Charlie Loyd @vruba@everything.happens.horse

@sgillies Doing semi-proper mypy workflow for a personal project has really helped convince me that (1) it is a very useful tool to have around and (2) the idea that all python code ought to implement it in order to be considered complete, mature, correct, or whatever is unhinged and very unpythonic.

@tim Like if you read https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/atsc/20/2/1520-0469_1963_020_0130_dnf_2_0_co_2.xml?tab_body=pdf we never got a whole lot deeper than that in 60 years! Lots of very good work was done, no doubt, but the sense of “we’re onto something extremely big here” was never fulfilled! It’s kind of wild!

@tim Did you see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kya_LXa_y1E? I would be delighted in the equivalent but for those ’90s things. (I had a fractal shirt. I should get another one.)

@tim It is really interesting that the fractals and chaos theory hype of the ’90s mostly didn’t pan out into fundamental new understandings, and I wish we talked about this more!

@incanus @bil Surprised you have a signal back then.

@beep Perhaps in the sense that it has demonstrated some kindness to us today.

Let’s set aside petty politics and remember the great statesman in his own words, committing one of his several unimaginably gruesome crimes against humanity.

@beep , hell is kind,

@w8emv Exactly.

@kissane This, as the kids say. People acting in bad faith sure do benefit from the (understandable) norm of not accusing people of acting in bad faith.

@meetar Would you rather debate one majority-sized bad opinion or

@kissane @robinsonmeyer The two of you are prime examples, for me, of people who manage to put themselves out there without hardening into Debate Me Gender-Nonspecific Bros.

This is adjacent on one side to the corrosive forces of fame. On another side, to something I think of as the Linguist Scicomm Problem, which is a pattern in science communication where you spend so much time rebutting people’s surface-level misconceptions that you never get to anything else. (Thinking of online linguists who keep explaining that linguistics is descriptive and never actually get to the, you know, linguistics.)

A bad thing about social media is this pattern where a person with expertise starts rebutting bad ideas, and it’s great, but over time it primes them to see everyone who doesn’t hold exactly their opinions as part of a horde of goons with terrible ideas, because that’s who they end up interacting with.

Eventually their online persona is, like, Truth Gladiator. And that’s so much less interesting and important to me than Thoughtful Person With Useful Perspectives.

@aegir CC: @migurski.