Michael T. Bacon, Ph.D. / is on Nostr

Day job: #geospatial #datascience
Academic research: #LandReform #STS #Scotland #Ecology #Landscape #CommunityOwnership

STS, planning geography, ecology, geospatial data, stuff.

I live and raise a fuss in #Durham #NC

MA Geography
Ph.D. Constructed Environment

He/him http://git.io/vxjC7

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-bacon-a8b41b9/
Monastic order: Corbettite

Last Notes

2024-09-14 18:53:07

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Alt-texted version:
(Alt text is edited for character length.)
https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/113/136/906/063/033/624/original/3b6c1e6c4ecdc310.png

2024-09-12 02:46:15

This is outstanding, utterly damning work by the WaPo. (Get this guest link out in the world please.)
https://wapo.st/3TsmzPn

2024-09-02 04:55:24

I would like to unironically thank Elon Musk for taking an almost unimaginable amount of wealth from this list of terrible people and vaporizing it.
https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/113/065/696/344/102/742/original/2daad522253eb75e.png

2024-08-30 16:11:39

A project I'm on at work is trialing a chatbot.
I'm doing my best to try to come up with an answer that conveys my strong sense of what a mistake our current approach is, but without letting the internal screaming come out too much.
(Most folks on the project already know my general take on this so I don't need to belabor the point too much.)

2024-08-29 17:12:19

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This whole thing reminds me of a friend in high school trying to convince me to read a Heinlein novel. He said it was fascinating in that it started with the premise that "the eugenics experiments worked" and went from there.
Like, even then (when I didn't realize a lot of things), I realized that was just not an okay premise to start with. At all.
(Oddly that friend is Jewish so him apologizing for an extremely Nazi-adjacent construct was . . . ugh.)

2024-08-24 16:46:01

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And there are basic rule changes that would make it immeasurably safer for the players. But the NFL refuses to do them because it might "compromise the product."
Sacrificing players' brains for oceans of cash.

2024-08-24 16:10:29

Why, despite enjoying the sport for decades, I refuse to give the football played by the NFL even the tiniest bit of my attention anymore.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2024/08/20/nfl-concussion-settlement-mri-alzheimer/

2024-08-23 06:05:37

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Beto got within 2 points six years ago, and Cruz was more popular then. I'm not super optimistic but I think Allred's got a 1-in-3 shot.

2024-08-04 20:42:59

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I haven't read them in their entirety but I read several of the essays in Bad Feminist and Hunger and they hit hard.

2024-07-31 04:29:19

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social.coop is run on a co-op model of sorts. I really should know more about the governance model, but I do know it's run through https://opencollective.com/ .

2024-06-19 22:43:54

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I've been trying sporadically to use GNOME for "real work" for 25 years. It's still broken in the same frustrating ways it was broken 25 years ago. If I end up spending hours trying to figure out how to do basic tweaks or simple tasks, I'm don't use it.
I'll say again, there's already widely deployed Linux notebook and tablet adaptations. They're called Chromebook and Android. There are major lessons (good and bad) for Linux advocates therein.

2024-06-17 22:02:09

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Putting GNOME on a tablet seems like . . . a really bad idea.
Tablets are just screaming out for a for more restrictive, prescriptive UI framework. And GNOME is very much not that.

2024-05-23 22:43:37

Rant that's somewhat but not entirely related to a parallel thread:
Not every damn thing in the world needs to be new and original. Human society persisted for a hundred thousand years on re-performing the best works to each other, writing new ones all the time but not throwing everything old out. That's not a bad way for us to live.
A good retelling of an old story or a good performance of an old piece is still new art.

2024-05-03 17:29:48

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The issue at question in the protests is whether the the universities' endowments should be specifically benefiting from a select and specifically targeted group of defense manufacturers. The notion that a few dozen major universities divesting from a half dozen largely boutique defense contractors is going to break US military readiness is. . . tenuous . . .

2024-05-03 17:19:46

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The only caveat I have to this is that divestment from an endowment is often really complicated and not in the hands of University Presidents, but rather usually in the hands of trustees and even then it's complicated as they're often managed by hedge funds.
That said, an awful lot of protestors have specifically asked for *meetings* about divestment and financial transparency on the topic, which is 100% something that can be agreed to.