@tsdower@hachyderm.io
@tsdower@hachyderm.io avatar

tsdower

@tsdower@hachyderm.io

Devops infrastructure nerd bringing you data from Hubble, JWST, and other tin cans in space, all interoperable archives #OpenScience like.

Also a fortysomething queer and internet Old. #Cyanotype printmaker, photographer of abandoned spaces with obsolete cameras. (#BelieveInFilm)

Expect rants on tech culture, #accessibility, colonialist capitalism, #Baltimore history. No employer opinions here.

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tsdower, to random
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Finally cracked the local Indian carry-out's secret code to receive spicy food despite an Anglo name, and it is adding a cup of rasam to the order.

tsdower,
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I don't even like this rasam (it's fine it's just not Mango Grove or a college friend's mom's) but tears streaming down my face and spring allergies defeated, I am going to order it every time I get carryout forever if that is what it takes for someone to provide me sinus melting Madras curry I can live on for days. So happy.

tsdower, to voyager
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A thing that makes the bugfix so compelling: at no point has "throw more GPUs/nodes/buckets/bandwidth at it" been a solution. Not at any budget.

Private
tsdower, (edited )
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@skinnylatte in this vein, the NARA 1950 census project with excellent handwriting detection including names!!! and support for citizen updates makes me weep for what we could do if we spent computing resources with more civic-minded priorities.

https://1950census.archives.gov/

tsdower, to random
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One from Mazatlán that did turn out: I would love an expert human to tell me what this Gulf of California / Pacific beach vine is, because with all my research skills Google and the Seek app are being useless.

Photograph of the blueprint being exposed in sunlight on a beach

tsdower, to random
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Greetings from Mazatlán, with just enough break in the clouds to make a ridiculous eclipse journey worth it. Cold, windswept, and beautifully unsettled

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tsdower, to random
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Meant to post more on in-person/remote soft skills events thread but then our train got to and I got distracted.

DC Artist Robin Bell's "Swamp HQ" room at Artomatic with found office furniture, a mannequin in an eagle mask typing at the desk, and letters in the window reading "END ALL WAR"
Reflected window selfie of OP and partner, showing Artomatic event in progress behind them, artist Dorothy Hickson's trash art in the window, and lights of other buildings in the distance

tsdower,
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is a vibrant and sometimes overwhelming free-admission temporary art gallery space takeover of unused office buildings by DC arts community, now in its 25th year but first iteration since 2017. Next Meet the Artists is April 13th, but it runs every weds-sun until April 28th, and there are so so many scheduled events.

https://www.artomatic.org/

tsdower, to random
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This week at work, got to peer facilitate a Safe Zone Project LGBTQ community support training, my second rodeo and our facilitator pool's first in-person offering of the materials since we spun up separately from associated university project in 2021. TLDR: intersections of accessibility are difficult. Choices were made to offer this event fully remote and then sometimes fully in person, but to never attempt this hybrid, and I now wholeheartedly agree with all that.

tsdower,
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The Safe Zone Project's fantastic and free materials (https://thesafezoneproject.com/), at least when our team spun up, suggest working in person if at all possible. What made it work remote for us:

  • cameras encouraged especially when speaking, never required
  • Mural app boards for anonymous voting on vocabulary exercises
  • capping class participation at 4 groups of 4
  • so many breaks. So many. Everything will take longer. It's fine.
tsdower,
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Even with a pandemic still on and many staff remote, we kept getting requests for in-person Safe Zone sessions. We tried bc:

  • this is vulnerable emotional material, humans coregulate more easily in proximity and can benefit from reading body language
  • online participation still has a higher barrier to entry for some
  • folks from MOC to facilities already have to be in office
    ...and we engaged with a totally different set of people than we were getting online. Big win. Accessibility is hard.
tsdower,
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Worth mentioning when I talk about in-person work events: CO2 monitors are in every conference room and it is policy to take breaks to air out a space if readings climb; many staff mask at times, especially on travel, with N95s, still provided, and nobody looks at them weird for it; bringing additional air filters of our own has been supported; health bennies help people test and stay home sick. In a field that considers things like astronaut safety risks, this is how we still work.

tsdower, to random
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Learning yesterday's delightful Thievery Corp early show at the 9:30 club that let out before 9:30pm also sold out faster than the late show and even had fewer pricier scalped tickets available: yes, glorious, more showtimes for us Olds, please.

hrefna, (edited ) to random
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In the annals of things no one cares about but which are vaguely interesting to me: how my brain parses pronouns.

I got into a fight a while back with someone because I insisted that I don't have pronouns. That's not how pronouns work for me. My pronouns are preferred.

I use pronouns, but I don't "own" them.

(You can own your pronouns, they can be yours and you can "have" them, this is about me)

The analogy I use is that they are a pointer to the thing, not the thing itself

1/

tsdower,
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@hrefna yesss. I have gotten a lot of mileage framing pronoun sets like MIME types, for a similar sense of 'they' will do for basic parsing but a lot of usable detail will be missed. And sometimes I like it that way.

tsdower, to baltimore
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Best thing to do on a deceptively cold sad bright still-winter day: tour!

's Rawlings Conservatory Palm House in Druid Hill Park is the second oldest structure of its kind in the country, only outdone by San Francisco's.

Not shown: snow flurries? Smarch.

Some tiny plant flowering in a puddle inside another plant
Pitcher plants and other vines
Palm House and newer entrance against a cloudy sky. Two women walk along a path, battered by the wind. Some palm leaves stick out of the top of the glass arched roof

grimalkina, to random
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A thing that they don't tell you when you're trying to recover from serious illness and you're working out again is that every single damn workout might be a psychological battlefield, truly.

I don't know how I'm supposed to go from dealing with heart symptoms, to simply being FINE! every time my heart pounds during a workout. They don't tell you how to deal with it when the good feelings are exactly what the bad feelings used to be.

**I know what I'm doing, do NOT give me ANY medical advice

tsdower,
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@grimalkina this. I also turned 40 over that recovery window, and the "is this normal or did I extra break something?" is so strong and differently terrifying!

tsdower, to random
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These adorable viral toy thermal printers can't possibly be archival can they?

molly0xfff, to Wikipedia
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Have you ever wanted to start editing , but got overwhelmed or felt like you didn't know where to start? Every time I encourage people to start editing, I hear that, so I'm trying to help.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRRHR1NEOqE

tsdower,
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@molly0xfff This is an excellent transcript. Video only would've been a barrier to me finally signing up and wholly auto-generated, difficult to decipher content might have as well. I appreciate all the work they went into this. Thank you!

grimalkina, to random
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In continuing "Cat tackles the terrifying world of doing things she used to do before she got really sick" I'm trying aerial silks again today.

I did silks for years and got pretty good at it for a while. But it's an incredibly demanding and dangerous sport that's often populated by bad cultures (the studio I used to go to went full antivaxx and stole money from customers???!!!!). I may not be as strong but finding safety AND silks together is a new goal I know more about now.

tsdower,
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@grimalkina congrats and good luck! I did lyra for years in recovery from now-we-would-call-it-long mono, and letting myself be terrible at it was really good for both my proprioception recovery and mental health.

tsdower, to random
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In retrospect, processing a sad year's worth of lonely weird film photos all in one go in colddark bleak January was a terrible idea from a mental health perspective, and we won't be doing that again. Not for any bulk discount on earth.

vaurora, to random
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From Atlassian’s remote work study: Team gatherings increase sense of belonging for 4-5 months, but sporadic office attendance does not

https://atlassianblog.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/lessonslearned.pdf

tsdower,
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@vaurora feeling a bit vindicated as a project organizer hypothesizing the answer for how often colleagues need to spend how much time together to remind each other we're human is... about the same as holidays, festivals, conventions, conferences: we already know how to do this.

grimalkina, to random
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A thing I wrote in a recent draft:

"...on the team side, the reality of team practices that claim to be autonomous at large organizations is that supposed independence of action is frequently sustained by senior members or managers “protecting” their teams from external dependencies and taking on the work of advocacy as individual responsibility (Moe et al., 2019; Hicks, et al 2023)."

I think this is a big point with large psychological implications although software journals, alas, did not

tsdower,
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@grimalkina as an engineering PM in a big open science ecosystem, I see myself in this paper and I would love to read it. (And keep its references in my back pocket)

shortridge, to Cybersecurity
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zealots often shame humans for writing down their passwords, but as someone who just had to excavate the digital remains of a loved one who died suddenly:

please write down your credentials somewhere a trusted human can find them, especially your phone passcode and any primary passwords (like for email accounts, password manager, etc.)

the humans who care about you will need that access for many reasons; a "badass" threat model will only add helplessness to their grief

tsdower,
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@shortridge and for goodness sake keep the hidden paper copies updated!

Memories of getting locked out of accounts my dad, eminently practical threat modeler greybeard hospital sysadmin, had set me up as power of attorney and executor to handle, for too many old passwords tried straight out of his desk papers, and only being able to fix some with his phone.

tsdower, to random
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Skimming audio games blurbs, I was surprised at first how many seemed to be horror. Genuine question: what percentage of games in general are horror these days? Is it overrepresented here, afraid of the dark flavored, in a way that bears consideration? Or do y'all play lots of creepy crawlies and jump scares?

I don't play horror games. Also I was raised by a blind parent. I know my perception isn't standard here.

tsdower, to random
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Oh hey, games, accessibility, and data sonification nerds: Games for Blind Gamers jam on itch.io is about to run its third round in February!

Results, games and demos from round 1 and 2 are still up, with audio text adventures, sound cue shooters, controller synths with trippy visuals:

https://itch.io/jam/games-for-blind-gamers-3

https://itch.io/jam/games-for-blind-gamers-2

https://itch.io/jam/games-for-blind-gamers

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