Darius Kazemi @darius@friend.camp

I finished my stint as a Mozilla Fellow and now I'm relaunching my Patreon with a focus on, well, fixing social media.

This means I'm going to continue my concerted work trying to make the fediverse a better place, in the form of best practice guides for running instances, external advocacy, and technical tutorials and training so that more people can contribute software to the fediverse at large.

You can read a partial summary of my work so far at my new Patreon page!

https://www.patreon.com/tinysubversions

Just learned about a woman in computer science history: Elizabeth Fong. She spent her career at the National Institute for Standards and Technology, and is mentioned as attending data standardization meetings in RFC-316 (1972). She was heavily involved in the effort to standardize SQL in the 1980s.

Here's a 2014 interview with her:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLUm3vst87g&feature=youtu.be

And a brief autobiographical sketch on being awarded for 48 years of service at NIST:

https://medium.com/@usnistgov/cant-stop-computing-nist-dean-of-staff-elizabeth-fong-ddc550781c26

My biggest complaint about the python programming language is that when people capitalize it in the middle of a sentence I think they're talking about Pynchon and then I'm let down when I look a little closer

This may seem like basic stuff but I constantly commit the error of, "Wow I admire the work of a person on certain moral/ethical/political issues, surely we will get along."

Advice I would give my younger self: if someone has a reputation for fighting for a cause you believe in, that says nothing about whether they are a kind person. If you meet or interact with them, it will go as well as if you met someone at random you've never heard of.

If someone has a reputation for kindness, then meeting them will probably go well. I've never regretted meeting someone after a person I trust said of them "Wow person xyz is the nicest, kindest human being I know."

Just eating my breakfast like a normal guy

Is there any documentation on the *usage* of full text search for Mastodon instances that use it? There's plenty of documentation on how to install it but I mean from a user perspective. I'd like to know if there are advanced operators for things like time of post, or your basic AND/OR/NOT logic operators.

Is anyone here caught up on the latest Jojolion because the only thing I want to do is talk about this month's issue #jjba

In my mind this is what @casey does all day long

(from this brochure describing the Tektronix 4002 Graphic Computer Terminal, https://vintagetek.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Tek-1970-T4002.pdf )