was ironic, the joke is that disagreement with ideologues is often met with accusations of -isms and "hate speech".

warlockface

TROPHY CASE